Christofer Rodelo
Harvard University
Christofer A. Rodelo is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. He holds an MA in English from Harvard and a BA in American Studies and Ethnicity, Race & Migration from Yale University. His research interests include theater and performance studies, 19th century American literature and drama, Latinx and Afro-Latinx literary and cultural studies, critical race/gender/queer/feminist studies, archival thought, and aesthetics/visual culture. His dissertation is a critical study of Latinx, Afro-Latinx, and Indigenous performance cultures in the long transnational 19th century.
“What’s in a Name?” Racialization in Transamerican Contact Zones
As USAmerican imperial expansion after the Invasion of Mexico increasingly brought different peoples and cultures into (often uncomfortable or violent) contact with one another, language quickly began to reflect larger epistemological problems with regards to race. While for white USAmericans these problems manifested in often reductive racializations and simplistic categorizations of Others for the purposes of domination, for people of color and people living on the margins of USAmerican empire, the failures of USAmerican racial ontologies provided opportunities to redefine themselves, their cultures, and the relationship between political entities. The papers assembled in this panel take up the imaginative energy produced in this climate to consider how categories like Latinidad, Blackness, American, and foreignness were performed, rescripted, and improvised throughout the nineteenth century. How did these categories delimit identities? How did they occasion political organization and/or solidarity? How did their radical instability from person to person or moment to moment generate opportunities for resistance? If the ontological contents of such labels are so flexible and variable as to be meaningless, then what utility remains, either for 19th-century subjects or 21st-century scholars? As scholars in the field continue invoking multilingual methodologies to expand analyses of American literary history, our panel hopes to elicit conversation on the fluidity and limits of racialized depictions of in nineteenth-century literature.
Christofer A. Rodelo
“Performing Spanish: Strategies of Racial Passing(s) in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Clotel”
This paper maps out a pervasive, if subtle, literary trope of American and African American literature: the strategy of passing as Spanish to approach whiteness, and the potentialities for freedom afforded by a racial category close to, but not entirely Anglo-American whiteness. I suggest that representations of passing as Spanish/depictions of Spanishness in literary works about African Americans highlight the influence of other geographies and ecologies in cultural production about and by black subjects. Moreover, I read these passings as a shared performance practice captured in literary form, an intertextual mode of corporeal presentation pervasive throughout American and African American cultural production. Spanishness functions as a racial category between whiteness and blackness, made useable through the adroit bodily movements of specific bodies. To explore these arguments, I examine two texts:Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or Life Among the Lowly (1852), and William Wells Brown’s Clotel; Or, the President’s Daughter (1853). In short, I posit the relationship between racial passing and Spanishness, both separate and in conjunction, as key to understanding representations of black life in American literature.
