Calling for Papers for the 2023 American Literature Association Conference in Boston

Deadline for Submissions: 10 January 2023

Contact: argerj@gmail.com 

The Margaret Fuller Society will sponsor two panels at the 34th Annual Conference of the American Literature Association, to be held 25–28 May 2023 at The Westin Copley Place in Boston. Please send 250-word proposals (indicating AV needs), along with brief biographical statements, to Jana Argersinger, First Vice President, at argerj@gmail.com. Submissions from graduate students are most welcome.

For conference details, click here (opens in new window).

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TWO SESSIONS

Foundations for the “World at Large”: Women Authors and Their Homes

“No home can be healthful in which are not cherished seeds of good for the world at large.”

— Margaret Fuller, New-York Tribune, 12 December 1844

The Fuller Society invites ideas for a panel that will explore the historic residences of female US authors and leaders of thought. Our author’s childhood home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has for 120 years served as a neighborhood center that provides empowering community services (https://margaretfullerhouse.org/), a mission in close keeping with Fuller’s own commitments—and one that also invites us to study how her contemporaries and inheritors have worked toward antiracist justice in ways her writing only begins to imagine. 

What, we would like to ask, are the possible meanings and uses of the former dwelling places of women authors and intellectuals—whether maintained as museums, recognized with historic markers or street names, preserved as National Historic Landmarks and run as active public institutions like the Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House, held in private ownership, or still standing only in text and memory? How does lack of property rights for married women and people of color in the nineteenth century bear on the matter? What of indigenous and enslaved or formerly enslaved writers for whom habitation could be troubled, impermanent, or simply modeled on a different—non-Western—concept of home? 

We welcome proposals from folks associated in any way with an author’s house in any region of the US: directors and staff of houses themselves, members of societies that honor the authors who lived there—or who left only textual traces of home—and others with scholarly interest in the subject. Scholars and society members might team up with house representatives for joint presentations. Indeed, as part of our antiracist work, the Fuller Society is learning how to partner with other author societies and institutions that honor the legacies of nineteenth-century women intellectuals and reformers. Houses of interest include those of Anna Julia Cooper, Charlotte Forten Grimke, Louisa May Alcott, Frances E. W. Harper, Harriet Tubman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, Jane Addams, Sarah Orne Jewett, Edith Wharton, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Laura Ingalls Wilder—and of course Margaret Fuller—among numerous others.

Possible topics:

  • the public-facing work undertaken by historic author houses, and its relation, if any, to the work of the author
  • factors influencing whether an author’s house is preserved as such or not
  • the work of recovering houses and places associated with women intellectuals, in relation to literary scholarship
  • the meanings of home to writers for whom experiences of residence are troubled
  • archaeological recoveries associated with enslaved women’s homes or places of refuge
  • threats to home and neighborhood (e.g., Africatown, Alabama, and its preservation foundation) 
  • the diversity of forms that habitation can take, and how that can inform, enable, or inhibit writers’ work (e.g., boardinghouses, shelters, asylums, orphanages)
  • personal places of residence memorialized in authors’ texts, whether treated autobiographically or fictionally

Original image was contributed to Wikimedia Commons by Boston Public Library as part of a cooperation project. The donation was facilitated by the Digital Public Library of America, via its partner Digital Commonwealth. DPLA identifier: 11f2d8aa0c9e86a401387524f30f986aBoston Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=98785749

The Margaret Fuller Society Announces a Teaching Award to Support Racial Justice 

Teaching to Racial Justice with Margaret Fuller

The Committee on Racial Justice welcomes entries that:

–outline a syllabus including writing by Margaret Fuller and explain how Fuller’s work fits into the semester’s aims, including support of racial justice.

–describe a classroom activity or series of exercises that use Fuller’s writing to teach to issues of racial justice.

–detail a paper assignment that focuses on racial justice and engages Fuller’s writing. 

–plan a community project that addresses racial justice and Fuller’s writing.

–propose a nontraditional pedagogical approach to racial justice issues through Fuller’s writing.

We especially encourage entries that engage critical race theory.  We welcome submissions from both members and non-members of the Society and urge graduate students to consider submitting.

Submission Requirements

Submissions should be limited to one page.

The winning submission, as judged by the Society’s Committee on Racial Justice, will receive a small monetary award and publication in Conversations, the newsletter of the Margaret Fuller Society.  The award will be presented at the annual conference of the American Literature Association. 

