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Placing Equality in the American Literature to 1865 Survey

Brian Yothers
University of Texas at El Paso

My encounter with Equality—A Political Romance this spring consisted in my inclusion of the text in my survey class on American Literature to 1865. Most of us who teach such a class have observed that it seems as if it should be two or three classes, were it defined in strictly intellectual terms rather than by the complicated set of compromises that goes into defining any English department’s curriculum.

Equality served as a bridge among the different courses that I’m tempted to imagine the American literature to 1865 survey as being divided among through its utopian framing and its attempt to answer precisely those questions that figures from the sixteenth-century explorer and captive Cabeza de Vaca and the seventeenth-century New England Puritans to the eighteenth-century framers of the founding documents of the United States and the nineteenth-century Transcendentalists were vexed by. Although I placed our in-class discussion of the text right before our transition from the eighteenth-century early republic to the rise of American Romanticism, I found occasion to mention the pamphlet throughout the early portion of the semester. Indeed, I ended up finding so many connections to Equality in our discussions that I’m tempted to use it as a means of launching the survey class in a future semester. Between its emphasis on economic and social inequality, its emphasis on the enabling conditions of friendship, and its presentation of utopian models for reimagining societal institutions, this text sends out filaments to virtually everything we discuss in an early and antebellum American literature survey.

To cite a seemingly unlikely example, when discussing Cabez de Vaca’s representations of indigenous people in Texas, I asked students to consider how his version of Catholic mendicancy and his observations of indigenous mores combined to call into question of the economic goals of New World colonization. This points toward the utopian tradition that narratives like Cabeza de Vaca’s help to inaugurate via Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and in which Equality participates. As similar premonition of Equality’s attempts to model a just society appears in John Winthrop’s frequently taught sermon “Of Christian Charity.” The fact that Winthrop emphasizes the idea of mutual care and responsibility in the Massachusetts Bay Colony even as he insists that class distinctions are divinely ordained means that students have the opportunity to think about the ways in which economic equality is not necessarily embedded in all texts that seek collective economic action and justice. When teaching Winthrop’s sermon, I have found that a fair percentage of my students focus on Winthrop’s argument that members of the community must contribute to the common good as an indication of something like social democracy, even as an equal number focus on his justification of class hierarchy as a sign of the reverse tendency.

Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and Alexander Hamilton’s and James Madison’s contributions to The Federalist Papers offered a further opportunity to consider how they might set us up for a discussion of Equality. Not surprisingly, I found that the Federalist Papers carried some added cultural weight for some of my students in the wake of the substantial public success of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton: The Musical, and like Winthrop’s sermon, these texts provided a range of strategies for reimagining social relations while maintaining some existing hierarchies and jettisoning others for which Equality provided a useful foil.

Finally, Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason and Judith Sargent Murray’s On the Equality of the Sexes provided a perfect jumping off point for a discussion of how gender and economic issues fit together in a reading of Equality. My students had just read The Age of Reason, with its stirring affirmation that “my own mind is my own church” before Equality, and so they were ready for a text that would challenge models of morality based on divine commands rather than reason. They had just analyzed Murray’s reinterpretation of biblical stories associate with gender roles, so they were prepared for a text that attempts to reimagine the relationship between the sexes on a less hierarchical basis than inherited traditions would suggest.

My students’ reactions to Equality were mixed. As is often the case when dealing with utopian works, some students tended to focus on why the utopian community described is impractical—a not-unreasonable stance, but one that tends to limit the conversation that we can have rather than expand it. For this reason, I try to prompt students to think less about whether the utopian society would work were its prescriptions to be implemented, and more about what these prescriptions tell us about the relationship of the author to his or her present society. For example, many of the customs that seemed most unusual to students could be explained as being motivated by the paramount value that the Lithconians placed on friendship, and considering the centrality of friendship for this utopian society pointed toward both Winthrop’s emphasis on affective bonds among the New England Puritans and the importance of voluntary associations in the early republic.

One beneficial aspect of teaching Equality that emerged when we approached the middle of the nineteenth century was the degree to which the pamphlet served to illuminate the connections between Transcendentalism and Deism. I found that when students considered the opening chapter of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and Margaret Fuller’s essay “The Great Lawsuit: Man vs. Men, Woman vs. Women,” the fact that they had already discussed Equality made these texts seem more manageable. Many teachers make connections among feminist writings over time, point out the development of feminist ideas between Murray and Fuller, or the appropriation by Fuller of Mary Wollstonecraft’s ideas and personal history. The text becomes richer still, however, when Fuller is understood as participating in a longstanding tradition of re-conceptualizing social and economic relations more broadly and that she is showing that questions of gender are central, not peripheral to such a re-conceptualization.

I am tempted to wonder about how this connective quality of the pamphlet might play out in related courses. Last fall, I had taught a course in American fiction to 1900, focusing particularly on novels that featured an interracial dimension. A piece like Equality, A Political Romance could have paired very nicely with Susanna Haswell Rowson’s Reuben and Rachel, with its attempt to find an inner meaning to contact between Europe and the America’s across generations. It certainly could make a useful context for teaching nineteenth-century novels like George Lippard’s The Quaker City or New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million, with their persistent focus on economic inequality in the antebellum US, or similarly focused fiction like Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” and “Rich Man’s Crumbs and Poor Man’s Pudding,” or Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills and Margaret Howth. In particular, it could shed special light on the economic dimensions of the seduction novel, from Charlotte Temple and The Coquette through The Scarlet Letter even as it is illuminated, in particular, but the late eighteenth-century seduction novel. I can also imagine it pairing nicely with Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive, in which Tyler satirizes late eighteenth-century norms in the United States in the first book and then presents an alternative that is the subject of both critique and desire in the second.

Because I taught Equality for the first time in a survey class, much of what I have to reflect upon here is prospective: I learned a good deal from both the connections that I found myself making with this work throughout the semester and the ways in which my students responded to it in our in-class discussion and beyond. What I have found is that this text offers more possibilities for this class and others than I had realized at the start of the semester, and I am looking forward to making this neglected text the linchpin for a more focused discussion of competing utopian visions in future classes.

Against Utopia – Teaching Equality: A Political Romance

Etta Madden
Missouri State University
June 15, 2017

“Against Utopia” may not be a unique title, but it expresses concisely what I recall as my students’ responses to the anonymously written Equality: A Political Romance (1802).[1] Yet these responses were typical of many student reactions to varieties of utopias they encounter in my classes—important to anyone considering inclusion of this short and stimulating narrative in a course. In spite of these responses, I remain a believer in this literary genre and ideological concept, especially for ways in which it opens the worlds of possibility or the “social dreaming” that by definition is the heart of utopianism.[2] My musings here wind through this assertion, focusing on two students’ responses to the narrative within the larger context of teaching American literature and utopian visions.

When Duncan Faherty and Ed White introduced Equality as the latest posting in the Just Teach One project, I had already announced a “utopian/dystopian visions” theme for my MA-level seminar in American literature before 1900. How, then, could I justify not including this short work on the imagined Lithconian society? Even before having read it myself, relying only on Faherty and White’s brief description, I put it on the course reading list. Surely, I thought, it would contribute to rich discussions of not only narrative devices but also of engaging themes and commonplaces of utopian literature, such as communal property ownership and sexual and marital arrangements differing from what has come to be considered as “the norm” in the early Republic. And it would add new facets to our understandings of such traditions American literature and culture.

