by Elisa Pesce

‘I like to think I know what death is. I like to think that it’s something I could look at straight.’ (Ward 2017: 6)

Whose words can those be? An elderly person’s? One who may be unwell and, feeling death drawing closer, mentally prepares to meet it? Actually, these are the opening lines of Jesmyn Ward’s novel Sing, Unburied, Sing, and the narrator is a thirteen-year-old African American boy living in Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. You may be wondering when this story is set, and I am afraid in light of this information the above quotation becomes even more unsettling: Jojo and his family live in present-day United States. His mother, Leonie, is a neglectful drug addict; his Caucasian dad is in prison; and his grandma Philomène is dying from cancer. To find love and support, Jojo can only turn to his grandpa, River, who is as solid as a rock, and to his toddler sister, Kayla, towards whom he feels responsible and protective.

Much can be said about Jesmyn Ward’s third novel, but in this blog post I would like to focus on the ways in which the novel empowers its African American characters through an atemporal oceanic space shared by the living and the dead (Choi X: 435).

The plot is set into motion by the news that Michael, Jojo and Kayla’s father, is being released from prison. Leonie, therefore, decides to take the children on a two-day trip to Parchman State Penitentiary, hoping that this would help her recreate a sense of family. The journey is a nightmare, but at the same time gives everyone the chance to come to terms with the legacy of trauma which characterizes the African American community. Ward masterfully does this by creating two atemporal spaces ‘where history is obliterated’ and Black people can construct a new sense of home. The first one is Parchman, ‘the condensed prototype of the black experience’ (Choi 2018: 446): like ‘a snake that sheds its skin’ (Ward 2017: 136), this place conflates incarceration with slavery in the modern figure of the leased convict. As a consequence, the protagonists’ trip reflects the Diaspora, as demonstrated by Kayla’s repeated episodes of vomiting. While echoing the seasickness felt by Africans during the Middle Passage, this ‘resistance to digestion’ is also a symbol of her community’s rejection of racial oppression (Choi 2018: 442). 

At Parchman, Jojo meets the ghost of Richie, a boy who lived and died there, and whose story River still hasn’t been able to tell him in full. By helping Richie find his way ‘home,’ Jojo opens a first doorway to African Americans’ past, which on the Mississippi Gulf Coast bears strong connections to its first inhabitants, the Choctaw people (Flores-Silva and Cartwright 2018: 142). This is evident from River’s Indian traits but, above all, from the figure of the scaly snake, which appears to Richie’s spirit to lead him up ‘Up and Away … [a]nd around’ (Ward 2017: 108) to the world of the deceased. A syncretic analogue of the Indian plumed serpent Quetzalcoatl and of the African deity Damballah, the primordial creator of all life, the Mississippian winged serpent is a sort of guide for the spirits of the dead, thus serving as a bridge or messenger across worlds (Flores-Silva and Cartwright 2018: 148). But Richie falls back down on earth as soon as he begins to remember his tragic death. In order to move on, he needs a story, his story, and a song by which his community can properly mourn him.

To end both his personal journey across African American history and Richie’s lingering among the living, Jojo needs to reach for a second atemporal space, the one created by his grandmother Philomène and symbolized by a primordial ocean. Mam was a healer and she is repeatedly referred to as the ‘saltwater woman’ (Ward 2017, 193) to underline her connection with the supernatural. In teaching Jojo to embrace his African ancestry and to be open up to the connections with the spirits of the dead, she offers him an alternative model of masculinity compared to the one that White history and society impose on him (Choi 2018: 446).

A second doorway on the beyond, through which the impetuous river of time can flow back, is opened by Leonie, who summons Maman Brigitte, the Voodoo lwa of death, to put an end to her mother’s suffering. However, only Mam moves on to the spirits’ world. To finally rest in peace, Richie needs another, more powerful song. While both children can see and communicate with spirits, Kayla is the only one who masters their ancestral, indecipherable language – and this because she is the future, in that she takes after and brings together all the members of her family: ‘Her eyes Michael’s, her nose Leonie’s, the set of her shoulders Pop’s, and the way she looks upward, … all Mam. But something about the way she stands, the way she takes all the pieces of everybody and holds them together, is all her. Kayla’ (Ward 2017: 225).

In the closing lines of the novel, the three-year-old sings ‘a song of mismatched, half-garbled words.’ In Jojo’s arms, she ‘hums over my shoulder, says “Shhh” like I am the baby and she is the big brother, says “Shhh” like she remembers the sound of the water in Leonie’s womb, the sound of all water, and now she sings it.’ (Ward 2017: 226). The voices of all the African Americans who lost their lives in American history is restored and their spirits can finally go home.

Sing, Unburied, Sing, is a punch in the gut, a poetic narrative about fear, pain, anger, and collective trauma. But it’s also a sweet song, an undecipherable hum that brings ‘something like relief, something like remembrance, something like ease’ (Ward 2017: 226) to the millions who have been silenced and marginalized by U.S. society. It’s a song for the spirit – and a song for the dead.

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Biographical Note

Elisa Pesce is a PhD student in American Literature at the University of Glasgow, and is co-leading on the Andrew Hook Centre of American Studies blog this coming session. Elisa loves books, wine, music, and – above all – a combination of the three.

Bibliography

Choi, Sodam. 2018. “The Haunted Black South and the Alternative Oceanic Space: Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing.” The Journal of English Language and Literature 64: 433-51. DOI: 10.15794/jell.2018.64.3.008.