Send submissions to avallone000@gmail.com.  Deadline:  10 April 2023

Event Recap: Fuller Society Panel at the July 2022 Thoreau Gathering

This post was written by Contributing Author and MFS Past President Phyllis Cole.

The Margaret Fuller Society contributed a panel with the title “Where in the World is Margaret Fuller?” to the Annual Gathering of the Henry David Thoreau Society in Concord, Massachusetts on Thursday, July 7, 2022. For several years we have been broadening the Annual Gathering’s previously exclusive focus on Thoreau by offering, along with the Emerson and Alcott Societies, an array of presentations on Transcendentalist and Concord-based authors. Always we have contributed to the Thoreauvian theme of the year, which this year was “Globalism.” What better perspective than this on Fuller, whose reading, life travels, and influence were always international? We might truly ask “where in the world” we want to locate her.

It has been my pleasure as a member of the Thoreau Society Board of Directors to plan this dimension of the Gathering program and to moderate the 2022 Fuller panel. I was particularly delighted that the papers proposed found such different angles on the broad topic. We had Fuller reading female-inflected German Romanticism in one paper, negotiating the difficulties of trans-Atlantic letter-writing in a second, sustaining friendship with an Italian noblewoman of opposing political belief in a third, and finally making her belated appearance in today’s China. At the same time some common themes emerged in these papers: epistolary expression, friendship between women, translation as vital work from Fuller’s day to our own. The members of our panel themselves range in background across national boundaries. You can read their full paper abstracts and bios here.

Alice de Galzain, doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh, began the session with her paper “Woman [and] Artist”: Margaret Fuller on Bettine Brentano-von Arnim and Friendship.”  Fuller taught herself German, then used it to read Bettine’s epistolary novel, translate the text into English, and interpret its meaning to Dial readers. De Galzain claims these cross-lingual acts as “feminist agency,” especially as they contribute to Fuller’s celebration of gender-defining women’s friendship, proceeding from within the soul and extending outward.

Cheryl Weaver, doctoral candidate at the University at Buffalo, approached epistolary expression in terms of problematic conveyance as well as content, in “I found your note here several days since”: Margaret Fuller and Postal Delivery from Europe. Fuller’s 1846 voyage to Europe came in the midst of American developments of both the postage stamp and the penny post, so that access to letter exchange boomed. But mail across the Atlantic was both more expensive and more problematic, as Fuller reveals in her private letters over the two years following.

Letters and their reports of conversation serve as evidence in Mario Bannoni’s paper, The Opposing Political Passions and Common Womanly Positions of Margaret Fuller and Costanza Arconati Visconti on the Eve of the Italian Risorgimento. Communication between Fuller and Arconati was a linguistic challenge: at first neither spoke the other’s language with confidence, so that they wrote to each other in French. And this was only the beginning of their difference, which also encompassed social status, religion, and position on the needed transformation of Italy. Nonetheless the two mutually defined a friendship ascending from inward soul to womanly bonding.

Close correspondence and friendship between Fuller and China never took place, but Julia Xianju Du explores cultural contact then and now in Margaret Fuller in China. Despite the Chinatown growing up in Boston (not far from the Peabody Bookstore), her contact with Chinese culture was limited to reading and quoting of Confucius. Even this, however, shows the power of translation as a trans-global resource of her time. In twenty-first century China there is growing interest in Fuller’s place among American Transcendentalists and advocates of women’s rights, with master’s theses about her on the rise. But translation of her actual writings is work still needed.

Read the full abstracts for the presentations here.

CFP Online Workshop: “Nature, Spirituality and Place: Comparative Studies between American Transcendentalism and Chinese Philosophy”

This workshop, hosted by Associate Professor Shan Gao (Soochow University), aims at examining why American transcendentalism and Chinese religions such as Confucianism, Daoism and Zen Buddhism all find spirituality in nature, and how their interpretation of nature generates great difference on people’s aesthetic perception of agricultural land, gardens and wilderness.

The deadline for submissions is September 30, 2022.

The workshop will take place on October 24, 2022.

Read the full call for papers below.

CFP for MLA 2023: Conditions of Exile in the Nineteenth-Century and Beyond

The Margaret Fuller Society is calling for paper proposals for MLA 2023 in San Francisco, CA.