My own understandings of the genre, I discovered upon reading Equality, remained unchanged. Nothing in its content or form surprised me—it consists of expected commonplaces of western utopian literature, reinforced by Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). This reading confirmed my view that the narrative would serve as a perfect work to assign early in the course, providing an opportunity early in the semester for students to test their understanding of the genre’s basic elements. Its brevity (approximately 50 pages) would keep them from getting bogged down in an extremely long and potentially plodding account. (Utopian narratives are known for lack of dramatic tension, as often a traveler, arrived in a new world, is escorted by a citizen who elaborates didactically on the political theories and social practices.[3])

In contrast to my reading of Equality, teaching it elicited surprising responses. Two examples suffice here. One emerged in a weekly response essay—an initial reaction—and the other in an end-of-term research-based essay, expressing thoughts developed over more time. Thematically, the responses centered upon marriage, family, and religion. Upon reflection, I see they had little to do with either my teaching or the narrative itself and much more to do with where the students are in their lives and careers.

In fact, these responses send me back to where I was, experientially, when I first began studying these alternative ways of imagining the world and its varied cultures. I first taught things utopian when I was a graduate student myself, more than 25 years ago as I began reading and writing about American religious communities. Since then assignments in my courses on utopian visions have varied from pre-1900 materials on the celibate Shakers and the Oneida community, whose members joined in the sexual practice of “complex marriage,” to a spectrum of secular and spiritual materials from various genres, cultures and time periods. Yet I often forget, as I introduce students to utopian traditions, the surprise element inherent in some of these alternative ways of existing and the time people need to process new information. Certainly I am reminded of these two aspects of teaching and learning as I consider Equality in the classroom.

This past spring my plans were to blend lesser-known with better-known works within a pre-1900 time frame. Equality would be preceded by two works and an introductory course lecture. Our readings began with part of More’s Utopia, not because last year’s quincentenary made it quintessential, but rather for how it sets out form and themes that have been replayed for 500 years. The author’s travels, political insights and stances, translated through his fictive imaginings, island setting, and traveling narrator Raphael Hythloday, set the stage for Unca Eliza Winkfield’s The Female American (1767) and the introduction and Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard sections of Hector St. Jean de Crevecour’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782). The latter two works allowed us to zoom in on travel, island and property ownership themes and the narrator’s role in complicating authorial stances. All three reminded us of the importance of understanding historical and political contexts for shaping such fictional visions or social dreaming.

My opening slide lecture had defined and illustrated variations on utopian commonplaces. I included, as usual, both literary and actual communities and their relationships: French radical’s Etienne Cabet’s novel Voyage en Icaria (1840) and the journeys and settlements of the Icarians in the US; Nathaniel Hawthorne’s experiences at Brook Farm and his Blithedale Romance (1852). And most importantly, we discussed the inverse relationships of utopias to dystopias. The students openly embraced Margaret Atwood’s keen insight, when you “scratch the surface . . . you see . . . within each utopia, a concealed dystopia; within each dystopia, a hidden utopia.”[4]

Yet even with these introductory definitions and admonitions, three weeks into the course, as we approached Equality, it was as if the students had thrown critical strategies to the wind. For example, although one short response essay focused on the Lithconians’ supposed lack of free will, sense of individuality, and personal desires as part of “human nature,” the supporting evidence for this claim noted Lithconian policies on sexuality, marriage and divorce—all arranged and “calculated to make the most of love” (13).[5] The student was troubled not only by the regulation that spouses only shared a bed (i.e. had sexual relations) once a week—although they might live in the same house, with several other non-biologically related adults—but also that the narrative provides no hint of any citizen objecting to the policies or having desires that differed from the ideal. Additionally, the student referred to concepts of family and the Lithconian policy, “there can be no family pride” (8) and the associated description, that children are “distributed in the houses as chance, passion or accident direct, male and female promiscuously” (12). This system designed with all citizens as part of one large family of humanity challenged what the student saw as a “natural connection” between a mother and “a child to whom she has given birth” and the lack of discussion of emotions among biologically related humans. In spite of my response that Equality’s author was emphasizing the learned or environmental aspects of such ties—even with references to contemporary adoptions—this student (and others in the class) appeared to resist thinking about other social organizations for marriage and family than those with which they believed “natural” and therefore normative in their lived experiences to date.

If such troubles emerge from distinctions about “human nature” and the “unnatural” in marriage and family bonds, the second student’s issues arose from an attempt to blur distinction, or to find common ground across time and beliefs. In this instance, the linkage of Equality to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888) was Christian socialism. Even with its overt Deist language and Faherty and White’s explanation of the narrative’s publication within a Deist newspaper, The Temple of Reason (1), Equality’s Lithconia and its citizens demonstrated to this student author all the elements of Christian socialism. Although the essay provided historical information on the origins of the “social gospel” and “Christian Socialist” movements later in the nineteenth century, the long section in Equality on the human constructions of religious institutions and any theological or political discussion of the label “Christian” were absent from the argument. In my attempts to work with the student on defining terms and understanding the place of religion and religious history in the narrative, I became aware that in the limited time frame of the course and this assignment, such results likely would not be realized.

In fact, through reflecting on these and other responses, I have decided that they exhibit a deeper and more pervasive attitude. Rather than being disappointed in the work’s literary qualities, these students (and many of their peers) are at root resistant to utopian visions. They are skeptical of “all things new.”[6] While they express interest in “thinking outside the box”—they are, in fact, trapped within it. That box is as much the world of their limited life experiences as it is a culture of cynicism, influenced by The Walking Dead and The Handmaid’s Tale in both video and literary forms. Where, then, does such a discovery leave me—especially as I consider teaching Equality again, or as you may consider it?

First, to the question of teaching Equality – I would absolutely do so. Second, as for what might be done differently—expect most students to be against Lithconia. Their interests in utopia emerge not from a love of it but from fascination with dystopias. For many, their cynicism embraces and supports a facility for seeing all possible new worlds with despairing darkness. Yet I remain all for teaching utopia—for the pinholes of light that appear through discussions of alternatives to the “norms.” Who knows when they might pop open?

With Equality not only property ownership and female agency emerge but also the small press publishing context of The Temple of Reason is critical. The marginal voices that spoke up about these topics—as Faherty and White discuss in their introduction—deserve discussion. Our voices as professors should be added to these by teaching works that contribute to dialogues that open rather than close possibilities. In fact, More’s Hythloday encouraged such conversation. His hope was discovering truths. The goal then remains today—social dreaming for a better world.

[1] Martin McGrath, “Against Utopia: Arthur C. Clarke and the Heterotopian Impulse,” Welcome to My World, August 1, 2011, http://www.mmcgrath.co.uk/?p=1406

[2] Lyman Tower Sargent, Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 5.

[3] Northrop Frye, “Varieties of Literary Utopias,” Daedalus 94.2 (1965): 323-373.

[4] Margaret Atwood, “Dire Cartographies: The Roads to Ustopia,” In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2011), 85.

[5] Page numbers refer to the version prepared by Faherty and White, “Just Teach One,” Common-Place: the journal of early American life, Spring 2017, http://jto.common-place.org/just-teach-one-homepage/equality-a-political-romance-1802/

[6] Robert S. Fogarty, All Things New: American Communes and Utopian Movements, 1860–1914 (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1990).

[1] Martin McGrath, “Against Utopia: Arthur C. Clarke and the Heterotopian Impulse,” Welcome to My World, August 1, 2011, http://www.mmcgrath.co.uk/?p=1406

[1] Lyman Tower Sargent, Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 5.

[1] Northrop Frye, “Varieties of Literary Utopias,” Daedalus 94.2 (1965): 323-373.

[1] Margaret Atwood, “Dire Cartographies: The Roads to Ustopia,” In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2011), 85.