Flores-Silva, Dolores, and Keith Cartwright. 2018. “The Scaly Bird Sings ‘Remember Me’: Gulf Fiestas of the Dead and Tribalography in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing.” Xavier Review 38, no. 2: 140-53. https://issuu.com/xavierreviewpress/docs/xr382-final02-text.

Hartneel, Anna. 2016. “When Cars Become Churches: Jesmyn Ward’s Disenchanted America. An Interview.” Journal of American Studies 50 (1). Cambridge University Press: 2015-218. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875815001966.

Ward, Jesmyn. 2017. Sing, Unburied, Sing (Simon & Schuster).

Cover Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

by Tilly Dunnachie

I visited St Andrews a few weeks ago and the weather was miserable. Walking down a relatively quiet street and blinking furiously as rain dripped from the hood of my waterproof, I could make out a sandwich board in the distance that read: “Open! A literary haven for bibliophiles”. Of course, I went in.

The book shop’s warm, inviting air provided the perfect escape from the torrential rain that pattered against its windows. I wandered around aimlessly – I didn’t know what I was looking for, or where to look. Colourful titles lined the walls from skirting board to ceiling. As I was meandering down a narrow-ish passageway to the back of the shop, I encountered a welcome respite from the sensory overload: some 5 shelves with books wrapped neatly in newspaper below a sign that read ‘Mystery Books’. I picked up the anonymous title placed below a placard that read, ‘Set in the mid-1990s, a young Turkish-American woman attending Harvard finds herself overwhelmed with the challenge and possibilities of adulthood. Our heroine shows that forging one’s sense of self can be a messy journey’. I bought it. If you are reading this Topping and Co. Bookseller, your 2-line synopsis got me – bravo!

Beneath the newspaper wrapping was Elif Batuman’s 2017 Pulitzer Prize nominated novel, The Idiot.

The novel begins with Batuman’s teenage protagonist – Selin Karadağ – moving to Harvard, where she meets her roommates and enrols in an array of classes in art, film, literature, and languages. One of Selin’s classes is Russian 101 through which she encounters the intelligent – and aloof – mathematician, Ivan. Ivan and Selin begin an email correspondence which sees both parties send cryptic, pseudointellectual messages to the other. Yet when Ivan and Selin move from virtual relations and begin to arrange in-person meetings, their relationship becomes complicated. Once the anonymity of a computer screen and the time afforded by email to meticulously prepare poetic paragraphs has been exchanged for immediate face-to-face interaction, Selin begins to falter. She battles an inability to verbalise her inner emotions, despite her profound grasp of the English language, and her proficiency in Hungarian, Russian, and Turkish:

‘I thought for the thousandth time of calling Ivan, and for the thousandth time was unable to think my way around the problems of how to get to the phone and of what to say.’ (Batuman [2017] 2018: 349)

Selin’s verbal impotence stems from her separation from her constructed writerly persona and her true self. As she sits with Ivan in the basement café of the University campus, Selin notes ‘Ivan was facing the street, and I was facing a window full of mirrors.’ (Ibid., 153). Not merely a description of the pair’s physical surroundings, we gain here a brief glimpse of Selin’s inner psyche, one fraught with hypercritical introspection; her intense self-awareness rendering speech, and the vulnerability in exposing oneself through language, an increasingly terrifying prospect.

Whilst Selin and Ivan’s relationship is perhaps the only constant throughout the narrative, Selin’s crushing introspection, her feelings of social anxiety, and disconnectedness transcend beyond the boundaries of their relations. Selin’s transition to young adulthood is met with worry surrounding social expectations, and the subsequent fear of failure. At many points, Selin appears to be going through the motions of everyday life:

 ‘I didn’t really smoke, I had done it maybe ten times before […] but the blue cardboard boxes were so beautiful, with the picture of the ghostly woman leaning into a cloud, and something about being alone made me want to mark the time in some way.’ (Ibid., 254).

The above quotation is merely one example of Selin participating in activities which are seemingly at odds with her personhood. Selin doesn’t smoke, she doesn’t drink, she doesn’t sporadically decide to move to a new country, but she does all these things. Crucially, Selin doesn’t know who she is … yet. She makes her decisions based upon the expectations and behaviour of those who surround her, and this leads her to feel dissociated. Strikingly like Plath’s protagonist Esther in The Bell Jar, Selin begins to feel unwell:

‘I got physically sick. My stomach hurt, I felt nauseated all the time and especially when I tried to read, my legs and shoulders ached, I lost the strength to go anywhere or do anything, or smile, or hold my mouth in a normal position when people talked to me.’ (Ibid., 420).

In the same page Selin realises,

‘I really didn’t know how to do anything real. I didn’t know how to move to a new city, or have sex, or have a real job, or make someone fall in love with me, or do any kind of study that wasn’t just a self-improvement project.’ (Ibid.)

Selin’s identity is so inextricably bound to scholarly endeavours that she applies the same logic to everyday life. Does anyone know how to do any of these things? What is it to know how to move to a new city, or the correct way to make someone fall in love with you? Who decides who experiences what correctly? As Selin states, ‘It occurred to me that it might take more than a year—maybe as many as seven years—to learn to feel nineteen.’ (Ibid., 408), but do we learn to feel nineteen? How can we possibly learn to feel nineteen when our sense of selfhood is continually changing, pushing forward, stepping back? And perhaps more obviously, how do we feel nineteen? I certainly didn’t feel nineteen, or maybe I did and I just didn’t realise it at the time.