Conditions of Exile in the Nineteenth-Century and Beyond

What forms have the experience and idea of exile taken for U.S.-affiliated writers and intellectuals in the nineteenth century through the present? Can exile engender gain and growth, along with pain and loss? For whom, and under what conditions? The examples of Frederick Douglass and Margaret Fuller suggest a complex range of possibility and constraint: Douglass, as an orator, writer, activist, and formerly enslaved person living in the North—and temporarily a “triumphant exile” (in Peter Ripley’s words), who considered making his successful tour of Britain permanent after the publication of Narrative endangered his freedom in the U.S. And Fuller, as a free, white foreign correspondent for the New-York Tribune in revolutionary Italy, who at times referred to the Roman Republic as “my country” and “my home,” briefly shared exile with the Italian nobleman she loved, and inspired Emerson to call her “our citizen of the world by quite special diploma.” 

Possible topics and approaches:

–    exile and citizenship

–    racial justice and citizen rights

–    labor and exile

–    activism, reform work, anti-racist projects

–    integration, alienation, cosmopolitanism

–    displacement and colonization

–    mobility and immobility

–    exile and travel (forced vs. chosen)

–    self-imposed exile and questions of agency

–    exile as a state of feeling

–    linguistic implications (multilingualism, translation)

–    historical examples and contemporary formulations

–    representations in fiction, (auto)biography, letters, diaries, and more

–    concepts of allegiance

–    constructions of home and community

–    avenues for publication 

–    quarantine and immigration

–    immigrant/expat writing as Black critique (for example, Anna Julia Cooper, Claude McKay, James Baldwin)

–    border crossings and escape 

Please send 200-word abstracts to Jana Argersinger at argerj@gmail.com by March 15.

Event Recap: MLA 2022

This post was written by contributing author Dr. Christina Katopodis, who also presided on the panel.

On Sunday, January 9, 2022, the Margaret Fuller Society’s Ad Hoc Committee on Racial Justice hosted a virtual session at MLA 2022 on “Mattering in the Nineteenth Century and Beyond: Transcendentalisms, Racism, and Repair in the United States.” It was such a pleasure to moderate this round table discussion and to listen to exciting and even groundbreaking scholarship in the field. Read the paper abstracts and full bios for the panelists here.

Delivering a paper on “Transcendentalists and the Black Atlantic,” Dr. Katie Simon started us off with her discussion of Ralph Waldo Emerson and whiteness studies. Dr. Simon focused especially on how Gilroy’s work on the Black Atlantic shakes up geographical stuckness in New England, pointing to the mass genocide of the transatlantic slave trade fueling national and global commerce, and goods sold in the “free” states made and grown by enslaved people.

Doctoral candidate Jessica Elkaim addressed Walt Whitman’s unreconciled racism, his problematic blindness to bodily difference and the corpsification of bodies in his writings in her presentation on “Whitman and the Republic of the Dead,” developed from a chapter in her dissertation at the University of Toronto in which she analyzes representations of corpses in nineteenth-century American writings. 

Next, Andrea Walton of Illinois Central College traced the long genealogy of the Mammy stereotype from black face minstrelsy, Billy Kersand’s “Old Aunt Jemima,” Drysdale’s “Old Chloe” in Scenes in Georgia (1827) and more, to transvestite Mammy and asexual Mammy stereotypes. Her presentation on “Aunt Jemima: A Mascot for African American Femininity” tied this racist history to white complacency and tolerance and the systemic racism embedded in corporate America which continues to capitalize on racist stereotypes to sell products like pancake syrup.

Dr. Ben Bascom in “Empire of Smell: Douglass, Thoreau, and Queer Fungibility” called to our senses the smell of the Fitchburg railroad and the body of the author — Henry David Thoreau — who recalls readers to their own bodies through olfactory description. Dr. Bascom reminds us that when we smell we are taken over by otherness — the nose is an aperture that doesn’t close, much like the ears. His attention to the body reminded us of the humanity of these historical authors as well as how smell was racialized in the nineteenth century.

In “Miss Peabody’s Racism,” Dr. Mark Gallagher underlined the point that nineteenth-century antislavery efforts were not equivalent to actually calling for racial equality; in fact, some antislavery writings reinforced white superiority. His presentation illuminated the white supremacy embedded in Elizabeth Peabody’s writings (she was, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, late to abolitionism), particularly in her conception of the spiritual body. Dr. Gallagher argued that Transcendentalism can reinforce racism by not acknowledging the spiritual nature of nonwhite bodies.

