Key Critical Terms Flashcards
Surrogation
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”
Circum-Atlantic
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
Genealogies of performance
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)
Kinesthetic imagination
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
Vortices of behavior
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
Displaced transmission
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
Condensational events
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
generic narrative
docs & strategies become subsumed by the tale & the slave narrative becomes identifiable generic text like autobiography; Douglass
authenticating narrative
tale is subsumed by the authenticating strategy; the slave narrative becomes an authenticating document for other, usually generic, texts like novels or histories; Brown
Race Card
casting one racially constituted group as the victim of another
Racial melodrama
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
The icon of the home
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
performance of waste
“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.
Benjamin’s commodity fetishism
Not from exchange value, but from presentation, like in advertising. the “sex appeal of the inorganic.” Fascination with objects. Psychological, not economic, relation
Disciplinary Intimacy
Sentimental authority common in mid-century texts, discipline through loving coercion rather than corporal punishment
Myths
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
“‘revised’ Frontier Myth”
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
Hunter
male, enters willingly, speaks for the values of a “natural” and “precapitalist” Eden yet facilitates the spread of progress and civilization
Modernism (Benn Michaels)
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”
19th Century interest in anthropology, local color (Evans)
“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”
Nationalism & local color
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.
Popularity of local color in context of modernization
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
Local color
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
Local Color & immigration
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