These are the questions I was left pondering after I read Batuman’s The Idiot. Batuman’s novel probingly questions ‘coming-of-age’ and the anxieties that term induces through her teenage heroine, Selin. Selin contemplates the liberation to be found in language, and the crashing numbness we feel when language fails to articulate our inner thoughts and feelings. Selin contemplates the fear of growing up, the fear of journeying through time with little to show for the ride, the fear of not growing up ‘right’ and desperately wishing there were an ‘Adulthood 101’ class to enrol in. Although The Idiot is semi-autobiographical, I feel that if we put too much emphasis on the parallels between the work and the author, we are in danger of missing the universal relatability of Selin’s tale.

We are all clueless, we are all Selin.

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Biographical Note

Tilly Dunnachie is currently studying the MLitt Modern American Literature at the University of Glasgow and is co-leading on the Andrew Hook Centre of American Studies blog this coming session. Tilly enjoys reading, painting and going long walks with her canine companion, McCool.

Bibliography

Alter, Elina. 2017. ‘The Fiction of Everyday Life’, Publishers Weekly, 264: 52-3.

Batuman, Elif. [2017] 2018. The Idiot (London: Vintage)

by Shelby Judge

My name is Shelby Judge, I like baking and blogging, and I am a soon-to-be third year PhD researcher in English Literature at the University of Glasgow, writing my thesis on contemporary feminist adaptations of Greek myths. I was absolutely thrilled to accept the Andrew Hook Centre for American Studies’ offer to write their inaugural research profile blog post!

This post is going to be about one such adaptation, which really showcases the potential for Americanist implications when retelling Ancient Greek myths. Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011) is a novel about impoverished Black people in Mississippi in the run-up to, and immediate aftermath of, Hurricane Katrina. It is also a novel about motherhood, abusive alcoholism, and dog fighting. And a novel about Medea. Salvage the Bones eschews summaries in many ways, but if you think it overambitious that a novel of just over 200 pages could possibly tackle all of these enormously important subjects, you are wrong.

Ward’s prose is so poetic in emphasising the inevitable tragedy that you know is looming, if you are at all familiar with the tragedies of Medea and/or Hurricane Katrina. Moreover, her descriptions of the setting are so vivid that you can basically feel the red dust on your skin, see the garbage-strewn ‘Pit’ where the characters live, and smell the verdant woodlands.

For my research, Ward’s novel is particularly interesting in terms of adaptation methodology. Rather than a straightforward retelling set in Antiquity (such as in Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles) or a novel set in the modern day, where the mythic characters and storylines are mirrored (such as in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire), Salvage the Bones deals with its mythic sources in a different way. Ward’s protagonist, 15-year-old Esch, has been reading Edith Hamilton’s Mythology over the summer: ‘The chapter I finished reading day before yesterday is called “Eight Brief Tales of Lovers,” and it leads into the story of Jason and the Argonauts. I wondered if Medea felt this way before she walked out to meet Jason for the first time, like a hard wind come through her and set her to shaking,’ (Ward 2011: 10) Esch is learning about Greek myths as a school project and actively enunciates the parallels between her experience and Medea’s. This is an innovative way to draw parallels between the ancient myth and modern experiences insofar as my research, as the protagonist is performing the intellectual labour of comparing her lived experiences to those of the infamous witch princess.

The fact that Esch is reading Edith Hamilton’s version of the Greek myths is particularly relevant. Hamilton was an American educator and writer, whose most notable works popularized classical literature; her ‘translations of Aeschylus and Euripides in Three Greek Plays (1937) were among the first to replace florid Victorian diction with a more austere and accurate reflection of the Greek originals.’(EB 2020: np.) Esch is not reading Euripides’ play in Ancient Greek or in translation — no, she is reading an American woman’s mythic narrative, while constructing her own American mythic narrative. Moreover, Hamilton’s disruptive choice to ‘replace florid Victorian diction’ is amenable to Ward’s diction, which ‘rolls between teenspeak (“I’ma get Randall”; “My dog ain’t lose”) and the larger, incantatory rhythms of myth’ (Laing 2011: np.).

Who is Medea?

‘Who is Medea?’, in this context, is a question with many answers. In Hamilton’s version – the one read by Esch – Medea uses her magic to help Jason with his labours to gain the Golden Fleece, and the subsequent escape. She helps him secure his place in Corinth, and bears his children. ‘And then Jason showed the meanness that was in him, brilliant hero though he had seemed to be’ by engaging to marry another woman; ‘he thought of ambition only, never of love or gratitude’ (Hamilton 1942: 177). Hamilton portrays Medea as ‘sat brooding over what she should do and thinking of her wrongs and wretchedness’ (Ibid., 177), before coming to her infamous decision. She kills Jason’s new bride, and then turns her magic onto her children: ‘To die by other hands more merciless than mine. / No; I who gave them life will give them death’ (Euripides, in Hamilton 1942:180). In Euripides’ play Medea, she is condemned by the chorus as ‘You hard and wretched woman, / just like stone or iron — / to kill your children / the ones you bore yourself’; the drama culminates when Medea flies away from Jason with her children’s bodies, saying ‘you’ll never / have me in your grasp, not in this chariot, / a gift to me from my grandfather, Helios’ (Euripides, trans. Johnston, ll.1278-81; 1320-2).

There are several other iterations of Medea’s story in ancient source texts, many of which do not include the double infanticide; at present, however, I am more interested in the multitudinous Medeas in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones. One of them is the protagonist Esch, who identifies with Medea as she contends with the events of the novel. As Stevens writes in the International Journal of the Classical Tradition:

[Esch] feels a strong connection to Medea which deepens as the novel goes on and she rereads Hamilton, comparing aspects of her own experience to certain events in the “ancient tale.” In particular Esch’s identification with Medea is a way of understanding her own experience as a young woman coming of age, entering motherhood and confronting the responsibilities it entails, and more generally responding to forces–in her body, in her community, and in nature–that are beyond her control but nonetheless let her show an impressive power. (Stevens 2016: np.)