PhD candidate Jacob Walters concluded the panel with his presentation on “Dark Vistas: Circles, Sketches, and The Penumbra of the Future in the Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois.” In his discussion of Du Bois’s megascope, his talk brought to center stage the “constellation of tensions” in the lives of all the authors and figures discussed in the session. In thinking of Du Bois’s double consciousness, unknowing, reorienting one’s viewing, and trying to find humanist universality through the fragments and glimpses of real lives, we all were reminded of the humanity of these authors, their uncertainties, their sometimes contradictory traits juxtaposed, and how they recall us to our own humanity as scholars and people in the world.

These authors were not perfect. They had bodies that smelled, opinions that changed, some ideas worth keeping and others worth critically reevaluating and problematizing. If we’re willing to treat them as complex and changing, they can help us to reflect on our common struggles, fight for equality, and resistance to injustice today.

Feminism(s) and American Land: Examining Early Feminist Ecologies Through Legacies of White Extractivism

Chair: Eagan S. Dean

Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, 1843 is remembered for its comparative approach to women’s gender roles across American regions and attention to scholarly process in its accounts of the Midwestern American “frontier;” at the same time, it performs crucial justificatory work for the “Manifest Destiny” model of Indigenous displacement and frames land as a resource to be mined for white feminist visions of vigor and economic independence–a vision which depends on the exclusion of Indigenous women from narratives of teleological progress. In light of this complex, fascinating, troubling legacy, the Margaret Fuller Society assembled papers for a special session engaging with the relationships among race, ecology, and feminism, in Fuller’s time and beyond.

Chip Badley and Kathleen Lawrence look to Fuller’s history and aesthetics to explain the intertwined philosophical and personal tensions which inform Fuller’s work as a woman philosopher and travel writer, and to reckon with the opportunities and burdens of that history, particularly in terms of the white gaze on Indigenous subjects. Lawrence Lorrain Mullen works to rethink white relationships to American land through a trans studies lens, reading Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis” as an extension of Fuller’s regionalization/geologization of American gender, one with decreasing space for queerness, produced in part through the narrative disappearance of Indigenous nations. Reaching beyond the 19th century to address these very disappeared narratives, Chadha Brahem reads Leslie Marmon Silko’s late-20th century novels for the historical and contemporary workings of indigenous womanhood, ultimately arguing that an understanding of Pueblo gender categories reveals Silko’s route for the “reclamation of land, power, heritage and identity” through “female emancipation and sexual liberation.” Ultimately, this panel aims to stimulate conversation about the influences, impacts, and legacies of feminist understandings of the relationships between gender, race, and American land, especially in the Midwest and West.

Image credit: Sarah Freeman Clarke, “Arched Rock from the Water,” illustration #6 from Summer on the Lakes

Honoring Christina Asquith with MFS Award for Social Service

A Message from MFS Past President Phyllis Cole:

It’s a great pleasure to let Fuller Society members know that on July 9 we presented our triennial Award for Social Service to pioneering journalist and educator Christina Asquith.  The setting was our society dinner party at the American Literature Association meeting, with thirteen of us, including Christina and her ten-year-old daughter Marianna, gathered around a conversational table at Piattini in Boston’s Back Bay. 

The Social Service Award recognizes ”extraordinary achievement in extending the social ideals advanced by Margaret Fuller,” and the award committee realized immediately that this year’s honoree had to be Christina Asquith.  You may remember that in 2018 Megan Marshall offered an interview with Christina in Conversations, which you could access here.  But now we have caught up with her more recent career as well.   

Through the interview we heard about Christina’s amazing work in establishing the Fuller Project for International Reporting, designed to support the investigation of women’s issues around the world.  Christina had personally experienced the difficulty of getting such issues recognized by major press outlets as a freelance reporter in Baghdad and Istanbul in the years after 2003.  A decade later, reading Megan Marshall’s biography of Fuller as she organized this collaborative project was like ”gasoline poured on a simmering fire,” she said, and as a result the project honored Fuller in its official name.    Christina Asquith served as editor-in-chief of the Fuller Project from 2014 to 2020, during which time the organization raised $5 million for its work—with more in the pipeline—and grew incrementally in scale and visibility.  Some of their early stories concerned a Syrian girl who lost her violin and music career in the war, a tragically large number of Russian women murdered through domestic violence, and a Turkish woman with an MBA inheriting her father’s confectionary business.  But Christina also landed a cover story in Time magazine (9-2-2019) about women living less far away, in the “Left Behind Economy” of waitress work for minimum wages in this country.  By 2020 the Fuller Project had become an established part of the international press, and you can see its range of current publications here.   