[1] Page numbers refer to the version prepared by Faherty and White, “Just Teach One,” Common-Place: the journal of early American life, Spring 2017, http://jto.common-place.org/just-teach-one-homepage/equality-a-political-romance-1802/

[1] Robert S. Fogarty, All Things New: American Communes and Utopian Movements, 1860–1914 (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1990).

Exploring Utopian Literature and Thought in Nineteenth-Century America

Diana I. Dabek
Doctoral Candidate
Department of English
University of Miami

I’d like to start by thanking Duncan Faherty and Ed White for preparing this text, and for making it accessible to us all. As a graduate student, I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to partake in this project with so many other wonderful scholars and teachers. I taught Equality near the end of a unit on utopian literature in my undergraduate Early American Literature course (colonial-1865). I began with a brief overview of the history of utopian thought in Western culture, starting with Plato’s vision of the ideal Greek city-state to Sir Thomas More’s imaginary island of Utopia. We spent some class time talking about the genre of utopian literature and how it has evolved over the centuries. Mostly, I wanted students to understand that writers who engage with utopian themes usually do so as a form of social commentary.

After their crash course on utopian literature, students were introduced to the first of three “utopian” texts, C.B.B.’s Wieland (1798). The class was eager to understand why the utopian project failed for the Wieland family, and what exactly C.B.B. was trying to tell contemporary audiences through his experimental novel. I explained that Americans were experiencing a great deal of change in the years following the Revolutionary War. We touched on a wide variety of topics ranging from the Enlightenment to the rise of Jeffersonian democracy. Again, I asked the class to think about how C.B.B. used his novel as a form as social commentary. Some students suggested that C.B.B. was trying to warn Americans about the dangers of limited government. These students viewed the novel as a criticism of Jeffersonian democracy, which favored minimal institutionalized authority. Others in the class interpreted the text as a criticism of social isolation, noting that the Wielands reject some of the most common institutions like church and school. For the most part, students agreed that Wieland is a text that is steeped in issues of national identity and inquietudes about unchecked power.

After Wieland, we moved on to our second text, Equality (1802). From the start, students had a lot of questions concerning authorship and audience reception. For example, students wondered if the text would have been more successful had it been printed in a pamphlet by itself. Some students in the class were curious as to why it was published anonymously. Others wanted know more about Deism and how it figured into the author’s understanding and representation of a utopian society. All of these questions led to some interesting discussions about target audience and purpose. We explored these questions with the help of the prefatory material and some of the suggested reading (I found the articles by Michael Durey and Anthony Galluzzo to be especially helpful when discussing issues of authorship). We also spent some class time looking at excerpts from The Temple of Reason in order to get a better understanding of how contemporary audiences would have experienced the text. In total, we dedicated a week to Equality. Students had a difficult time understanding (and frankly even reading) the latter half of the text where the narrator provides a long account of the Lithconian origin story. As a result, we wound up spending most of our time talking about the first half of the text. Our primary goal was to analyze the text from different approaches (as a radical immigrant text, as a travel narrative, as a socialist tract, or as deist propaganda). In doing so, students were encouraged to read the text closely and to look for supporting evidence for each point of view.

In the end, students were asked to write a 6-8-page research essay on one of the three utopian texts (the third one was Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance). I am happy to report that several students in the class wrote thought-provoking and insightful essays on Equality. For example, I had a student who argued that the author of Equality hoped to appeal to Philadelphia’s laboring working class and immigrant population with his idyllic representation of Lithconia. Another student argued that Equality should be read as a criticism on the unattainably of the American Dream.

Overall, I truly enjoyed teaching Equality. This text encouraged my students to think about why utopian literature started to gain popularity in nineteenth century America. More importantly, it exposed them to a piece of literature that they otherwise would not have read.

“Equality—A Political Romance” and Early Contact Narratives

Tamara Harvey
George Mason University

We discussed “Equality: A Political Romance” on the last day of a survey of literatures of the Americas that stretched from Christopher Columbus to, this time, “Equality: A Political Romance.” The class was made up of both undergraduates and graduate students and met once a week. On that last Monday, students needed to complete their evaluations of the class and we needed to review for the final exam. The weather was nice. On top of it all, I wasn’t completely sure how this reading fit with the rest of the class—my lesson plan was only slightly more elaborate than “let’s throw this up and see what sticks.” In short, these were not ideal conditions for tackling such an unusual text for the first time.

However, the students enjoyed it and thought I had chosen it as an ideal though quirky capstone to our class. The utopian travel narrative conceit allowed them to think back to Columbus and The Travels of Sir John Mandeville from the first class of the semester as well as accounts of cultural contact and conquest by Hernán Cortés, Bartolomé de las Casas, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, John Smith, and others. The treatment of gender roles and sexual practices recalled both these contact narratives and other more feminist discussions of gender by Catalina de Erauso, Anne Bradstreet, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Benjamin Franklin, Judith Sargent Murray, Hannah Webster Foster, and others. We were able to extend our discussion of deism, first touched on with Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography. And finally, treating a periodical publication recalled an earlier database assignment in which students found and analyzed crime narratives written before 1801.

Because this reading came so late in the semester, students could not address it in a formal essay assignment, so I made it a required text for an essay question on the final exam. For this essay, I wanted to hold students responsible for the reading while giving them a range of opportunities for synthesizing the course material in a manner that suited their interests. They needed to write a short essay treating three texts from the semester, one of which had to be “Equality—A Political Romance.” Because the exam was administered online, these essays were submitted like papers and students were on their honor to spend no more than 90 minutes writing the essay (they could prepare as long they liked). Here are the prompts I gave them:

In the latter portion of the class we have read a number of works that are concerned with better fostering equality among people. Sometimes the solutions offered rest on political and social organization; sometimes they are grounded in civil exchanges among people on a more local level. And in several texts, ideas about equality are developed through discussions of injustice and inequality. Choosing two texts in addition to “Equality—A Political Romance,” compare and contrast some aspect of how equality is treated or fostered. You might, for instance, focus on religious issues, political organization, or different forms of neighborliness and mutual support (though there are many other possibilities). Be sure to introduce your focused, arguable thesis at the beginning of your essay and remember to use close textual analysis to support your argument.
Throughout the semester, we have read a number of texts that are critical of norms related to gender and sexuality. Choosing two texts in addition to “Equality—A Political Romance,” compare and contrast some aspect of their approach to critiquing gender ideology or treating expectations associated with sexuality. How do they characterize the problem(s)? What solutions do they offer? How does discussion of gender and/or sexuality fit with other aims of the text? (These questions are just suggestions—you don’t need to answer all of them.) Be sure to introduce your focused, arguable thesis at the beginning of your essay and remember to use close textual analysis to support your argument.
“Equality—A Political Romance” describes a visit to a utopia that echoes earlier discovery and contact narratives we read this semester while also reflecting on Lithconia’s own relationship to nationalism and colonization. Choosing two texts in addition to “Equality—A Political Romance,” explore some aspect of how “Equality” builds on and diverges from these earlier models of writing about discovery and contact and imagining more innocent cultures. Be sure to introduce your focused, arguable thesis at the beginning of your essay and remember to use close textual analysis to support your argument.

Most students chose the third option, comparing “Equality” to earlier models of discovery. Only one student wrote about gender and sexuality while two chose to write about the idea of equality. Perhaps because I wasn’t able to provide the scaffolding for our discussion of deism, socialism, or utopian writing, the most unlikely of the comparisons—“Equality” compared with mostly Spanish conquest and contact literature—was the most successful as well as the most popular.