Specifically, Esch compares her unrequited love for Manny with Medea’s feelings for Jason: ‘I imagine that this is the way Medea felt about Jason when she fell in love,’ (Ward 2011: 51). She further becomes Medea when Manny realises that she is pregnant with his child and rejects her: ‘Manny saw me, and […] he turned away from me, from what I carry,’ (Ibid., 127). She finds empowerment in the comparison – ‘I imagine myself tall as Medea,’ (Ibid., 147) – and escapes from her dire situation by reading Hamilton’s Mythology.

Because of her mother’s death, Ward has asserted that Esch ‘doesn’t have [ordinary] models [for motherhood] in her life, she begins looking to Greek mythology […] and to [the dog] China and to the natural world for her cues’ (Eveld 2012, in Stevens 2016). Perhaps a more convincing Medea in Salvage the Bones, though, is China. China is a pit-bull, a champion fighting dog in illegal rings, and a more savage model of Medean motherhood. The other dog-fighters make the same mistake as Jason and his contemporaries, by assuming that motherhood has calmed the bitch, that it ‘Take a lot out of an animal to nurse and nurture like that. Price of being female.’ (Ibid., 84), but she ‘make[s] them know’ (as Skeetah, Esch’s brother, China’s owner, her – more loyal – Jason, tells her) by killing her puppy and beating the puppies’ father in a visceral fight for them.

There is one more Medea in Salvage the Bones: Hurricane Katrina.

Katrina ‘treat[s] the land and its inhabitants as a mother might her children. There is violence indeed, including physical and psychological damage,’ (Stevens 2016: np). When ‘the sound of the wind and the rain relentlessly [bear] down on the house’ comes when ‘Jason has remarried, and Medea is ailing’ (Ward 2011: 193). As Ward has said, ‘Medea is in Hurricane Katrina because her power to unmake worlds, to manipulate the elements, closely aligns with the storm.’ (Hoover 2011: np.). Esch is looking for a mother, a mother to teach her how to be a mother, and when China’s motherhood is too monstrous, she turns to the storm. When she is nearly carried away by the hurricane, she asks ‘Who will deliver me? And the hurricane replays sssssssshhhhhhhh’ (Ward 2011: 202). After the storm, Esch resolves to tell her child that ‘Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.’ (Ibid., 218)

‘Make them know’

Ultimately, then, Medea’s myth is used to navigate the experience of impoverished Black people in the Southern states of America, particularly in the time surrounding Hurricane Katrina. When asked why she called the novel Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward said:

The word salvage is phonetically close to savage. At home, among the young, there is honor in that term. It says that come hell or high water, Katrina or oil spill, hunger or heat, you are strong, you are fierce, and you possess hope. When you stand on a beach after a hurricane […] and all you have are your hands, your feet, your head, and your resolve to fight, you do the only thing you can: you survive. You are a savage. (Hoover 2011: np.)

The Ancient Greek myth is used to speak to a quintessentially Southern narrative. Though, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Ancient Greece itself becomes quintessentially Southern American. Even before the storm, in the dog-fighting ring, ‘The boys have been drawn by gossip to the fight […] like the Argonauts were to Jason at the start of his adventure’ — living as impoverished Black people in Mississippi becomes a heroic feat, ‘their own dangerous Aegean Sea’ (Ward 2011: 138-9). More specifically, the myth of Medea becomes the cornerstone of a narrative about one of the most traumatic natural events to happen on the Gulf coast of the US in recent history.

Biographical Note

Shelby Judge is an English Literature PhD student at the University of Glasgow. Shelby’s thesis topic is ‘Exploring contemporary women writers’ adaptation of myth for feminist purposes’. In this thesis, Shelby is researching what impact contemporary adaptations of Greek myths can have upon the feminist movement. Shelby’s overarching research interests are in feminist and queer theory, and contemporary British and American women’s fiction. For more information on Shelby’s research, you can visit her researcher profile.

Additionally, Shelby runs a PhD-related blog and can be found on twitter @Judgeyxo.

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Welcome back to the Andrew Hook Centre of American Studies blog – we hope this post finds you well following a particularly turbulent year. Previously this blog space was run expertly by PhD student Chiara Howe, and as the new academic year begins we would like to take some time to introduce the new team who will be leading on the blog this coming session.

Elisa Pesce currently lives in Turin, Italy. After working several years, first in the wine business and then as a language service provider, she decided to resume her studies with a 1-year University Masters in American Studies and an M.A. degree in Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Turin. Elisa’s dissertation focused on the spiritual dimension as an essential space for resistance and re-appropriation for ethnic minorities in contemporary United States. At the University of Glasgow, she will have the pleasure to work on a PGR project dealing with the thorny question of maximalist female writers and the way in which looking at gender and race could provide further insight into what is normally considered a predominantly White-male-only subgenre.

Tilly Dunnachie lives in Glasgow and recently graduated with an M.A. (Hons) degree in English Literature from the University of Glasgow and is looking forward to beginning the MLitt American Modern Literature this September. Tilly’s previous research interests have centered around the intersection of literature and medicine, having recently completed her dissertation on representations of degeneration theory in fiction, focusing primarily on the ways in which said theory was used as a policing mechanism in Victorian society.

There will be a multitude of events hosted (virtually!) through the Andrew Hook Centre this coming session:

Tuesday 29 September 4.15: Hook Centre Welcome/Social Gathering. Meet fellow Americanists (staff and students) in an informal friendly setting – Please come and say hello!