At this point, however, Christina was ready for a new initiative.  The burgeoning of the Fuller Project, she felt, owed a lot not just to its unfolding in times of #MeToo, Mideast war, and Hillary’s well-publicized campaign.  In addition, a new generation of women around the world was getting educated to use Twitter and the internet and do their own coding.  And so she took on direction of the new Hack Club, an educational initiative to accelerate such literacy, through an alliance of school-based clubs around the world with the most advanced women in tech spaces, from bitcoin to artificial intelligence and space technology.  “I wanted to be part of something radical,” she wrote to me about this in one email.  We live in an internet-driven world; collectively we create a new kind of journalism, with many people rising with skill to tell their own stories. And yes, she assured me, this social justice campaign was equally in the spirit of Margaret Fuller.  Our committee agreed right away!   “Learning to code,” declares the club’s website, “is uniquely like gaining a superpower—turning you from a consumer of technology into a creator.”  

And so the Social Service award recognizes Christina Asquith as both a journalist and an educator.  At the dinner in Boston she was given a carved wooden plaque, as well as a modest donation to the Hack Club and lifetime membership in the Margaret Fuller Society.  To Marianna we gave a book sack with the motto “Let them be sea captains,” courtesy of the website for Peter Reilly’s Fuller documentary.  Christina warmly embraces her membership and hopes to stay in touch as we move forward toward an international conference on “Journaling for Justice.”   

Three years ago the Social Service award was given to me (indeed given my name), recognizing work simply to further the society’s connection with the Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House in Cambridge.  As I hope you know, this was her birth home, not far from Central Square; but since the early twentieth century it has also been a service center for the working, often immigrant and economically struggling, people in its area. I’ve been happy to increase the contact between this place and Fuller’s legacy, including her own calls for justice to the poor. But this year, heading the search for the next recipient of the “Phyllis Cole Award for Social Service,” I have welcomed the opportunity to flip the picture and recognize communications about women around the world. Both are authentic Fuller. Writing to the Tribune from Rome in 1848, she described violence against women in the very midst of revolution as a subject she would take up again “if I live.” Instead, she had to rely on the efforts of others, among whom we’re happy to recognize Christina Asquith and her expanding network. 

Please join me in welcoming Christina to the Margaret Fuller Society. 

Phyllis 

Past President, Margaret Fuller Society 

“Mattering in the Nineteenth Century and Beyond: Transcendentalisms, Racism, and Repair in the United States,” an MFS Roundtable at MLA 2022

On Sunday, January 9, 2022, at 1:45 PM-3:00 PM the Margaret Fuller Society will be hosting a roundtable at the 2022 Modern Language Association conference in Washington, DC about “Mattering in the Nineteenth Century and Beyond: Transcendentalisms, Racism, and Repair in the United States.”

This roundtable was organized by the MFS Ad Hoc Committee on Racial Justice, with Jana Argersinger taking the lead on liaising with MLA to organize the panel. Christina Katopodis (City University of New York) will be presiding.

We hope you will join us for what will surely be an exciting roundtable featuring new and relevant scholarship in the field. Below is a list of paper titles and abstracts, our presenters, and their bios. Topics include the Mammy stereotype, smell and queer fungibility in Douglass and Thoreau, Whitman’s corpses, transcendental racialism in E. P. Peabody, Black collectivist subjectivity in Malcolm X and Biggie, transcendentalists and the Black Atlantic, and democratic praxis in Du Bois’s “sketches.”


“Transcendentalists and the Black Atlantic

Transcendentalists are often considered in relation to one another, and the lines of influence and descent hover close. This project recovers the generative cross-pollination of ideas across racial lines that actually took place. Paul Gilroy’s pivotal formulation of the black Atlantic offers a crucial theoretical starting place, though it’s rarely been considered in relation to Transcendentalism. Gilroy’s work helps us address the constitutive exclusions that underwrite a construction of nature as Transcendent and wild, one that Paul Outka suggests is a recoil from plantation pastoral, but others might argue emanates from the wider global capitalist system, one that would see both nature and black bodies as outside of culture, in zones of nonbeing. Christina Sharpe and Ian Baucom, following from Gilroy, both offer models for the kind of “wake work” that engages with contemporary reverberations of violence, erasure, and systemic exclusions within canon formation and scholarship itself. Using formulations of the black Atlantic, this presentation sketches lines of affiliation between worthies such as Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet E. Wilson, and William Wells Brown.

