Russ Castronovo
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Russ Castronovo is the Tom Paine Professor of English and the Dorothy Draheim Professor of American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has written and edited many volumes about American literature, including most recently, Propaganda 1776: Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communications in Early America.
This roundtable charts new understandings of secrecy across the nineteenth century in response to the new political and cultural climate today. Scholars like Jedediah Purdy, Sisella Bok, and Simone Browne will guide the... [ view full abstract ]
This roundtable charts new understandings of secrecy across the nineteenth century in response to the new political and cultural climate today. Scholars like Jedediah Purdy, Sisella Bok, and Simone Browne will guide the questions of this roundtable. Much as Purdy has characterized the conflicting uses of nature in After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (2015), secrecy is both essential and dangerous; it protects and destroys individuals, groups, and what we think we know. Likewise, in Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (2015), Browne argues that modern surveillance and its techniques are inextricably intertwined with histories of slavery and racism, and that African Americans have long resisted this surveillance through techniques of disguise and secrecy. This panel aims to think about the nineteenth century through these new theories of secrecy and privacy, and show how they make possible new ways of imagining – and potentially transforming – the field’s approach to questions of secrecy and privacy.
Each roundtable participant will speak on the following topics:
Russ Castronovo: If “intelligence ultimately is storytelling,” as the director of the RAND Corporation’s Center for Global Risk and Security, Gregory Treverton, writes in Intelligence for an Age of Terror, we might well wonder what mode this storytelling takes. With the help of an early and surely unlikely theorist of communications, Charles Brockden Brown, my contribution to this roundtable will explore how facts, evidence, and other verifiable information are suffused by a gothic modality that deflates notions of rationality and transparency. Even the clearest communication rests on secrets in which speakers, readers, and auditors are unknown to one another and obscure even to their own selves. In short, the question I want to ask is: What if communication itself is the source of terror?