Tuesday 13 October 4.15: American Studies Book Club Meeting

Tuesday 20 October 4.15: Dr Megan Hunt (Edinburgh) speaking on Civil Rights/Religion in Selma. Megan is one of the founders of the new Precarity Project – found on Twitter @PrecarityProj.

And many more to be revealed in the near future!

Additionally, the Transatlantic Literary Women group holds fascinating discussions, is open to all, and can be found on Twitter @atlantlitwomen. TLW’s next event is #TeawithTLW on Wednesday 7 October 5pm when Canadian scholar and editor of The Edith Wharton Review, Paul Ohler, will be talking about Edith Wharton’s short story career.

As always, all are welcome to join our community of scholars interested in the field of Americanist research. For updates on events and happenings in American Studies at the University of Glasgow, follow our Twitter page @UofGAmStudies.

We wish to amplify your voices through this blog space and are continually looking for contributions. If you would like to write a guest post about a book you have read, Americanist themes in your research, a conference you have attended, a trip you have gone on – we want to hear all about it!

Please get in contact by emailing AmStudiesBlog@gmail.com to pitch your idea to us and contribute to the blog this academic session.

We are both excited to co-lead on the Hook Centre’s American Studies blog this year and look forward to engaging with you all soon!

Elisa and Tilly

As part of the 2019/20 BAAS-funded seminar series, we were joined in Glasgow a few weeks ago by Dr Nicole King, Lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. Dr King’s first book, C.L.R James and Creolization: Circles of Influence, was published in 2001 and she has also published articles and book chapters on Attica Locke, Zadie Smith, Andrea Lee, Toni Morrison, Earl Lovelace and Ida B. Wells. She recently served as the historical consultant on the acclaimed West End production of Death of a Salesman and is currently writing a book on childhood in African American fiction for Edinburgh University Press.

Dr King began her talk, titled ‘Ain’t nobody gonna beat me at nuthin’: Reading Toni Cade Bambara and 20^th-century Black Literary Childhood, with a question: ‘Has anybody heard of the Birmingham Children’s Crusade of 1963?’ Just one person in the audience had.

At the beginning of 1963, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and other civil rights organisations decided to target Birmingham for desegregation, in part because the city symbolised extreme resistance to integration. In the span of very little time, there were 60 bombings in the city. All went unsolved and no arrests were made. The police were also very open about how many KKK members there were on the force. Soon, the city had earned the nickname of ‘Bombingham’ and one neighbourhood in particular came to be known as ‘Dynamite Hill’. We know the name of Birmingham’s mayor, Bull Connor, and King noted that we can also probably picture the fire department using water cannons to disperse protesters and ‘police using batons to beat children, dogs to terrorise marchers.’ Apart from one audience member, what we certainly didn’t know was that this campaign on Birmingham included thousands of children activists. 

So in April 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. and others decided to target Birmingham for mass demonstrations. At this point he had only had one major victory, the bus boycotts with Rosa Parks. This was eight years prior, however, and so he enlisted the help of ‘one of the youngest and very charismatic characters of the SCLC, James Bevel, who starts working on the training of thousands of children in Birmingham for non-violent protest.’ This becomes the Children’s Crusade, in the first week of May 1963. 

On day one, around 500 children – ranging from high school age to under ten years old – started marching, illegally of course because Bull Connor has outlawed mass demonstrations. But the aim was to get arrested, and around 500 children were. On day two, about 2000 more children were arrested and, on day three, over 4000. They filled the jails and kept coming, then being held in outdoor areas having been transported using school buses. Wide press coverage showed water cannons and police dogs being used against protesters, police officers hitting children. The footage was seen across the country and around the world.

Kennedy got involved in the middle of the first week and by day ten a settlement was reached with the city. Birmingham would desegregate businesses and free all those imprisoned, as well as remove Bull Connor from office: a huge victory. On 11^th June, Kennedy addressed the nation in a speech on desegregation. On 28^th August, there was the March on Washington, a collective and extremely successful action. Little over two weeks later on 15^th September, the very church at the centre of James Bevel’s organisation with Birmingham’s children was bombed by clan members. Four black girls were killed: Addie May Collins, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson, all 14, and Carol Denise McNair who was 11. 

King ended the 1963 timeline here, with this act of racist violence and its child victims. She said that she was ‘familiar with the 1963 narrative that places Martin Luther King at its centre’, and ‘very aware of the SCLC and of that soaring rhetoric of the “I have a dream” speech’. She also noted the way in which ‘more radical voices and virtually all women’s voices were silenced at that March on Washington.’ ‘What I’m not familiar with,’ King continued, ‘what I had not been familiar with at all until I started doing my research, was the narrative that locates agency with children’. She quoted one of the children who participated in the crusade: ‘It’s funny to think about it, the police, the fire department and the KKK were beaten by us kids.’

Building on what sociologist David Oswell calls ‘the agency of children’, where children are rarely seen as actors in social change, King’s project involves looking for children in modern African American fiction. She asks two questions: ‘What is made possible when children and adolescent characters push against, question and even reject ideas of black subjectivity? How does modern African American fiction use children and childhood to reimagine racial liberation and the production of alternative ways of organising our society?’

King’s introductory chapter to the forthcoming book considers the civil rights era in particular. ‘When we ask questions about children’s agency’, she noted, ‘we are by implication acknowledging that it is vitally important to do so.’ Her research thinks through ‘children and young people’s capacities to make a difference, rather than just being constituted as difference’, allowing us in turn to consider the ‘ways in which children and young people have been and are actively involved in emergent, innovative and substantive forms of solidarity and coexistence.’ These capacities were recognised by W.E.B. Du Bois and Jesse Fawcett in their editorial leadership of Crisis, the NAACP’s magazine and literary organ, but King noted that African American literary criticism has been ‘less attentive to that agency despite […] the prevalence of children at the centre of modern African American narratives.’ 