I also suspect that this questions best suited the long and broad survey format of the class. Students were particularly insightful as they considered the investments of the first-person narrator. Whereas Columbus and Cabeza de Vaca’s narratives displayed ideological contradictions and complicated personal investments, the narrative style of “Equality—A Political Romance” was, they felt, “distant” and “passive.” One student developed a very strong argument about how natives are treated as simpler and idealized in the earlier texts as well as in “Equality.” Another found that the relative humility of the traveler in “Equality” upon encountering the utopia was a striking divergence from the model developed by Cortés and Columbus. Still others considered the ways in which “Equality” was directly engaging and critiquing discourses of conquest and imperialism through its rejection of private property and a single religion or echoing cultural biases about others, as when the narrator reports that the “host of shopkeepers which seem so necessary in barbarous countries, is here unknown” (12). Generally speaking, this assignment helped bring into sharper focus what was happening in the earlier texts; for “Equality” itself, students were more intrigued than enlightened.

In looking back, I regret that I could treat the context of “Equality—A Political Romance” only minimally. Directing students’ time and attention to the age of discovery came at the expense of greater attention to the text in its own time. But just as “Equality” offers a glimpse of other political possibilities being entertained during the early republic, the comparison with much earlier texts helps further unsettle both the celebratory and damning interpretations of early contact that so often shape our readings of these texts. I don’t think we did justice to “Equality—A Political Romance” at all, but its presence in the class helped keep the stories of the Americas unsettled both in looking back to “discovery” discourses and anticipating the unfolding of national narratives with which they were more familiar.

Female Review

Kristina Bross, Marc Diefenderfer, Michelle Campbell, and Amy Elliot
Purdue University

When the announcement came that JTO had selected The Female Review for its next collaborative reading/teaching endeavor, I wracked my brains to try to remember the last time I’d read it—grad school, prelims, most likely. Years ago. But it had stuck, and my memory of it—a combination of surprise about the range of gender roles and performance available in early American literature and bafflement at the mediated form—prompted me to think about its possible place in my upcoming survey of early American lit.

I hadn’t taught the survey in some years; the course itself is under siege here—low enrollments coupled with pressures from higher up to connect our curriculum more concretely to the job market means that going forward the class will be offered less often, mostly to fulfill requirements for education majors or as one pathway to meet requirements for straight-up English majors rather than as a common, gen-ed course. In addition, we’re in a period of rebalancing our undergraduate and graduate programs, and as a result, last year fewer of our graduate students were assigned sections of literature courses of their own. As a stop-gap measure in mentoring new literature teachers, we experimented with assigning small cohorts of graduate students to shadow established literature classes, and three Ph.D. students joined my class.

In response to these changes, my department has rewritten curriculum and created new courses to meet core graduation requirements. We are looking to meet our undergraduate students more where they are, and to develop syllabi that mesh with our land-grant, tech-and-engineering identity (an effort for which our graduate students may be better equipped that tenure-track faculty). Thus we are working to articulate explicitly the skill sets our classes help students develop; we’re developing “genre fiction” classes (detective fiction, sports and fiction; haven’t thought about romance yet, but maybe?) even courses that teach imaginative “world building” as a complement to computer graphics design courses.

I suppose this description of recent curricular reforms could be a prelude to a declension narrative. But I don’t think that’s the plot we are inhabiting, least not necessarily. I am enthusiastically prepping a fall offering of “Science Fiction and Fantasy” (fully enrolled a week after the registration window opened, natch) that’ll put a Midwestern spin on the genres and will even sneak in a little early American instruction via an alternative-history fantasy in which the “United” states never emerged. But as much as I’m looking forward to the new teaching challenge, I do think we lose something significant when we decide that early American literary history is for specialists. The survey, so long a bread-and-butter course for early Americanists, still strikes me as uniquely valuable, a chance to interrogate with some time and attention the cultural productions that seem at once utterly strange and still so much a part of those of us in the U.S.

But my approach to the survey has changed, of course, as it should have done, from the exceptionalist literary history I learned as an undergrad to the heavily historicized version I spun earlier in my academic career, to what, exactly, today? For this iteration, I decided that I wanted to try to get students to think about how “America” has been constructed, not as inevitable, but in fits-and-starts, with dead-ends as well as successes. As a tag-line on the syllabus, I subtitled the survey “America and Americans as Speculative Fiction,” in the hopes of both de-naturalizing the idea of a (singular) American identity and to try to get at what made (and makes) such an identity possible. I decided to start with descriptions of Eden and the Golden Age, move through exploration/travel/captivities, take on the Declaration of Independence as a speculative speech act that instantiated an American identity, and head toward satire, drama, fiction for imaginative explorations of these ideas. Although the literary history I spun through my text selections wasn’t some radical departure from standard survey fare, I hoped that by foregrounding the constructed nature of our national identities, and with some judicious inclusion of new-to-me texts (Franklin’s “Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim,” Byrd’s Sheppard Lee), the readings might help students contemplate American literature, culture, and their own identities differently.

Female Review seemed ready-made for my take on the class: a text that was speculative in every possible way, from Mann’s vexed and vexing mediation to the glimpses we may be getting of Deborah Sampson’s self-fashioning, which I wanted to have students understand as itself a sophisticated and difficult construct, not as reflecting her authentic, singular voice. Not incidentally, I also hoped that by bringing in a newly edited text and collaborating with the graduate cohort to lead discussion, the undergrads would get different angle on literary analysis and scholarly conversation. Of the three Ph.D. students who joined me, Michelle Campbell, Marc Diefenderfer, Amy Elliot, none is an early Americanist, but all three are super-sharp, enthusiastic, creative collaborators. We decided that one way to short-cut the expertise gap would be to have them take on the task of prepping and presenting Female Review. Since I hadn’t taught it before (or, indeed, read it at all for some twenty years), I wouldn’t have much standing to second-guess their approaches or compare it to my own pedagogical choices.

Amy, having recently emerged from a graduate seminar on formalism, took on genre and form for us, asking students “what exactly is this?” As we prepped for the discussion, we talked about how this narrative is very different from a lot of what they’d read before—either on their own or in the class—so we wanted to ask whether the text created some kind of “American genre” and what elements they trace in our other texts. She asked students to talk about the word “review” and what exactly that meant (recap, a history, a performance, a military review) and how the genre was setting us up to understand Sampson.

Michelle dealt with personal identity and sexuality. She led students in a discussion of how Mann’s description of Sampson both constructed her as subverting feminine roles, but also abiding by them. For example, Mann describes Sampson as having “tokens of a fertile genius and an aspiring mind,” but also a “primeval temper” that was “uniform and tranquil.” Although she’s described as smart and even-tempered, she is purported to have all the submissive qualities of an ideal femininity: “She may be noted for a natural sweetness and pliability of temper–a ready wit, which only needed refinement–a ready conformity to a parent’s or patroness’ injunctions–a native modesty and softness in expression and deportment, and passions naturally formed for philanthropy and commiseration.” Asking students to square Mann’s description of Sampson with her actions can help students critically consider the depiction and performance of acceptable gender roles that would be legible and palatable to Mann’s readership.

As Marc took over, we discussed the ways in which the text’s mythic conventions reinforced its radical commentary on gender. By connecting Sampson’s dreams and imagined battles with monsters first to classical accounts of monsters and violence and then to the text’s account of the real-life Siege of Boston, students were better able to ascertain Mann’s critical intervention in regard to the nation’s mythic vision of itself—a vision balanced on the difficult construction of Sampson as a heroic individual.

