The Clashing of Stones: New Madrid and the Geological Indian
Dana Luciano
Georgetown University
Dana Luciano is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University. She is the author of Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America, and co-editor, with Mel Y. Chen, of “Queer Inhumanisms," a special issue of GLQ: The Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, and with Ivy G. Wilson, of Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies. She is currently at work on How the Earth Feels: Geological Fantasy in the Nineteenth-Century US.
Abstract
Dana Luciano’s paper, “The Clashing of Stones”: New Madrid and the Geological Indian,” opens with a white-settler legend about the New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811-1812 which centers on the fate of an “Indian” man,... [ view full abstract ]
Dana Luciano’s paper, “The Clashing of Stones”: New Madrid and the Geological Indian,” opens with a white-settler legend about the New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811-1812 which centers on the fate of an “Indian” man, of unspecified tribal origin, who was swallowed by the earth and then spit out again. Upon his return, the man announced that the earthquakes had been caused by Tecumseh to obliterate the whites. Her paper takes up the form of the geological fantasy outlined in this legend: a settler-colonial attempt to neutralize by appropriation the threat of Native American intimacy with the land, vividly presented in the story of Tecumseh’s prophesy of the earthquakes as retribution for the crimes of white settlers and their incursions on Native lands. The prophecy kindled sustained resistance among indigenous tribes of the region. Yet it also became central to white Americans’ memory of the earthquakes—so much so that a 1990 report on the New Madrid seismic zone by the US Geological Survey was titled “Tecumseh’s Prophecy.” Luciano’s paper examines the part played by this kind of geo-mythologizing in what Scott Lauria Morgeson has termed the “biopolitics of settler colonialism.” It focuses on an 1820 poem written by the then-geologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, which transposes indigenous resistance to settlement into a reaction of the land itself. The geologizing of indigenous resistance, she argues, constitutes an overlooked stage in the history Morgeson frames as biopolitical—one in which “Indian” was not yet a racialized, biological category, but one linked to the land. Turning a geographic connection into a geological identity furnished white settlers with an affective connection based on shared geological experience—but one that could safely remain underground.
Authors
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Dana Luciano
(Georgetown University)
Topic Area
Panel
Session
P86 » The Subterranean Nineteenth Century (15:45 - Saturday, 24th March, Fiesta III-IV)
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