And so Dr King’s project looks at childhood ‘as a key theatre for asking questions about African American existence’ and children as symbolic of what Chandra Mohanty has called ‘pedagogies of dissent’. King is looking at what becomes apparent when we read black children and how they voice dissent in her ‘somewhat narratological’ study. She uses the idea of an active palimpsest to theorise the how and why ‘of the child figure who is actively questioning, expressing ambivalence in some cases, or even refusing an identity that is already inscribed on their bodies.’

This talk focused on Gorilla, My Love, a collection of short stories by Toni Cade Bambara. Bambara was born in 1939 towards the end of the Harlem Renaissance. She was a prolific writer – of short stories and several novels – but also an activist who became a university professor and successful filmmaker. She was editor of The Black Woman: An Anthology, the first feminist collection focusing on African American women and a seminal text, featuring the likes of Audra Lorde, Alice Walker, and Paule Marshall. (Dr King added parenthetically that the text is available from more progressive, tax-paying retailers if you’d like to buy it.) 

Gorilla, My Love was Bambara’s first collection of short stories, published in 1972. Children, and particularly young black girls, are at the centre both as subjects and, often, narrators. King described Bambara’s girls as ‘feisty, self-assured, vulnerable, nuanced but never, ever tragic.’ She contrasts these with the protagonist in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), Pecola Breedlove, whose trauma King identifies as ‘perhaps the most famous 20^th century representation of African American girlhood.’ Claudia McTeer, however, Morrison’s narrator, is closer to Bambara’s protagonists. Gorilla, My Love begins ‘in this broader context of how children in modern African American literature are figured as beacons of political change, as Cassandras who warn of the recalcitrance of racist US political systems’ and ‘signifiers of postmodern identities, different ways of enacting girlhood.’ 

The Lesson is the tenth of the 15 stories in Gorilla, My Love. Though other stories had been published individually earlier, the collection itself and The Lesson specifically were published in 1972 by Random House, when Toni Morrison was editor. In fact, everything Bambara published with Random House was edited by Toni Morrison, who also edited a collection of Bambara’s essays, interviews and previously unpublished short stories, called Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions, the introduction to which makes clear, King notes, that it was a ‘labour of love’. 

The Lesson’s pedagogical purpose is immediately apparent. Miss Moore, a neighbourhood radical, takes a motley crew of Harlem-based children on an outing to F.A.O Schwartz, which King describes as ‘the biggest, most spectacular toy store on Fifth Avenue’, in order to teach them about money. The story is narrated by Sylvia but features her best friend, Sugar, and all of the children speak at least briefly. Miss Moore teaches the lesson – which is learned collectively albeit reluctantly – by having the group observe the toys and their hefty price tags. King suggests that the story is set sometime in the late 1960s, or possibly the early 70s, and the sight of one toy in particular, a fibreglass boat on sale for $1195, is thus all the more gobsmacking. Seeing the extravagant toy and its price tag, the children begin to think critically about the world and its inequalities. 

The children see a white lady wearing a fur coat on Fifth Avenue, on a hot summer’s day, on which Sylvia remarks simply ‘White folks crazy.’ King underlines the children’s awareness of the store staff, ‘staring at their black and brown bodies as if they don’t belong there’. When Miss Moore asks what the children thought of F.A.O. Schwartz, Rosie Giraffe ‘mumbles, “White folks crazy.”’ Sugar, the narrator’s best friend, observes ‘You know, Miss Moore, I don’t think all of us here put together eat in a year what that sailboat costs.’ And so the children do learn about money, King argues, but they also learn about their ‘agency in changing how the world sees them and how they themselves move in the world.’

Bambara is known for her humour and skill in rendering black vernacular speech, and King argues that the author’s ‘broader and more subtle’ pedagogical impact on the reader is also achieved through her ‘supreme, just supreme, respect for her child characters.’ Critic Elizabeth Muther claims that these ‘stories depend on narrative triangulations involving Bambara, her adult readers (who, of course, share with Bambara an awareness of the limitations of the child narrator/protagonist’s perspective), and the child herself—who defines the terms of her own experience through the comic forensics of her own self-representations.’ ‘Bambara’, writes Muther, ‘refuses utterly the potentiality for condescension in this narrative situation.’ King underscores this absence of condescension and emphasises the idea of narrative triangulation in Muther’s readings. The adult reader is highly significant, she argues, and Bambara’s narrative triangulations enable us to examine how children in modern African American fiction are ‘figured as beacons of political change’ who ‘sound an alarm about what is or is not working in American culture.’

Sylvia’s reaction to her best friend’s engagement with Miss Moore’s lesson is to stand on her feet to make her stop talking: ‘Miss Moore is besides herself and I am disgusted with Sugar’s treachery.’ Sylvia continues: 

So I stand on her foot one more time to see if she’ll shove me. She shuts up, and Miss Moore looks at me, sorrowfully I’m thinkin. And somethin weird is goin on, I can feel it in my chest.