We had mixed success—positive enough to encourage us to include the text in a future version of the course, definitely—but with some challenges to take up next time. A number of students had difficulty parsing the voices of the text, even though we’d been talking about such issues at least since our reading of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity. Or rather, they had difficulty knowing what to do with Mann’s heavy-handed mediation other than to note it. Beyond a doubt, the experiment would have been a failure entire were it not for Jodi Schorb’s excellent, clear critical introduction. Our students were unanimous in their praise of it. Perhaps because the text was difficult for them to puzzle out, more of them seemed to have ingested the introduction for Female Review than they had done for most of our other texts.

It was more difficult to handle their unfamiliarity with classical mythology and their commitment to conventional gender roles in their own moment, both of which I underestimated, and which led to some frustration. For instance, when I asked students to think about whether they’d keep the text on a future version of the syllabus, one student wrote that Sampson’s experiences weren’t “representative” enough to merit inclusion in the sweep of the syllabus (which I’d thought was the point).

One small moment in the discussion suggests a way forward next time: by linking Sampson’s story and Mann’s narrative to genre fiction, ironically enough (I said this post isn’t a declension narrative). As we struggled to make sense of the push-pull of gender representation and heroicism in the text, we hit on Sampson’s parallels to—of all things—Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games. This brief moment in the discussion seemed to have been surprisingly satisfying to the students, and led to one of those prized “ah ha” moments in the discussion. My takeaway? It’s not that undergraduates aren’t interested in literary history or historic cultural productions—they are quite interested in puzzling them through. Rather, they want to link that history concretely to their own moment, to the texts and literature that give them so much pleasure today—a connection that promises to help them better understand the literary forms that captured the imaginations of their forebears centuries ago. My realization isn’t earth-shattering, but it encourages me to find ways to connect older curricular genres—the beloved survey—to new.

Beyond Early American Literature: Teaching The Female Review and Contemporary Works

Gregory D. Specter
Duquesne University

For the purposes of this post, I want to comment first on the particular circumstances in which I taught The Female Review in my first year honors course. I think understanding the context will help those considering The Female Review in their own classes to see the versatility of this Just Teach One offering, it’s accessibility for students, and the possibility of using it beyond the American literature classroom. In short, while you should consider including The Female Review in your survey course or upper-division American literature course, I recommend thinking creatively about incorporating it in different courses.

Unlike many participants in this fall’s Just Teach One initiative, my course was not focused on early American literature, let alone American literature. The course was focused on the theme of history, memory, and revision—all themes that are prominent in The Female Review. This course featured a handful of contemporary texts: Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive, and Seth’s George Sprott: (1894-1975). Like the course theme, these readings were selected by a committee of instructors also teaching this particular honors course. My iteration of the course featured a substantial unit on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. Indeed, it was only Hamilton, our engagement with primary sources, and several essays on the musical which provided students with any connection to early America. Additionally, a key component of my course involved students working with local archival collections in order to complete the semester’s major assignment. Working on a project involving archival work and telling a story about the past provided students a unique perspective on The Female Review– which is, of course, a text focused on a retelling of the past.

I share all of the above information for two reasons. First, even with the seemingly odd fit of The Female Review, my experience (and the students’ experience) in the classroom was very positive. As a class we had fruitful discussions of The Female Review over the course of two class periods. Second, I share my particular circumstances of teaching because they shaped how I prepared the students to read this work and how we discussed the work during class.

Because the focus of my class was not early American literature, I spent time preparing students to engage with themes about gender and the role of women during the early republic. While prior readings on Hamilton introduced students to the representation of women in history and the archive, I knew that engaging the topic of gender might be difficult for students. Since virtue and decorum were important thematic elements of The Female Review, I asked students to prepare for the class by reading a short piece by Karen Robbins on the connection between the “Pursuit of Happiness” and virtue. Robbins’ essay provided students an extra layer of context that they could rely on during their reading.

Secondly, I prepared a brief reading guide for students. I am a fan of preparing short reading guides for students. Reading guides can aid students significantly in preparing for engaging with a longer work. A reading guide is an opportunity to provide students with context, a sense of expectations, and allow for providing guiding questions. In The Female Review, it frequently feels like Deborah Sampson slips away from the narrative. Such quirks of the text could be problematic for students and I highlighted this factor for them in the reading guide, provided a way of understanding these gaps, and provided further guiding questions. I also identified some ways of thinking about how the text fit our course themes. Of course, I tried to walk as fine line between guiding students versus telling them how to read this particular work.

I want to close with addressing some ways of entering into discussion of this text in the classroom. I found it effective to begin with the title page and dedication page for The Female Review. These pieces of paratext provided a way of entering into the text and provided a robust way of jumpstarting a vibrant class discussion. In general, I find using title pages of works as a start to discussion is an effective pedagogical tool for the classroom, and in this case the title page for The Female Review is a great example of pole-vaulting into the rest of the text. With little prompting students took control of the discussion in thoughtful and engaging ways.

I encourage others to consider using The Female Review in other creative contexts. Hopefully my circumstances of using The Female Review show that the text has a great deal of potential. Yes, use The Female Review in an early American literature class—and—consider it for other courses, too!

Teaching The Female Review in a Course on the Literature of the U.S. Revolution

John C. Havard
Auburn University at Montgomery

I taught Herman Mann’s The Female Review in an upper-division course on the literature of the U.S. Revolution. This is a course I had taught previously. The course focuses on American literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with a focus on writing pertaining to the Revolution such as relevant public rhetoric, memoirs, and historical fiction. We also read works with less obvious connections to the Revolution but that touch on the era’s pressing social and cultural issues. I teach at Auburn University at Montgomery, a regional branch campus in Alabama that serves a diverse student population. The course is taken by traditional English majors, secondary education/language arts majors, and graduate students in our Master of Liberal Arts and Master of Teaching Writing programs.

As a scholar of the early United States who is always looking for interesting new material that might enliven his classes, I have long been interested in Just Teach One (JTO). However, JTO’s text selections had been good fits for the classes I was teaching at the time—until The Female Review, an obvious choice for a class on the Revolution. As a fictive memoir regarding a woman who cross-dressed to enlist in the Continental Army, the narrative drew my students’ interest for what it revealed about women’s roles in the war. These roles still receive too little air time in popular accounts of the conflict. My class also had conversations regarding connections between the memoir and other works we had read. Benjamin Franklin’s discussion of his religious coming of age in his Autobiography served as a reference point for Mann’s characterization of Deborah Sampson as holding rationalist religious views. Our coverage of Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette provided context for Mann’s narration of the seduction of Fatima as a cautionary tale regarding the dangers for women of what was considered deviant behavior. I also told students about my participation in the Just Teach One project as part of a description of the history of the recovery movement and the canon wars. These discussions helped students understand that the canon and course syllabi are mutable; the kind of scholarly work and institutions that make recovery possible; and the politics of literary study.

