Kristin Moriah
Grinnell College
Kristin Moriah is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Grinnell College. She earned her PhD in African American Literature and Culture at the CUNY Graduate Center. She currently holds research fellowships at the Rose Library at Emory University and the Harry Ransom Research Center. Her book project, Dark Stars of the Evening: Performing African American Citizenship and Identity in Germany, 1890- 1920 employs a multidisciplinary approach to explore the impact of black performance in transnational settings. Her scholarly work can be found in American Quarterly, Theater Journal and Callaloo.
Chair: Britt Rusert (UMass Amherst)This panel explores the social, political, aesthetic, and scientific entanglements between antiblackness and environment in the nineteenth-century United States. Overlapping meanings come to... [ view full abstract ]
Chair: Britt Rusert (UMass Amherst)
This panel explores the social, political, aesthetic, and scientific entanglements between antiblackness and environment in the nineteenth-century United States. Overlapping meanings come to play in Christina Sharpe’s invocation of “the weather” to rethink ongoing histories of antiblackness. As Sharpe points out “antiblackness is pervasive as climate. The weather necessitates changeability and improvisation; it is the atmospheric condition of time and place; it produces new ecologies.” We investigate survival, resistance, and thriving within the climate of antiblackness as both literal and metaphoric: what does it mean to weather the weather in the 19th-century U.S.?
In our papers we take texts by and about Black women as our focus to explore the everyday wake of misogynoir. What does it mean for the weather to shape affects, bodies, and ideas in the context of environmental factors in race science or ecologies of plantation agriculture? Britt Rusert has contributed to our understanding of Black people’s agency, posing “fugitive science” as the Black emancipatory reclaiming of science. Are there technologies, creative strategies, and reading methods to forecast and navigate the weather? Through these culture and literature we consider how 19th-century studies speaks to survival and resistance in the ongoing “wake” of anti-blackness.
The Pent Up Fires Burst Forth: Fabricating Warmth in Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig
Kristin Moriah (Grinnell College)
The motifs of weather, social climate, and social exclusion lend structure to Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig. The weather tells us much about Frado’s place in the community. Wilson’s description of the weather indicts the hypocritical liberalism of white New Englanders. Pathetic fallacy plays an important role in the description of the trials and tribulations of Frado’s mother, Mag, whose “comfortable winter” leads to “the cold desolation” of widowhood, and social isolation. Mag’s daughter Frado is also left to the mercy of the elements, clad in threadbare hand-me-downs season after season, excluded from the warmth of familial affection. Abused by her guardians, Frado’s life is one of cold comforts. And yet, she is not always at the mercy of the cold: “in the kitchen, and among her schoolmates, the pent up fires burst forth.” How can we account for Frado’s occasionally fiery outbursts and persistence in the face of hardship? I posit that Frado’s ability to weather the weather can be ascribed to her peculiar slights of hand, or her ability to fake natural elements like fire and familial warmth.