Not yet at Sugar’s level of understanding, Sylvia is unable to articulate this feeling, and King argues that Sugar’s treachery in engaging with Miss Moore ‘is more aptly connected to the other treacheries that had been on display that day, large and small’. But the feeling in Sylvia’s chest and the ‘nascent oppositional voices’ in Bambara’s story are very much the feelings and voices of children. The story ends with Sylvia and Sugar racing each other to a shop to spend the remainder of a five-dollar bill given to them by Miss Moore for cab fare:

We start down the block and she gets ahead which is O.K. by me cause I’m going to the West End and then over to the Drive to think this day through. She can run if she want to and even run faster. But ain’t nobody gonna beat me at nuthin.

Sylvia does not truly see Miss Moore or Sugar’s behaviour as treacherous. ‘Rather,’ King stresses, ‘she recognises their strategies and political awareness, and is determined to devise some of her own, beginning with a conviction to think this day through, and a refusal to be beat or broken down or cowed by anybody.’ This final line and its bravado are double voiced. It serves to remind the reader that Sylvia is a child, but it is also ‘a refrain from the historical moment of the story’: the civil rights movement, the Black Power movement and the feminist movement, all of which Bambara was involved in.

And this final line, King concluded, is ‘either deliberately or inadvertently echoing an anthem sung by many people active in the civil rights movement, but particularly by the children and young people in the children’s crusade, and that was the freedom song: Ain’t Gonna Let No Body Turn Me ’Round.

We thoroughly enjoyed Dr King’s talk and hope that this was the first of many visits to Glasgow! We’re also very much looking forward to her book, and you can follow her on Twitter @DrNicoleKing to keep up with her research. 

Post by Chiara Howe, PGR American Studies

As part of the 2019/20 BAAS-funded seminar series, we were excited to be joined in Glasgow last semester by not one but two Americanist speakers: Dr J. Michelle Coghlan from the University of Manchester and Dr Katie McGettigan from Royal Holloway, University of London. This post is about the second talk of the evening, given by Dr McGettigan, Senior Lecturer in American Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Dr McGettigan’s talk, ‘The Transatlantic Materials of US Authorship in The Whale, or Moby Dick’, is taken from her second monograph, tentatively titled The Transatlantic Materials of American Literature, 1830-1860. The London edition of Moby Dick (1851), the title and subtitle inverted as The Whale, or Moby Dick, is a curiously ornate object. Richard Bentley, Melville’s authorised London publisher, commissioned an extravagant binding for the book which he issued in three volumes. The material object of The Whale – with a white or cream spine, blue face, and three gold whales stamped on its binding – stands in stark contrast to the Harper Brothers’ single volume bound in standard cloth. 

Clarifying that this contrast is partly explained by ‘different print economies either side of the Atlantic’, McGettigan explained that US publishers sold a greater volume of cheaper books directly to readers, whereas the inverse was true in Britain where circulating libraries demanded the multi-volume format. But Bentley’s elaborate presentation was still unusual, even by his own binding standards which were smarter than most. Given that Melville’s last three books lost Bentley money and his print run was just 500, why such ornate presentation?

McGettigan’s answer to this curious choice is that Bentley’s material text intervened in contemporary transatlantic copyright debates about the rights of foreign authors and, by extension, how notions of authorship – as an ‘imaginative and economic activity’ – were situated in US print culture. Melville came to represent disputes over the rights of US authors in Britain and Bentley’s binding, McGettigan suggests, was an ornate claim to these rights. She argued that this also generated a ‘literary extravagance’, which she considers to be Melville’s ‘stylistic signature’. She examines this literary history as an example of the ways in which British publishers and texts – as material objects – shaped US authorship and its place in national literary culture, a transatlantic exchange often ignored in histories of US literature.

From 1830 to 1860, Bentley published over 80 titles by 57 American authors, such as James Fennimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and Charles Fenno Hoffman. In June 1849, the Court of Exchequer ruled that ‘foreign authors could not claim copyright through prior publication’, a reversal of the status quo prior to the ruling, which was not final. Thus, British publishers were now reluctant to produce authorised editions of US books. Meanwhile, cheap railway libraries were encouraged to reprint US books – which they could do legally regardless of the author’s permission – ‘to which other British publishers claimed copyright’, and so some American writers found this source of income suddenly insecure. 

In November later that year, ‘The Literary World’, a pro-copyright periodical in New York edited by Melville’s friend, Everett Duyckink, hoped US authors would be persuaded to campaign for revisions to international copyright law. Melville felt this change in law immediately, since selling English copyright to books had provided a valuable income supplement. He travelled to London to sell White Jacket, which McGettigan noted was rejected repeatedly. Journals from the period reflect that the investment was perceived as too risky, and one anonymous Times article describes Melville ‘wearily hawking this book from Piccadilly to Whitechapel’. 

Eventually, Bentley offered Melville what would have been the disappointing sum of £200. In this way, McGettigan explained, Melville became ‘emblematic of the struggles of American authors to secure copyright in Britain’ while Bentley made a name for himself as the British ‘champion of American writers’. In May 1851 the Court of Exchequer ruled that foreign authors could in fact hold copyright by prior publication, announced in ‘The Literary World’ in June. In July 1851, Melville wrote to Bentley – having accepted his offer of £150 for The Whale – to argue that Britain would have to lead the way in the copyright debate: ‘If you desire an international copyright hoist your flag on your side of the water and the signal will be answered, but look for no flag on this side till then.’

McGettigan suggests that Bentley did respond to Melville’s suggestion to hoist the flag in Britain. The extravagant binding, she argues, is ‘a statement about the text’s copyright status’. It advertised ‘that particular book’s security against reprints’, as well as Bentley’s role as ‘a champion of US authors’ rights’, willing as he was to pay handsomely both for the lavish material object and the abstract rights of the book’s author. The Knickerbocker Magazine, a New York literary monthly, suggested that American literature – and culture – would continue to lag behind London until publishers followed Bentley’s lead. The Whale stood as a physical emblem of pro-copyright lobbyist arguments that British publishers were doing the work that should really have been undertaken by their American counterparts but would not be until international copyright law was in place. Bentley’s edition, explained McGettigan, also argued for a ‘US publishing industry centred on authorship rather than reprinting.’