Katie Simon is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Georgia College, where she teaches courses in American literature and critical theory. She is also an Affiliated Faculty in the Program in Women’s and Gender Studies at Georgia College. Her work on Thoreau and the black Atlantic appears in ESQ. Other publications appear in Women’s Studies and Bad Subjects.


“Aunt Jemima: A Mascot for African American Femininity”

While Mammy is a mascot for black women, she also helped answer the question that Deborah Gray White examines in her book, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, when she asks “What did it mean for black women to share some identity and disability of both black men and white women and yet be very different from both?” (White 5). Sojourner Truth’s much earlier “Ain’t I A Woman?” speech at the 1851 Women’s Convention, she aids in answering this question. As a result, black women’s identities are a bit more defined. After Truth’s speech, black and white women unite in the common struggle for equality yet it simultaneously makes the dehumanization of the black woman slightly less palatable. This discussion will focus not only on the depictions of 19th Century Aunt Jemima in literary texts and minstrel shows, the ways that she connects to white women and black men, and how the tolerance of this image is a direct correlation to the consequences of the Mammy stereotype.

Andrea Walton has been an Illinois Central College instructor for eight years. While she is a Peoria, IL native, she spent most of her childhood in Wichita Falls, Tx.  She earned her Associates Degree from Illinois Central College. She went on to attain both her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Illinois.  Since earning her Graduate degree in 19th Century Gothic Women Writers, Andrea’s research, now, focuses more on Womanism. 


“Miss Peabody’s Racism”

Some of the central figures of the Transcendentalist movement were known to have held some of the common racial prejudices of their time. Ralph Waldo Emerson makes a number of comments about race and racial development in his journals, while Theodore Parker assumes a white racial superiority in some of his writings. And it would appear that another of the coterie expressed, on at least one occasion, an opinion strongly influenced by the Romantic racialism of her day.

Not long before she was embroiled in the controversy surrounding Bronson Alcott’s Conversations with Children on the Gospels, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody created a controversy of her own in the pages of the Boston Observer and Religious Intelligencer (1835). In a “Sunday School Lesson,” Peabody tells several young children a shocking anecdote about the “badness” of enslaved people in Cuba who, according to Peabody, commit infanticide because their conscience is “so little and weak.” After a letter to editor George Ripley objects to her lack of sympathy, Peabody defends herself by saying her comments were not “said in scorn of the race,” but “stated as facts” that attest to the “appalling moral result” of slavery’s “denaturalization.”

While it is clear that ideas on racial equality do not always square with the Transcendentalists’ antislavery commitments, it may be worth considering how racist assumptions might inform more generalized constructions of race, especially as they serve the perfectionism of Transcendentalism’s moral vision. In her early devotional “The Life of Christ in the Soul of Man,” for example, Peabody states that Jesus undertook “a moral renovation of the race.” Moral transformation reflects a change in “the race” rather than in individuals, a view that would be indicative of Peabody’s Transcendentalism.

Mark Gallagher is a lecturer in the UCLA English Department, where he received his Ph.D. in English in 2021. He also teaches in the Rhetorical Arts program at Loyola Marymount University. His primary research interests are in nineteenth-century American literature, with a focus on Transcendentalism, religion and literature, and book history and print culture. His current book project examines the “affective transcendentalisms” of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. 


Empire of Smell: Douglass, Thoreau, and Queer Fungibility 

In his “Sounds” chapter in Walden, Thoreau rhapsodizes the commodities of global market capitalism through the smells of the Fitchburg Railroad. Thoreau writes: “I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me, and I smell the stores which go dispensing their odors all the way from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreign parts, of coral reefs, and Indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the extent of the globe.” This bucolic representation of smell contrasts with two important moments from Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom: when he enters New York City only to feel a “sense of loneliness” and later when he describes the “Keen . . . scent of the slaveholder” who pursues fugitive slaves for profit. As a roundtable participant, I propose to frame the spatial and sensorial organization of smell as it constrains the movements of these two nineteenth-century figures. Their contrast highlights how particular affects make visible nineteenth-century racial structures of feeling. Thoreau configures smell as emitted from commodities on a global capitalist network whereas Douglass emphasizes how his own personhood is surveilled as an object in that market, one that marks a queer fungibility that elaborates insights from scholars Thomas Roach and Shannon Winnubst about neoliberal racism.