Many students were eager to discuss Mann’s historical inaccuracies. Their comments led to productive conversation. As Jodi Schorb explains in her introduction to the Just Teach One edition, The Female Review “is less a factual biography of Sampson than a fictive shaping of Sampson for early republican audiences” (1). As Schorb specifies, “Sustained by multiple periods of masculine presentation, an embrace of religious revivalism, church excommunication: the historical Sampson fits uncomfortably into Mann’s idealized portrait” (4). My students keyed onto this issue in part due to the efforts of Lindsay Guest, a talented graduate student in the class who is writing her master’s thesis on women in the American Revolution. Lindsay took an immediate interest in Mann’s account, chose to write her seminar paper on it, and prior to the class sessions devoted to Mann had begun reading Alfred F. Young’s Masquerade, which specifies inconsistencies between Mann’s account and what we know about the historical Sampson. Lindsay shared what she learned with the class, and I shared other related information. As English professors know, student interest in historical inaccuracies in literary works sometimes threatens to derail productive analysis, as students may deem the works less worthy of study. I steered students in a more positive direction by asking that they think of these inaccuracies in rhetorical terms: What were Mann’s goals, and how did his portrayal of Sampson help him achieve these goals? These questions helped students think about the purpose and function of the work. We discussed how Mann was collaborating with Sampson in an effort to win public applause that would be helpful in Sampson’s effort to obtain a federal pension for her war service. He thus praised her patriotic sacrifice but deemphasized and explained away her perceived gender deviancy to avoid offending his audience’s sensibilities. We also discussed Mann’s personal aims. Mann was a Deist and downplayed Sampson’s embrace of Baptist revivalism to promote rationalist religion. Moreover, he supported the ideals of Republican Motherhood and its emphasis on female education as requisite for women’s successful assumption of the duties of the private sphere. For this reason he portrayed Sampson’s enlistment as the consequences of her insufficient education, as opposed to the desire to escape marriage and make money it may have been. Sampson, he suggests, was interested in pursuing her interests as an amateur geographer and botanist. Without the opportunity to do so due to poor education for women, she enlisted in the army to see the world. This depiction enabled Mann to advocate Republican Motherhood while deemphasizing Sampson’s deviancy. Lastly, he was a pacificist who opposed U.S. involvement in ongoing conflict between England and revolutionary France. He thus depicted war as hell despite his aim of positively depicting Sampson’s patriotism. Discussing the inaccuracies in this light helped students understand the cultural and rhetorical contexts of post-Revolutionary America as well as to appreciate The Female Review as a dynamic engagement with those contexts.

Conversations regarding challenging passages in the memoir also provided valuable learning experiences. Teachers of early American literature know that the differences in vocabulary, syntax, and typography between then and now often make reading assignments difficult for students who have not previously been exposed to colonial and early national writing. I consequently make close reading of such passages a centerpiece of classroom activities. One way I do this is by assigning student-led discussions in which I ask students to pick at least three passages from the day’s assigned reading to discuss with the class. While I allow students to ask interpretative questions about passages, I tell them it is acceptable and even encouraged to choose passages simply because they are hard to understand. Conversations regarding these passages often help students understand the era’s rhetorical conventions and vocabulary connotations. In a student-led discussion on The Female Review, one student drew our attention to a passage in chapter 9 in which Mann writes, “I am perfectly enraptured with those females, who exhibit the most refined sensibility and skill in their sweet domestic round, and who can show a group of well bred boys and girls. But I must aver, I am also happy, if this rare female has filled that vacuity, more or less in every one’s bosom, by the execution of the worst propensities: For, by similitude, we may anticipate, that one half of the world in future are to have less goads in their consciences, and the other, faster accumulating a fund of more useful acquisition” (49). The student noted not only the elaborate clausal structures and unfamiliar vocabulary such as “vacuity” in the passage but also the uncertain tone. The author seems decisive in using language such as “I aver,” but the passage also comes across as confused because it contradicts the earlier assertion that “THUS, Females, whilst you see the avidity of a maid in her teens confronting dangers and made a veteran example in war, you need only half the assiduity in your proper, domestic sphere, to render your charms completely irresistible” (54). Via conversation regarding this passage, we concluded that some of the more challenging passages in Mann’s narrative exhibit not just differences in the usage of language between then and now but also Mann’s struggle to navigate a central challenge in writing this narrative: He seeks to portray Sampson in a good light to aid her effort to obtain a federal pension, but he also aims to promote conventional gender norms. As Schorb succinctly puts it, “The narrative’s richness lies in Mann’s attempt to make both an example and a warning of Sampson” (1). In these passages he thus encourages women to “render your charms completely irresistible” by devoting themselves to the domestic sphere, whereas he also gives Sampson backhanded praise for providing readers with negative examples regarding the dangers a woman faces in the masculine sphere of war. Such discussions helped my students understand that lingering on passages that are difficult to understand may yield much deeper understandings of an author’s stance and purpose in relation to audience expectations. These are valuable lessons for novice literary critics.

I also experimented with a new assignment while teaching The Female Review. Whereas in the past in this class I had assigned three conventional 4-6 page essays of literary analysis, I replaced one of these papers with an assignment for each student to contribute to an annotated edition of the work. I was inspired to give this assignment by my colleague, Seth Reno, who achieved impressive results using a similar assignment with Erasmus Darwin’s The Loves of Plants in a class on British Romanticism. Teaching The Female Review provided a good opportunity to try the assignment, as recovered works require the development of annotated editions to make them accessible to non-scholarly audiences. I divided the work by section to the students and set up a Google Doc in which they transcribed and annotated their sections. To provide for appropriate challenge, I asked students to write somewhat extensive explanatory annotations. I provided examples from teaching editions of other works we read that utilized this style of annotation, and I distinguished the style from more minimalist approaches such as that used by Ed White and Duncan Faherty in the JTO edition. The assignment was a success: In addition to providing for an appreciated respite from the typical round of essays, my students developed research skills; better understandings of the value of annotation and the rhetorical purposes of differing annotation styles; and an understanding and appreciation of the scholarly effort that goes into producing teaching editions. The quality of the students’ work differed, of course, but in many cases I was impressed by and learned a lot from the annotations. One memorable annotation was written by a thoughtful student named Kiarah Holloway. Kiarah discussed Sampson’s contemplation in Chapter 8 of committing suicide to avoid detection as a woman; the annotation discussed contemporaneous legal debates regarding suicide; cultural conversation that was spurred by the popularity of Goerthe’s Werther; and how Mann’s inclusion of the detail was meant to illustrate the stress placed upon Sampson as someone committing what was considered a deviant act.

Overall, teaching The Female Review was a success. The work fit seamlessly into my course, my students found the narrative engaging, and they learned a lot from the annotation assignment.

Makandal, Change Agent: Teaching Account of a remarkable Conspiracy formed by a Negro in the Island of St. Domingo

Kate Simpkins
Northeastern University (PhD), Wallace Community College (Faculty, English)

When I had the opportunity this spring to teach a work of literature about François Makandal—the African-born, eighteenth-century maroon healer and poisoner of Saint-Domingue—I had already been writing a dissertation on Makandal literature for three years.[1] Though the dissertation is finished, the gathering of texts continues to grow, since stories about him span multiple genres, languages, nations, and centuries.

Given this special circumstance, my initial task as a teacher was in some sense to table a great deal of graduate research on this mytho-historical figure of the early Caribbean in order to foreground this particular work—Account of a remarkable Conspiracy—in terms of the broader purposes of the course. My first-year college students read Account in context of other material relevant to the Haitian Revolution as well as in context of other materials relevant to the course’s overall aims. My reflections on teaching Account speak to the way in which the text fits into the course’s themes and objectives.

My class, First-Year Writing, is a core requirement at Northeastern University and is designed to introduce students to reading and writing critically on the college level. Teachers of FYW are free to choose any wide variety of texts that engage students in an introduction to the writing process. The course’s subtitle, Change Agents: Race, Revolution, and Resources, puts Makandal’s rebellion against the plantocracy of early Haiti in context of other modes of effecting social change and foregrounded the way that human struggle and environmental practice are intertwined.