Meredith McGill writes in American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting 1834-1853 that these international copyright debates were situated within wider arguments about the US literary industry’s emergence. McGettigan noted that Gill demonstrates that both British and American petitions to the latter’s government constructed a vision of US literary culture as ‘centred on native authorship.’ For America to assert both literary independence and nationhood, US authors needed protection. Meanwhile, anti-copyright petitions argued that the cultivation of a radically different literary marketplace, a kind of republican based on reading and reprinting rather than authorship, would prove cultural independence. McGill argues that ‘the resetting of type becomes a powerful point of re-origination’ and the single-volume US reprint of The Whale was a sign of this developing literary culture. McGettigan argues, conversely, that Bentley’s materialisation of The Whale as an expensive and beautiful print object ‘validated a copyright system in which foreign authors had equal rights’, as well as an author-centred literary culture. So, in addition to intervening in copyright debates, Bentley’s lavish edition envisioned authorship as central to a print culture that was still finding its shape.

Turning to the book’s author, McGettigan examined Melville’s own engagement with copyright law in The Whale. In chapters 3 and 4 in the third volume, ‘Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish’ and ‘Heads and Tails’, Ishmael digresses to explain how disputes over whale ownership are resolved, observing that the American whaleman’s code is ‘One, a fast-fish belongs to the party fast to it’ and ‘Two, a loose-fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it.’ These statements, McGettigan proposes, ‘constitute a version of the English court’s position on foreigners’ copyright’: American books entering the British marketplace attached to a British publisher were fast fish, but those loose fish that came over after publication were fair game. 

In ‘Heads and Tails’, Ishmael explains that the heads of whales beached on English coasts belong to the king, the tails to the queen. He tells the story of the Lord Warden of Cinque Ports taking possession of a beached whale brought in by ‘honest mariners of Dover, or Sandwich’, robbing them of the chance to make £150 from oil and bone. McGettigan underlines that what Melville imagined here was good men taking pains to bring a whale to England and then losing a considerable sum when it is seized ‘by one who has a legal but not a moral right to it’, and the sum of £150 ‘further binds Melville to the mariners’, since this is the amount Bentley offered for The Whale. 

Dr McGettigan gave us an extremely rich and informative talk on The Whale’s participation in the transatlantic fashioning of the material and aesthetic practice of American authorship. We eagerly anticipate her second monograph and hope she’ll visit us again soon! You can find the link to Dr McGettigan’s first book, Herman Melville: Modernity and the Material Text, below:

Herman Melville: Modernity and the Material Text

Follow Dr McGettigan on Twitter @KatieMcGettigan.

Post by Chiara Howe, PGR American Studies

The Andrew Hook Centre is Scotland’s only centre for American Studies, providing a hub for postgraduate students and academics. Building upon the University of Glasgow’s distinguished record in American Studies, the Centre promotes American studies by sponsoring seminars, colloquia, conferences, films and theatrical events.

Ever since the seventeenth century Glasgow has been a gateway for economic, social and cultural exchange between Scotland and North America. From the tobacco trade to the annual Transatlantic Sessions concerts, these connections provide the foundation for American Studies at the University of Glasgow, which has long been at the forefront of the study of American society and culture in the British Isles. The University of Glasgow was one of the first British universities to take seriously the study of the literature, history and politics of the United States of America. John Nichol (Glasgow’s first Regius Professor of Literature, appointed in 1862) taught American literature at a time when no British and very few American academics believed that American literature deserved to be considered part of English literature. His book American literature: an historical sketch, 1620-1880 (1882) was the first such volume to be published on either side of the Atlantic. Since then distinguished Americanists at Glasgow have included students such as Sir Denis Brogan and academic staff such as Esmond Wright, Peter Parish, William Brock and Andrew Hook.

In 1997 the University of Glasgow recognized this heritage with the creation of the Andrew Hook Centre for American Studies. The Hook Centre has become Scotland’s only centre for American Studies, and it operates one of the leading taught master’s degree courses in the UK. The Centre sponsors the most extensive American Studies lecture and seminar series in Scotland, which is open to academics, students and the general public.

The Centre has featured presentations by the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, the Oscar-winning documentary film-maker Ken Burns, and the Grammy-nominated musician Bruce Molsky, as well as scholars from North America and Europe. Furthermore, the Centre has hosted the annual conferences of the British Association for American Studies, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, and the Scottish Association for the Study of America, as well as numerous smaller conferences and symposia.

The Hook Centre brings together academics from across the university to create a focus for research and teaching in the history, literature, media and culture of the United States. Staff associated with the Centre are based primarily in the subject areas of History; English Literature; Theatre, Film and Television Studies; Music and Politics. The Centre offer a taught MLitt degree as well as a research PhD, and hosts a vibrant research community of postgraduates and academic staff.

You can keep up to date with the Centre and our events below:

Andrew Hook Centre, University of Glasgow

2019-20 Seminar Series

The Andrew Hook Centre is directed by Dr Laura Rattray, Reader in American Literature at the University of Glasgow.

This blog is managed by Chiara Howe, the PGR Representative of the Andrew Hook Centre, so please get in touch if you’d like to write something! It could be about Americanist themes in your research, a trip you’ve been on, or a conference you’ve attended – whatever takes your fancy.