Ben Bascom is assistant professor of English at Ball State University where he teaches and writes about early and nineteenth-century American literature and culture and queer studies. He is currently working on a book manuscript titled “Feeling Singular: Queer Masculinities and the Early United States,” which tells an alternative account of the founding decades of the United States through focusing on the stories and writings of an eccentric and motley set of characters. Departing from the likes of Benjamin Franklin, whom tradition positions as a paragon of self-production, this book offers instead typologies of the failed inventor, the tragic outsider, the flamboyant pretender, the farcical exhorter, and the disaffected exile to make room for queer conceptualizations of early America. 


“Whitman and the Republic of the Dead”

Primarily as a result of his radical poetics of inclusion, Walt Whitman has been refashioned into a posthumanist whose work is inclined toward a material monism that transcends racial and gendered differences. Yet the inconsistencies between his poetry and his life present a serious challenge to this view. As a workaround, critics have suggested that the racist views he espouses in his journalism, for example, simply open up new interpretations of his poetry as a complicated attempt to confront his own prejudices. In this paper, I want to take a closer look at these inconsistencies and suggest that his free and unrestricted engagement with the material do not mitigate Whitman’s practices of racialization—they compound them. In fact, I contend that the treatment of base matter in his poetry is precisely where his democratic vision falls apart. I read his poetic treatment of corpses in particular as an assimilationist move to neutralize the threats of gendered and racialized difference. The corpse appears, in Whitman, as a type of othered body that puts his abilities and ideals of kinship to the test. Despite sharing in the view that death is the great equalizer, where “we lie beyond the difference,” his limited gaze when it comes to corpses ends up disrupting his egalitarian fantasies and, by extension, his literary legacy.


Jess Elkaim is a PhD candidate in the English department at the University of Toronto. Her paper is a modified version of the first chapter of her dissertation, which analyzes representations of corpses in nineteenth-century American writings. Her research interests include critical theory, necropolitics, narratology, and media studies.


“Dark Vistas: Circles, Sketches, and The Penumbra of the Future in the Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois”

This paper considers “the sketch” for W.E.B. Du Bois as a Romantic-Tragic mode of vision that engages the conflicting temporal and spatial scales of democratic engagement. Exploring the implications of Du Bois’ recurrent and consistent attempts to self-identify his writing as “sketches”, Walters reads Du Bois with and against Ralph Emerson’s Romantic “circle,” his metaphor for enlarged/idealist vision in the poem “Circles”, as well as William James’ critical, post-transcendentalist turn away from enlarged/idealist vision (what James calls the flattened “pictures” produced via idealism and illusions of imaginative transcendence). Rejecting either a Romantic vision of natural harmony and visual-enlargement or the Tragic focus on the irreducible difference between small-scale particulars, Du Bois offers a visual grammar for democratic praxis that is tragically-utopian. A democratic vision of transcendence, here, suggests not the final achievement of a transparent plane of knowledge but, rather, an opaque engagement with the pleasurableness of difference, where the critical self is sketched and re-sketched actively through engagements with perceiving and sensing others. Sketchiness, in turn, invests people and images with potential energy that signals no guarantees but offers critical resources for kinetic pictures of possible futures.

Jake Walters is a 5th year PhD student at Cornell University focusing on African-American intellectual and cultural history. He is currently writing a dissertation, tentatively titled “Strange Twistings of Soul: Emancipatory Experimentalism, Interdisciplinary Incalculability, and the Revolutionary Unknown in the Writings of W.E.B. Du Bois”, focusing on W.E.B. Du Bois’ theories of experimentation and experimentalism in their scientific, literary, and political guises at the turn of the 20th century. His dissertation examines connections and tensions between American and black diasporic engagements with the fluctuating border of scientific truth at the turn of the century, especially its implications for thinking about democratic praxis and metaphysical notions of human togetherness that emphasize affective energies over philosophical principles. He also explores connections between ideas of experimentalism and traditions of African-American cultural and intellectual production, particularly focused on the role of narrative emplotments – Romance, Tragedy, and Comedy – in the way experimental, speculative, and/or “risky” activity is framed and understood by African-American writers. 