When they met Makandal and his story, students had already finished two prior units that both focused on combined issues of politics, race, ecology, and history. Each unit examined these ideas in terms of the way that colonial culture of the past can be read in legacies of poverty and environmental unsustainability today in the Americas, the Caribbean, and beyond. Our course schedule followed a timeline from the present toward the past; (we worked backwards from 2015 to his emergence in 1758). Makandal was the last figure of change and revolution the students studied for the semester. I did not expect first-year college students to consume the complexities of the Haitian Revolution, nor a literary tradition on Makandal that began in the French language, in a such a short period of time. My greater aim was to capitalize on how Makandal literature helps us conceptualize historical and literary study as a common project, and how human and environmental politics—another binary promoted in the idea of modern culture—seem to merge in the counter-modern revolution Makandal started against the plantation economy. In order to present Makandal in this light, I chose texts and media that would complement Account and help students draw correlations between this seemingly distant event of the eighteenth century and more contemporary resonances to his cause.

Drawing on Bruno Latour’s panel presentation, “Fifty Shades of Green,” our introduction to the course material asked students to consider the ways in which seemingly separate issues such as race and environmental justice have common historical paths as well as modes of intellectual and actual resistance; some of our essential focusing questions included: How can the study of literature propose ambiguity and or intimacy between our ideas of nature and society instead of the dualism and clear distinction that modernity ensures? How does what we know or believe about ourselves and our surroundings speak to our engagement with ourselves and our surroundings? Some topics for discussion and reading response included Latour’s idea that nature is not a “wilderness,” but rather, a form of “excess.”[2] More basically, students journaled and talked in efforts to describe the way in which they conceptualize nature vs. society. Conversely, we considered what we commonly believe to not be nature and why. As a further extension of that thought, we discussed how and why a word or concept such as farming might seem more natural or positive in connotation than the word plantation and what they associated with these words. In addition, students discussed the ways in which Latour explains the term “modern” and how he challenges our understanding of what modern or modernity means; some of their associative words were: industry, civilization, new, and society. Why, I asked, does he suggest that humanity, as the only form of recognizable agency, is an anachronistic idea? If being modern is about enacting a radical departure from what is known or a part of a given order of things, we questioned, how can we reconceptualize the notion that we humans are acting—as Latour says—“alone on stage?”[3] As a pre-reading and writing response prompt for the semester—one to which we would return several times—I asked students to consider how the agents of change we studied (including Makandal) create a “redistribution of agencies,” in non-human terms, or, in Latour’s terms, away from the idea of human agents and passive environments for human use. In early writing responses, students addressed the relationship between humanity and nature as a one-way (human) act upon a passive landscape and communicated that humanity has changed from its prior mysterious and perfected reality. With each writing assignment, these assumptions became less reliable.

Unit 1 began with a coupling of Audre Lorde’s “Of Generators and Survival-Hugo Letter,” and a viewing of excerpts from Spike Lee’s documentary about Hurricane Katrina, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. The essay assignment asked students to respond to one of these two central texts, either by adapting Lorde’s use of the genre of the letter, or by responding to the way in which Lee’s story creates a collectively drawn view of history from personal perspectives. The assignment asked students to write about how one or multiple survivors’ stories create a view of history, of culture, of nature, or of human nature. Some students chose to respond to Lorde’s letter-diary about Hurricane Hugo, which is addressed to “a friend” and written from the morning after the Hurricane hit the island of St. Croix. Others responded to one or some of Lee’s interviewees—all survivors of the hurricane that struck the Gulf Coast in 2005. Essential concerns for discussion were the ways in which Lorde’s description of reality shifts when places and structures familiar to her are erased and replaced by a post-disaster landscape. A few essays reflected on the ironic idea of time after the storm as something that had produced a kind of ‘new’ place or paradise without a name in ways that evoked a consideration of the experience of reality in indigenous or even pre-colonial time. In contrast, those same student papers also remarked on her negative presentation of American military aid workers on the island, and these responses, which I presented in excerpts on screen, sparked conversation about the role of the United States in the world and in relation to natural resources, violence, assistance, and intervention. Still others responded on more intimate terms by meeting Lorde’s address to a “friend” as a challenge to act and empathize as a friend would. In one case, a student from New York whose family had survived serious damage to their home during Hurricane Sandy was able to speak for the first time in writing about the way in which the experience of environmental disaster both changed her ideas about community and environmental politics. Most strikingly, her essay argued for viewing nature as a continual disruption rather than a perfection to which we should return, and her paper’s conclusion added that comparing her story of survival to Lorde’s brought this idea forward in her thinking.

The second unit of study focused on themes of community, activism, and the ways in which humans interact with environment. We opened with an in-class viewing and critical discussion of still photos from the installations of contemporary Chicago artist and activist, Theaster Gates, who transforms condemned buildings into livable spaces by gathering repurposed materials.[4] Second, we viewed a 2009 documentary entitled Collapse, which features one long interview with peak oil activist and post-petroleum prophet and whistle-blower, Michael Ruppert, who provokes his audience by claiming that capitalism, socialism, and communism are all anachronistic ideas since they all depend on unsustainable economic and ecological paradigms. Though the syllabus was heavy with visual arts, students also read supplementary critical articles including Diane Solway’s, feature article on Theaster Gates, which names him a “Change Agent.”[5] In closing the unit, we viewed and read a transcript of Slavoj Zizek’s lecture on ecology in Examined Life, which is filmed in a dump. Zizek claims that we should get used to thinking about nature as a concept that includes garbage, and reconsider nature to be a phenomenon that moves continually toward a state of artificiality rather than purity (2008).[6] The essay assignment for this second unit asked students to reflect on their own roles as agents of change in the world and within their environments of origin (whether characterized as rural, urban, academic, familial, or otherwise.) Because Ruppert encourages the idea that humans should consider strategies for survival through the application of knowledge in their local community and economy, we brought to the table what parts of our educations and experiences would contribute to a post-petroleum world, and asked how we might conceptualize a possible world-life after fossil fuels. Students made lists of items for essential bug-out bags—of only necessary materials they could carry or bring with them to a place without petroleum luxuries, and we theorized ways in which we could rethink “economy” without paper money: what would we value and why? What currencies might replace paper money, or even oil, if it became unavailable or useless? In groups, I asked students to combine their essential materials, strategies, and talents toward building a local community while each student was randomly assigned a set of fictional social characteristics (on paper literally pulled from a hat). For example, one student was a medical doctor, and another had never attended college, but knew how to farm. This in class exercise built on the idea that community is necessary in order to survive. Students led discussions based on what they learned from working together as a heterogeneous group of people. Our discussions moved toward considerations of factors such as environmental and social health, questions regarding individual vs. collective power, the role of hierarchy in forming social order, as well as other concerns about differently-abled persons and the role of or need for pleasure in a space in which there is no certain “future” as once expected.

Finally, for Unit 3, I introduced Account of a remarkable Conspiracy in context of excerpts from two other narratives of Makandal. The first, “King Caesar, or The Negro Slaves,” is a pantomime first performed in 1801 that is based on another British newspaper version of the same Account.[7] Projecting song lyrics from the pantomime, students remarked on how this historical figure becomes a romanticized noble savage. However, they also noticed that even the pantomime preserves the central idea of Makandal as a knowledgeable slave with understandings of medicine and the ability to bring relief or pleasure to his community. On the other hand, in chorus, his plantation patients (especially the female slaves) sing praises for his medicine in ways that become more sexually suggestive than other versions. In contrast and as the text’s introduction suggests, we read from an excerpt of C.L.R.’s presentation of Makandal in his well-known history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins.[8] At this point, I asked students to reflect on how Makandal’s use of poison/medicine or knowledge of plants in the world of the plantation makes his rebellion an example of human-environmental relations that produces a redistribution of agency. In follow up, I asked: How did Makandal evoke change in comparison to Theaster Gates? How can we compare the way in which Makandal changed history through gathering materials for charms and poisons from the detritus of the plantation to Gates’ use of the material of urban environments characterized by poverty and neglect? In addition, how would we characterize his methodology, politics, and the role of environmental materials on the plantation in terms of the way that Zizek asks us to reconsider the definitions of nature?

