Scott Glenn as William Lloyd Garrison. Discuss.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Monday, July 6, 2009
Loomings
The chapter draft is officially due August 31st. Yikes! I talked to Bryan last week, and he thought it was a better idea to get the chapter done before thinking about the article which is good in terms of how I've been thinking, and bad in terms of my own anxiety. I'm going to spend this week getting organized for the writing process, get some index cards and start making more concise notes in addition to getting a bit more reading in. In terms of blogging, I'm going to try to discipline my prose. The bad thing about writing before I'm ready is I tend to meander into these incoherent and horribly overwritten paragraphs. I wonder if I'll ever get a chance to develop an elegant prose style. For the time being, if I can't be elegant, I'm going to try to clean and concise.
Instead of sectioning the chapter by text, I'm going to section it by trope: the geography of the swamp, the figure of the insurrectionist/mutineer, and ships and ocean travel. This will allow me to circle back to texts more organically instead of doing rigid and plodding juxtapositions text by text. The hope is that: A) I won't have to force the connections between the texts if I cluster them like this, and B) by keeping these three things in mind I can keep the maritime aspects front and center.
Because of my tendency to think backwards it also helps if I start with something like Dred and then reach back to her source material and work my way forward. It makes me wonder if I shouldn't have started the last chapter from Equiano and worked my way backward to Grainger. Oh well, hindsight and everything.
Because of my tendency to think backwards it also helps if I start with something like Dred and then reach back to her source material and work my way forward. It makes me wonder if I shouldn't have started the last chapter from Equiano and worked my way backward to Grainger. Oh well, hindsight and everything.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Dred and the Swamp Sublime
Finally got around to reading Monique Allewaert's essay "Swamp Sublime: Ecologies of Resistance in the American Plantation Zone" which is incredibly suggestive in terms of thinking about Stowe's positioning of Dred, and through him Vesey and Turner, as heirs to the white American revolutionaries. Contact with the swamp produces subjects capable of resistance through interaction with "non-human forces" (Allewaert 341). The swamp zone in opposition with the plantation zone becomes not simply a place a refuge but a way of creating resistance.
Earlier I pointed to the swamp as Dred's swamp community as "a brief failed attempt at revolution." Reading the Allewaert essay I'm wondering if part of Stowe's dilemna lies in the way she attempts to "domesticate" the swamp. Granted, she is working from knowledge of the way these maroon communities operated but she also represents the ultimate demise of Dred's little utopia as white destruction on a fledgling black republic. In this reading Dred seems less a revolutionary and more of a colonist of a terrain viewed as un-colonizable by white settlers (343). This begs the question: does Dred's failure in part lie in the semi-permanence of the community? Stowe depicts of the population of the Great Dismal Swamp as seeming to have fewer revolutionaries than refugees, Tiff, Henry's wife, the wounded Clayton. In depicting the swamp she seems unable to imagine it as something other than an outdoor domestic space.
This reading also really emblematizes Stowe's transition from being pro-emigration to pro-assimilation. On the one hand she needs to recognize slaves as potential revolutionary subjects. On the other she also needs to recognize the ways in which the fit into recognizable societal norms. This is an extension of what she did in Uncle Tom's Cabin in depicting slavery as bound up in the fabric of white domestic space. In Dred she demolishes the plantation house and displaces the population to the swamp to show the possibilities of a free community of blacks interacting if not fully assimilating with whites. This makes the swamp an even more interesting metaphor of interstiality. Not only in terms of the state of slavery in the 1850s being bound up in the history of the transatlantic slave trade, but also in terms of the changing face of abolition in the years leading up to the Civil War.
I'm returning to Dred because I need start laying down the groundwork for the real writing (as opposed to the "fake" writing I'm doing here) and while I've been thinking of the shape of the chapter I really need to start thinking of how the article is going to be. Dred still seems like a good place to start and going back over some of these idea I've only glossed over before.
Earlier I pointed to the swamp as Dred's swamp community as "a brief failed attempt at revolution." Reading the Allewaert essay I'm wondering if part of Stowe's dilemna lies in the way she attempts to "domesticate" the swamp. Granted, she is working from knowledge of the way these maroon communities operated but she also represents the ultimate demise of Dred's little utopia as white destruction on a fledgling black republic. In this reading Dred seems less a revolutionary and more of a colonist of a terrain viewed as un-colonizable by white settlers (343). This begs the question: does Dred's failure in part lie in the semi-permanence of the community? Stowe depicts of the population of the Great Dismal Swamp as seeming to have fewer revolutionaries than refugees, Tiff, Henry's wife, the wounded Clayton. In depicting the swamp she seems unable to imagine it as something other than an outdoor domestic space.
This reading also really emblematizes Stowe's transition from being pro-emigration to pro-assimilation. On the one hand she needs to recognize slaves as potential revolutionary subjects. On the other she also needs to recognize the ways in which the fit into recognizable societal norms. This is an extension of what she did in Uncle Tom's Cabin in depicting slavery as bound up in the fabric of white domestic space. In Dred she demolishes the plantation house and displaces the population to the swamp to show the possibilities of a free community of blacks interacting if not fully assimilating with whites. This makes the swamp an even more interesting metaphor of interstiality. Not only in terms of the state of slavery in the 1850s being bound up in the history of the transatlantic slave trade, but also in terms of the changing face of abolition in the years leading up to the Civil War.
I'm returning to Dred because I need start laying down the groundwork for the real writing (as opposed to the "fake" writing I'm doing here) and while I've been thinking of the shape of the chapter I really need to start thinking of how the article is going to be. Dred still seems like a good place to start and going back over some of these idea I've only glossed over before.
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