Publication Type: Internal Paper
Abstract: Historians of the Reconstruction era have shown that American literature was instrumental in the process of post-war sectional reconciliation, producing a flood of romance narratives that painted over ideological conflict in the service of white national reunion. Popular literature abounded with marriage plots between union soldiers and southern belles, displacing the political content of the war and recasting the recent combatants as lovers. This paper complicates this appraisal, offering a broader view of the functions of the marriage plot in Reconstruction literature by turning to a novel by a radical abolitionist and one of the most famous American women of this period, Anna E. Dickinson�s What Answer? (1868). I argue that this forgotten work disrupts the conventions of the �romance of reunion� to call attention to the neglected project of racial integration, insisting on democratic procedure, rather than family feeling, as the solution to the nation�s divisions.
A legendary abolitionist orator, Dickinson�s critiques of marriage as an institution also aligned her with the burgeoning first wave of American feminism. When the former abolitionist movement splintered after the war, the suffragists avidly pursued her official sponsorship for the considerable influence she wielded as a national celebrity. Dickinson, however, remained singularly devoted to African American advancement. A fictionalized version of this conflict, embodied in Dickinson�s divided allegiance between Liberal Republican Whitelaw Reid and suffragist Susan B. Anthony, later appeared as the central political and romantic triangle in Henry James�s The Bostonians, another revision of the romance of reunion in which the voice of social reform is silenced in an unhappy union with a former Confederate.
In What Answer?, however, the historical Dickinson not only resists sectional reconciliation but also rejects marriage as a symbol of political harmony, putting her skepticism of this institution to work for the cause of black male suffrage. The central interracial marriage, seemingly the symbol of a future integrated nation, comes to a tragic and precipitous end, foreclosing the idea that romance can suture social wounds. In its place, Dickinson focuses on the bonds between loyal northerners across the boundaries of race, class, and gender. A rare example of postbellum fiction overtly hostile to the culture of reconciliation, the novel repeatedly reminds readers that southerners and Copperheads were villainous traitors. For Dickinson, interracial friendship between Union soldiers, not romantic love or family relation between the sections, ultimately epitomizes the ideal American democracy. This paper will show how What Answer? debunks the white national marriage plot, subordinating the role of familial structures in the remaking of national identity to focus attention on the receding goal of a functional and racially integrated political community. Moreover, this restoration of Dickinson to her central position in the fifteenth amendment debates necessitates a reevaluation of the split between white feminism and antiracist activism central to scholarly accounts of this period.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In the 1920s, Anna May Wong and Josephine Baker journeyed to Europe to escape racial stereotyping in the United States. Given the American racial climate characterized by Asian immigration exclusion, institutionalized segregation and wage-labor stratification, neither actress achieved stardom in the United States. Instead both trained in Europe to further their craft. There, Wong starred in theater productions such as A Circle of Chalk (1929) and in films such as Flame of Love (1930) and Baker headlined La Revue Negre (1925) and movies such as Princess Tam Tam (1935). Their performance reviews, films, and fashion coverage circulated not only throughout Europe and the United States but in Africa and Asia as well. This paper will use the performances of Anna May Wong and Josephine Baker as a means to examine how transnational culture that constituted race and modernity flowed between the United States and Europe. In doing so, “Anna May Wong and Josephine Baker in Transnational Performance” extends the insights of Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic” as a critical foundation for western modernity by examining it as a gendered space simultaneously traversed by transnational Asian American performance. In addition, this work defines performance to include not only the cinematic screen and the music hall but press and fashion images. These differing types of performances are marked by the modern because even when the images or performances are local, mass media allows them to travel. This paper first explores the development of an American modernity whose multiple and hybrid temporalities developed as a response to the contradictions race posed to the modern American nation-state. Although the women themselves are important, this is not solely the story of their individual agency but is conjoined to the historical and structural factors that created American modernity and allowed it to circulate internationally. Finally, it examines Anna May Wong and Josephine Baker’s films, theater, dance and fashions under European colonialism and shows how the women used their American modernity to disrupt the colonial imagination.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The October 2006 murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya brought international attention to the dangers of investigative journalism in Russia. Media framing of this event in Izvestiya and the New York Times shows that each framed the tragedy differently. The Times elaborated on Russia’s political failings; Izvestiya focused on Politkovskaya and the crime with some commentary on a free press. Cold War rhetoric may be returning to U.S. news coverage of Russia.

Publication Type: Individual Paper
Abstract: Why do many know about Aimé Césaire's or C.L.R. James' analyses of the Haitian and French Revolutions as dialectical events signaling a transatlantic revolutionary consciousness, but not Anna Julia Cooper's? Although most Cooper scholarship focuses primarily on A Voice from the South, her 1925 Sorbonne dissertation, L'Attitude de la France à l'égard de l'esclavage pendant la Révolution, merits closer attention. Anticipating future critiques of colonized people as passive recipients of reason and virtue from Europe, Cooper challenges conventional narratives of the Age of Revolution by focusing on the Haitian revolution as central, not anomalous. She examines the dialogic interplay of Haitian and French politics, highlights slavery's role in the rise of capitalism, and excoriates the rationalization of human exploitation, both in France and in Saint-Domingue. She demonstrates that resistance from Haitian gens de couleur and slaves impacted France's nascent democracy. She also asserts that an economic dependence on slavery and inability to confront its own colonial expansion undermined France's revolutionary potential and egalitarian ideals. Moreover, Cooper hones in on the pivotal role of difference in politics and suggests that how a society contends with conflict distinguishes democratic from despotic polities. Toni Morrison suggests that "certain absences are so stressed, so ornate, so planned, they call attention to themselves; arrest us with intentionality and purpose." Similarly, Cooper examines the "intentionality and purpose" of opacity and evasion in historical accounts of the Age of Revolution: by uncovering a deeply embedded epistemology of ignorance, Cooper highlights opacity's role in maintaining the status quo.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: For this project, we parallel Carnie Wilson and Anna Nicole Smith, for both women have become culturally notorious not for sheer talent or award winning skills, but rather, for the ridiculous antics their bodies have performed. From fat to thin, to the exploitation of their fame and their self-promotion, the public and private worlds of these two women are very similarly framed by the popular press. More than being made similar in how we dismiss them, these two women have manipulated their own excessive performances to yield the very fame that causes their dismissal. This is worth examination, for if one could manipulate their own cultural construction by ignoring the cultural rules for appropriate performance, there is a degree of resistance within such a gesture. Therefore, if celebrity bodies can perform excess that successfully resists, can less recognizable women also reclaim such spaces for the production of stronger, more salient identities? Further, the identification of which cultural boundaries Anna and Carnie push against and ignore are also key elements to understanding the critical discourse surrounding them. While seemingly succumbing to the system, they also expose its rules, further amplifying the normative ways in which women’s bodies are constructed and maintained.