“Until Somebody Kills You: Transgressing Black Transcendentalism in The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Life After Death”

Malcolm X and The Notorious B.I.G. (Biggie) produced seminally revered textual artifacts that were published after their tragic assassinations thirty-two years apart: Malcolm, his autobiography co-authored by Alex Haley (1965) and Biggie, his final studio album Life After Death (1997). As the legacies of both Malcolm and Biggie’s public and cultural work reflect a social impulse to periodize Black cultural history into binary conflicts (East Coast hip-hop versus West; Malcolm’s self-determination versus Martin Luther King, Jr.’s non-violence), scholars have adamantly worked to disrupt these binaries by assessing areas of collaboration and overlap. I read both The Autobiography and Life After Death in the Black transcendentalist tradition by highlighting how these cultural products emphasize the unity of the divine and human; these texts underscore the importance of subjectivity in the configuration of Black material experience.  By transgressing aesthetic and temporal boundaries to place these two texts in conversation with each other, I demonstrate American transcendentalism’s failure to accommodate the parallel subjectivities of Black American experience. I suggest that the threat of retaliatory violence in TheAutobiography and inner-city violence in Life After Death frame these texts’ unique rhetorical anxieties while conterminously organizing their exploration of the interstices of justice and personal redemption as purely subjective notions. I propose that Malcolm and Biggie’s respective expressions of Black American subjectivity that manifest from the mid-1960s to the present demonstrate the need to regard the repair and reclamation of Black identity and freedom as an ongoing and incomplete process whose revision and refashioning are constantly under review by these disparate cultural modes of Black expression.

Zachary Johnson is an English PhD Candidate at Southern Methodist University.

Get to Know Prof. Leslie Eckel, MFS Communications Officer

This year, the Margaret Fuller Society (MFS) is spending time getting to know its leaders and members who live all over the world. This month we honor the work of Dr. Leslie Eckel, who is Associate Professor and Honors Coordinator of English at Suffolk University.

Dr. Eckel teaches American literature, literatures of travel and migration, utopian and dystopian studies, first-year writing, and women’s and gender studies. She is currently working on two major projects: a monograph on utopianism in the long nineteenth century, and the Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Writings of Margaret Fuller with her co-editors Sonia di Loreto and Andrew Taylor. If you see Eckel on Zoom or at the next in-person conference, you might ask her about Atlantic literary studies, publishing and co-editing books, service-learning pedagogy, parenting, and even yoga.

We asked Dr. Eckel to tell us about what drew her to Margaret Fuller, and here is what she said: “I first discovered Fuller in a graduate seminar on Victorian poetry with the late Linda Peterson, who was a wonderful professor, as we were reading Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Fuller appeared in a footnote to the poem, and I wanted to learn her whole story! As I was starting my dissertation, I traveled to Rome and read Fuller’s dispatches from Europe for the first time while eating lots of Nutella on toast. … I love and appreciate Margaret Fuller’s ability to fuse intellectual pursuits with activism in a wider world. The turn she makes as she leaves Boston for New York is such an important part of this path, and she captures it when she writes in an 1845 letter to her brother Richard, ‘[I] wish to share and impel the general stream of thought.’”

In the next several years, Dr. Eckel would like the MFS to become more inclusive both in its membership and the conversations that our members have with one another. She believes that our current racial justice initiatives and planning for an international conference in 2023 are key steps in this direction.

During the pandemic, Dr. Eckel learned a great deal, including how to support her students more holistically as learners and as people, even via Zoom. The things she looks forward to doing most after the pandemic include: “Visiting faraway family and friends, exploring Legoland in Denmark with my son, and experiencing the next international conference with Fuller Society colleagues.”

We thank Dr. Eckel for her service and leadership and for sharing her time with us. If you would like to learn more about her work, see the resources she has shared with us below.

Bibliography:

A documentary film, Margaret Fuller: Transatlantic Revolutionary, Risorgimento Productions, 2021, https://margaretfullermovie.com

An edited volume, The Edinburgh Companion to Atlantic Literary Studies, edited with Clare Frances Elliott, Edinburgh University Press, 2016, https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-edinburgh-companion-to-atlantic-literary-studies.html

An article, “Radical Innocence: Margaret Fuller’s Utopian Rome” in Transatlantica, no. 2, 2015, http://transatlantica.revues.org/7754

A chapter on “Fuller’s Conversational Journalism: New York, London, Rome” in my book Atlantic Citizens: Nineteenth-Century American Writers at Work in the World, Edinburgh University Press, 2013, https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-atlantic-citizens.html