Daniel Couch
United States Air Force Academy
Daniel Diez Couch is an Assistant Professor of English & Fine Arts at the United States Air Force Academy. He received his PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2016. From 2015-16, he was a dissertation fellow in material texts at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and from 2016-17 he was a postdoctoral Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. His essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Early American Literature, Studies in American Fiction, and The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.
“Situating Race & Climate” brings together papers offering new approaches to race, climate, and environment in the nineteenth century. In addition to probing ideologies of climate, these papers engage with antebellum... [ view full abstract ]
“Situating Race & Climate” brings together papers offering new approaches to race, climate, and environment in the nineteenth century. In addition to probing ideologies of climate, these papers engage with antebellum American fiction, archival findings, and the cultural legacies of nineteenth-century race science. Panelists draw on methods and concepts including the history of material texts (Couch), medical humanities and biopolitics (Waples), accounts of race and global capitalism (Adams), and public history (Dauer). These papers all consider the ways real and imagined links between African Americans and the environment have been used to produce power. Kucich’s concluding response considers the relations among these papers, while also linking this panel’s concerns to indigenous communities in Alaska.
This panel begins by considering the intersection between race, landscape, and writing technologies. Known today as “invisible ink,” nineteenth-century writers called the chemical concoction by another name—“sympathetic ink.” Starting with a 1795 publication in The New York Magazine, readers encountered descriptions of and recipes for sympathetic ink in American magazines. Drawing on this archive, Couch analyzes how Edgar Allan Poe capitalized on the interest in sympathetic ink in his extremely popular 1843 story, “The Gold Bug.” The use of invisible ink in the story is localized in Charleston, South Carolina, where William Legrand (a Southern aristocrat fallen on hard times) uses his understanding of chemistry and the natural landscape to uncover treasure hidden by the 17th-century privateer, William Kidd. The transhistorical violence of the story extends from Kidd’s hemispheric violence to the scientific/natural knowledge Legrand uses to exert control over a former slave named Jupiter—both channeled through the invisible ink. Even without legal physical control of a black body, Legrand exerts his power over Jupiter, rendering Jupiter’s actions in the landscape identical with his own—Legrand thereby assumes agency over body and place. Couch argues that Poe offers a warning about the potential relationships among material texts, violence, and black bodies.
