Key Critical Terms

Question 1

Surrogation

Answer 1

process by which “culture reproduces and re-creates itself”; “survivors attempt to fit satisfactory alternates” that “rarely if ever succeeds [….] creating a deficit, or actually exceeds them, creating a surplus”

Question 2

Circum-Atlantic

Answer 2

a vortex of commodities (human flesh, addictive substances) that financed industrial revolutions cultural practices; diasporic, genocidal histories central in the creation of the culture of modernity; performed what and who they thought they were not, defining themselves into opposition to others

Question 3

Genealogies of performance

Answer 3

document & suspect the historical transmission & dissemination of cultural practises through collective representations (25). Draw on the idea of expressive movements as mnemonic reserves, including patterned movements made and remembered by bodies (26)

Question 4

Kinesthetic imagination

Answer 4

memory stored up in the body. inhabits the world of the virtual: “its truth is the truth of simulation, of fantasy, or of daydreams, but its effect on human action may have material consequences of the most tangible sort & of the widest scope” (27). A way of thinking through movements, the otherwise unthinkable, expressing the unspeakable

Question 5

Vortices of behavior

Answer 5

canalize specified needs, desires, and habits in order to reproduce them where the gravitational pull of social necessity brings audiences together and produces performers (candidates for surrogation) from their midst (28). A place where everyday practices and attitudes may be legitimated 
the grand boulevard
the market place
the theater district
the square
the burial ground

Question 6

Displaced transmission

Answer 6

the adaptation of historic practices to changing conditions, in which popular behaviors are resitutated in new locales; repetition: no action may performed exactly the same way twice, they must be reinvented or recreated at each appearance; improvisation; transformation of experience through the displacement of its cultural forms

Question 7

Condensational events

Answer 7

the reinforcement, celebration, intensification of everyday events that makes them legitimate. Events gain a powerful enough hold on collective memory that they will survive the transformation or the relocation of the spaces in which they first flourished

Question 8

generic narrative

Answer 8

docs & strategies become subsumed by the tale & the slave narrative becomes identifiable generic text like autobiography; Douglass

Question 9

authenticating narrative

Answer 9

tale is subsumed by the authenticating strategy; the slave narrative becomes an authenticating document for other, usually generic, texts like novels or histories; Brown

Question 10

Race Card

Answer 10

casting one racially constituted group as the victim of another

Question 11

Racial melodrama

Answer 11

seeks to give ‘moral legibility’ to race; deploys ressentiment, a moralizing revenge upon the powerful achieved through a triumph of the weak in their very weakness

Question 12

The icon of the home

Answer 12

humble cabin & plantation home that (vs gothic mansion) establishes a ‘space of innocence’ to construct moral power; essential to establish the virtue of racially beset victims

Question 13

performance of waste

Answer 13

“the elimination of a monstrous double, but one fashioned by artifice as a stand-in, an ‘unproductive expenditure’ that both sustains the community with the comforting fiction that real borders exist and troubles it with the spectacle of their immolation”

–Example: American justice in the form of Wahnotee killing M’Closky for the murder of Paul.

Question 14

Benjamin’s commodity fetishism

Answer 14

Not from exchange value, but from presentation, like in advertising. the “sex appeal of the inorganic.” Fascination with objects. Psychological, not economic, relation

Question 15

Disciplinary Intimacy

Answer 15

Sentimental authority common in mid-century texts, discipline through loving coercion rather than corporal punishment

Question 16

Myths

Answer 16

stories, drawn from history, that have acquired through usage over many generations a symbolizing function that is central to the cultural functioning of the society that produces them. […]history becomes a cliche

Myth does not argue its ideology, it exemplifies it. It projects models of good or heroic behavior that reinforce the values of ideology, and affirm as good the distribution of authority and power that ideology rationalizes”

myth: a set of narrative formulas that acquire through specifiable historical action a significant ideological charge

Question 17

“‘revised’ Frontier Myth”

Answer 17

Impact of Ind Rev brought basic change in conception of savage enemy (now embraced NA, free blacks, militant indust. workers, immigrants; the ‘dangerous classes’)

Protagonist added to original function as Indian fighter & pathfinder, aristocratic & managerial traits associated with southern plantation owners & northern tycoons

a vision–at once placating and reflective of the social crisis–of how the different races and classes that divided American society might restore their ‘harmony’ through a sanctified and regenerative act of violence

Question 18

Hunter

Answer 18

male, enters willingly, speaks for the values of a “natural” and “precapitalist” Eden yet facilitates the spread of progress and civilization

Question 19

Modernism (Benn Michaels)

Answer 19

characterized by an interest in the “relation of sign to referent”

By exhibiting the modernist premise that a word achieves “reality by transcending rather than being the thing it names” (74), Michaels employs the notion of the “untranslatability of a word” (74), and the “primacy of [a word’s] identity” (77), to suggest a “structural intimacy between nativism and modernism”, based on their common attempts to establish the “meaning of the commitment to [linguistic, national, cultural and racial] identity”

Question 20

19th Century interest in anthropology, local color (Evans)

Answer 20

“the circulation of something like ‘cultures’ became a sign of ‘Culture’ in the late 19th century; the contact with or appreciation of this kind of multiplicity was a mark of being ‘cultured’ in the capital C sense”

Question 21

Nationalism & local color

Answer 21

A literature reflecting the geographical differences of terrain, manners, & pronunciation—as long as such differences fit within certain boundaries of perceived otherness—embodied the US’s unique ID better than literature emanating from any one region could.

