Friday, March 1, 2024

Room 113 in the English Building

The second Symposia in the “Interlocutions in American Literary History” series, hosted by the Trowbridge Initiative, will take place on March 1. Featured interlocutors will present in Room 113 of the English Building. Information about the first symposium is available here.

Admission is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

1 March Schedule

Gordon Hutner: Welcome

Robert Dale Parker: Introduction

Kathryn Walkiewicz (UC San Diego), at 10AM: “Territoriality Beyond the State”

Reading Territory: Indigenous and Black Freedom, Removal, and the Nineteenth-Century State,argues that states’ rights logics are the essential glue that holds the U.S. colonial project together because states affirm white male possession of rights and land. Reading Territory turns to states’ rights and statehood crisis for so-called Georgia, Florida, Kansas, Cuba, and Oklahoma to demonstrate the influential role of print and visual culture, especially that of newspapers and printed land surveys, in asserting territoriality, community, and dissent. Assessing these texts and archives, Reading Territory theorizes the logics of federalism and states’ rights in the production of US empire, revealing how they were used to imagine states into existence while clashing with relational forms of territoriality asserted by Indigenous and Black people. In witnessing this tension, we more fully understand the role of state-centered discourse as an expression of settler colonialism. We also come to see the possibilities for a territorial ethic that insists on thinking beyond the boundaries of the state.

James H Cox (University of Texas at Austin), at 11AM: “Lynn Riggs’s Comedies”

The popular narrative remembers Cherokee dramatist Lynn Riggs for writing Green Grow the Lilacs, the source play of the spectacularly successful musical Oklahoma! A play rarely produced, The Cherokee Night, claims most of the attention of scholars. The forthcoming publication of Lynn Riggs: The Indigenous Plays, which includes The Cherokee Night along with The Cream in the Well and The Year of Pilar, will bring three of Riggs’s Indigenous-focused plays to contemporary readers. Riggs, however, was known in his day primarily as the author of comedies. One would not know as much from the scholarly record, but the comic Riggs was in demand with audiences on college campuses and in Little Theatres, repertory houses, and summer stock. He hit his professional peak with the comedy Russet Mantle, which triumphed on Broadway in 1936. This presentation considers the impact of centering Riggs’s comedies on our understanding of his place in Native American literary history.

Lunch Break

Ana Schwartz (University of Texas at Austin), at 2PM: “An Authentic Experience of Art”

Are we historians or artists? The question is a bit perverse, and just past the horizon of my first project. The book, Unmoored: The Search for Sincerity in Early America, was a polemic against a version of historiography that believes, usually unthinkingly, that what settlers said about themselves was self-evidently exhaustive of their motives. Materialist history, I wanted to insist, should have the last word. Like my predecessors and like my object, I was obsessed with claiming the truth. The question I now ask as I move on to new projects was whether that really was a desirable conclusion; whether such an insistence was, ultimately, all that different from the urgent longing for truth felt by a people who respected art and its powers so much they hated it. My goal in this short paper is thus to reflect with fellow literary historians on the affordances of aesthetic representational strategies like critical fabulation and on the psychic consequences of that longing for truth, including a loneliness so profound that art appears to be the best hope for authentic collective experience.

Abram Van Engen (Washington University in St. Louis), at 3PM: “Resisting Puritans”

This paper investigates the Puritans’ own theories and practices of resistance within and against a broader, guiding paradigm of oppression and resistance in early American literary studies. It begins by exploring views of New England Puritans as they have shifted over time, explaining the state of “post-exceptional” puritan studies. It then lays out the paradigm of oppression and resistance that guides current pedagogical and scholarly approaches to the puritans—a paradigm that depends on a certain form of historicist inclination within literary studies. Finally, the paper ends by examining how the puritans viewed and justified their own deeds in relation to that paradigm as they understood it in their own day. What consequences (including white settler colonialism, but also longstanding theories of political resistance) flow from their acts, justifications, and self-perceptions as resisters and reformers?

Speaker Bios

Kathryn Walkiewicz (walk-uh-wits) is an enrolled citizen of Cherokee Nation/ᏣᎳᎩᎯ ᎠᏰᎵ, Associate Professor of Literature at UC San Diego, and Associate Director of the Indigenous Futures Institute (IFI). They are the author of Reading Territory: Indigenous and Black Freedom, Removal, and the Nineteenth-Century State (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) and co-edited the anthology The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing after Removal with Geary Hobson and Janet McAdams (University of Oklahoma Press, 2010).

James H. Cox holds the Jane and Roland Blumberg Centennial Professorship in English at the University of Texas at Austin and serves as the Associate Dean for Student Services in the Graduate School. He has published three single-authored books on Native American literature from 1920-present, and he co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature (2014) with Daniel Heath Justice of the University of British Columbia. Lynn Riggs: The Indigenous Plays, co-edited with Alexander Pettit (University of North Texas), is forthcoming from Broadview Press in 2024.

Ana Schwartz is an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Her first book, Unmoored: The Search for Sincerity in Colonial America (OIEAHC/UNC) was published in 2003. Her next project is a social history of the soul. 

Abram Van Engen is the Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities and chair of the English Department at Washington University in St. Louis. His first book, Sympathetic Puritans (2015), isan intellectual history of sympathy in Calvinist theology. His second book, City on a Hill (2020), narrates how Pilgrim and Puritan origin stories affected U.S. nationalism over three centuries. He has also co-edited two volumes and written numerous articles on religion and literature. His work has earned an NEH Fellowship, a Public Scholar Award, the Pelikan Prize, the Peter Gomes Memorial Book Award, and other recognitions. In 2020, he started a side project co-hosting a podcast called Poetry For All, introducing poetry to a general audience one great poem at a time.