Question 22

Popularity of local color in context of modernization

Answer 22

These sort of differences could signify authenticity & rootedness within a context in which modern consumerism & corporate homogenization seemed to be colonizing ever-expanding portions of the nation & people’s individual lives.

Emotionally significant everyday objects instead of mass-produced consumer object (subversive vision against commodifying effects of Am capitalism or offering one-of-a-kind regional objects as a commodity)

Live outside the nation’s modern capitalist economy

Question 23

Local color

Answer 23

fiction in which place—the story’s geographic setting—not only serves as background but also plays a prominent role in the story’s foreground. Settings are usually someplace outside of the mainstream, at a distance from national centers of financial, political, or cultural power.

Traits: dense regional dialects, outsider visiting the region, impoverished & less economically diversified than metropolitan centers

Heyday: 1870s-1880s, same period when realism became prominent. Moved away from genre’s association with humorous stereotypes & aligned their own regionally focused writing with realist principles

Question 24

Local Color & immigration

Answer 24

Brodhead: to produce the foreign only to master it in imaginary terms…by substituting less ‘different’ native ethnicities for the truly foreign ones of contemporary reality

Question 25

American Theater in 1880 (Murphy)

Answer 25

Primarily formulaic melodrama or comedy

Sensational stage craft

Verisimilitude in setting, costume, dialogue

Question 26

Realism in Drama (CC)

Answer 26

1. Plot adheres closely to plausibility & avoids wild coincidence, dreams, fantasies, & soliloquies
2. Characters behave in ways we find socially typical & psychologically believable in the circumstances
3. Play deals w/ serious matters for the society represent & relevant for real-life society that comprises the audience
4. Dialogue approximates lang used by people in the place, time, social setting represented
5. Provides adequate resolution in its storytelling & character development so that the audience is challenged to reconsider or reject a commonly held view on moral or ethical questions which the story has focused

Question 27

the Sublime (Outka)

Answer 27

Can turn moments of unrepresentable flux into an empowered subjectivity & a romanticized nature that manifests the truth of the observer’s power

has been instrumental in creating a heroic whiteness

Question 28

Wilderness Sublime (Outka)

Answer 28

z

Question 29

Plantation Pastoral (Outka)

Answer 29

z

Question 30

Trauma (Outka)

Answer 30

Turns human subjects into natural objects, which are then available for exploitation, generating a terrible sort of transitive algebra that has allowed whites to conjoin racial and ecological violence

Question 31

Kaplan’s main thesis

Answer 31

Representation of domestic/foreign & anarchy/empire (terms that should be oppositional) created a contested ground & an identity for the US & the formation of a national culture

–“The idea of the nation as home is inextricable from the political, economic, & cultural movements of empire, movements that both erect & unsettle the ever-shifting boundaries between the domestic & the foreign, between “at home” & “abroad”

Question 32

Anarchy

Answer 32

Integral & constitutive part of empire

–Conjured by imperial culture as a haunting specter that must be subdued & controlled

–But also destruction & exploitation inflicted on the colonized world

Question 33

Manifest Domesticity

Answer 33

1830s-1850s

–Empire of the Mother

–discourse of domesticity intimately intertwined with discourse of of Manifest Destiny

–Process of domestication, conquering & taming the wild, the natural, the alien

Emma Lazarus: “The New Colossus”:

• -“Mother of Exiles”
• -Immigrants are children, Mother’s job to turn them into Americans
• -This mother safeguards the sanctity of the home & the nation through a firm docility expressed by the statue’s commanding mild eyes

Lamplighter:

• -Gertie’s father: Brazil, Am West, Asia
• -Gertie: Refuses to go to Havana to help William’s ailing mother; savage @ 1st
• -William: imperial enterprise in India economically necessary to support mother

–UTC: Haiti, Canada, Africa

Question 34

Imperialist melancholy

Answer 34

Form of blocked mourning for both the victims of imperial violence & the lost privileges of imperial power

–Intertwined, for Twain, with the loss of slavery

–Necessary to forget the interconnections between slavery & imperialism

Question 35

Effigy

Answer 35

–A contrivance that enables the process of regulating performance to produce memory through surrogation.

–Monstrous double; surrogate victim for itself from within itself.

–Surrogate for violence perpetrated on an absent victim.

–A performance of waste

–Sustains the community with the comforting fiction that real borders exist and troubles it with the spectacle of their immolation

–Example: NA in the self-invention of ‘the American People.’ Function of the surrogated aboriginal is to disappear.

Question 36

Regionalism & National ID (Greeson)

Answer 36

• -Site of national fantasy
• -Internal other
• -Matter of obsession
• -Our South spatializes the gap between national ideal & national reality
• -Denying & claiming the South (bad roads)
• -Desire to BE AT HOME in a place that IS NOT HOME

Question 37

the Slave South (Greeson)

Answer 37

• -1830s
• -antebellum baseline against which industrialization & expansion conceived
• -Hidden depravity/vice
• -Expose
• -Simon Legree’s plantation looks alot like Lowell, MASS
• -A site for isolating unfreedom, for epitomizing decline in personal autonomy w/ industrialization

Question 38

Reconstruction South (Greeson)

Answer 38

• -Late 19th Cen
• -Field for writers confronting question of Empire
• -Republic or Empire