In one important homework assignment, students kept a triple-entry journal in which they annotated their thoughts about how the three Makandal stories compared and how the three genres of newspaper, pantomime, and history reproduced this historical person/character differently. They returned to class to present one idea about what these versions, in turn, tell us about the production of history and the role of creative literature (what we might assume to be fiction or more subjective versions of experience) in that production. The triple-entry journal, which required that students keep a three-column running tab of their readings, revealed that the world of Makandal was in some ways romanticized in James’s history just as much as in the pantomime. Students agreed that Account seems to strike a balance between Jacobins, which in sharp contrast, graphically tells of physical and psychological suffering under slavery, and “King Caesar,” which amplifies some aspects of the account’s biographical details on Makandal for performance, such as his “strong natural turn for music,” the “amusement” he brought to captives of the plantation, and the love story between Makandal and Samba (renamed Ada in the pantomime).[9]

Perhaps the most interesting part of the unit, after reading three texts on Makandal from three genres, was performing a simple gallery walk in which students responded and read each others’ responses to the stories of Makandal and his legacy. I put several comparative excerpts from each text on three walls of the classroom. On one side, from Account, students could read the description of Makandal’s intellectual talents as well as the passage in which the overseer gives Makandal fifty lashes.[10] From The Black Jacobins, students read from James’s description of the middle passage and of the way in which slavers regarded Africans as “half-human” without intelligence.[11] In an excerpt from “King Caesar,” I combined three lyrical passages: Merry Mackendal’s [sic] “Solo,” the Overseer’s “Air,” in which he commands the slaves to work or else get the “arcau” or whip, and finally, Mackendal’s transformation into King Caesar following a meeting with La Rapiniere, a poison-making chieftain in a secret maroon encampment.[12] Using small post-it notes, students circulated silently and placed anonymous comments on the wall by each sample. Their responses ranged from commentary on Makandal as a leader to expressions of shock and disgust with the history of torture James relates in Jacobins. Some among many comments included were: “A leader is someone who chooses where his followers graves will be,” “It amazes me how much one person can affect so many people and cultures,” “I was not aware that poison was such a part of rebellion and that it was even used on other slaves,” “Makandal’s passion is commendable,” and “I am surprised that he was so highly regarded, since he poisoned his own people,” and “I am interested to learn much more about this man.” Surprisingly to me, several comments concerned the topic of terrorism, and students were most interested in extending this topic into the discussion that followed the gallery walk during the same class. “Does terrorism begin with revolution and revolutionaries?” one asked. On another note, a student had commented: “Was Makandal a revolutionary hero or a terrorist? After all, he and his followers killed 6,000 people.” Another response said, “It makes sense that we have never heard of him, since a slave would have been seen as a villain instead of a hero.” The same note commented that C.L.R. James had a duty to retell the story of the Revolution including Makandal’s early chapter, since “today, black men are still viewed as villains.” And yet another post-it note asked how we can determine what the difference is between a terrorist and a “righteous rebel,” and questioned what role that the writing of history played in this respect. These were difficult conversations to manage as a whole group following the gallery walk, and I refrained from doing much more than facilitating discussion by setting up a circle of chairs and directing students to call on one another after speaking. One intensive portion of the conversation drew correlations to contemporary associations with revolution and violent resource appropriation, e.g., issues of neo-colonial appropriation of oil in places like Iraq and legal fights over water rights in the United States. Overall, the exercise was a useful one for building openness in dialogue in a diverse and concerned class of students following the attacks in Paris that semester. Finally, the writing assignment for the Makandal unit asked students to define one of the major concepts we had encountered and questioned during the course of the semester through a close reading of one or more of the accounts of Makandal.

As a last note, the class also enjoyed playing Assassin’s Creed: The Americas, which is a hands-on experiential strategy and role-playing (RPG) video game that features former Makandal followers who re-emerge to plan resistance activities on a Louisiana plantation. I brought a PS Vita handheld device to class, and students took turns playing, but we also viewed a brief introduction to the game that makes a point of informing the audience about Makandal and his appearance in “pre-game” history.[13] Students wrote a brief reflection on pre-game history as a concept that allows us as players (and authors of video games) to participate in history as an ongoing reality. Through inhabiting the role of a female maroon who plots against the plantation owners, we navigated multiple landscapes and eco-systems such as plantations and swamps as well as investigated strategic Makandal-inspired weapons kept in an encampment, including a collection of charms, poisons and medicines, in an effort to understand how and why his story continues to be retold.

Makandal’s injury on a sugar gin and subsequent revenge against the plantation elite through the use of indigenous knowledge of plant poisons makes him an early anchor at the birth of modernity (and the plantation). Because Makandal’s resistance to slavery also formed a resistance to monocultural production of sugar and cotton, we were able to produce discussion and writing that considered other ways of thinking about the relationship between environment and human relations beyond the common binary of human and non-human agency. As a teacher and researcher of Makandal literature, I was glad to see that students could use writing to correlate neo-colonial injustices by/against humans and the environment. Students made connections between Makandal’s history and contemporary modes of resistance that had not occurred to me, and so the reward of the experience is seeing how teaching can create new directions in my research.

Kate Simpkins, “The Absent Agronomist and the Lord of Poison: Cultivating Modernity in Transatlantic Literature, 1758-1859” (PhD diss., Northeastern University, 2016).
Bruno Latour, “Fifty Shades of Green,” 2015, http://environmentalhumanities.org/arch/vol7/7.12.pdf. Accessed 21 January 2016.
Ibid.
“Theaster Gates – Dorchester Projects,” accessed August 11, 2014, http://theastergates.com/section/117693_Dorchester_Projects.html.
Diane Solway, “The Change Agent,” W Magazine, May 17, 2013, http://www.wmagazine.com/culture/art-and-design/2013/06/theaster-gates-chicago-artist.
Astra Taylor et al., Examined Life (New York: Zeitgeist Films, 2008).
John Cartwright Cross, King Caesar or The Negro Slaves. (London, 1801).
L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2 edition (New York: Vintage, 1989).
“Just Teach One: Account of a Remarkable Conspiracy (Makandal),” accessed February 13, 2016, http://jto.common-place.org/account-of-a-remarkable-conspiracy-makandal/.5-7.
Account, 4-5.
James 10, 17.
Cross, 10, 12, 15.
“Assassin’s Creed: The Real History – ‘François Mackandal’ – YouTube,” accessed November 4, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9ztpdSCyW4.

“Illustrious Villain”: On teaching “The Account of a Remarkable Conspiracy Formed by a Negro of the Island of St. Domingo”

Martha Elena Rojas
University of Rhode Island

I assigned “The Account of a remarkable Conspiracy formed by a Negro of the Island of St. Domingo” in a graduate seminar in early American literature. The course focused on the emergence of the interlinked discourses of “Americanness” and of what today we have come to call “race.” From the vantage of our own position in the 21st century, existing in what one of my students referred to as “an already racialized world” in which “[i]t is hard for us to see racial identity as something entirely in flux or uncertain, even as we come up against examples of this in everyday life,” the seminar considered how “race” came to be defined and defining for what would become the United States. We began the course by reading Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, chosen as a relatively recent example of the impetus to craft and re-craft foundational narratives, and because Morrison’s historical fiction animates those usually left silent in the historical record.

During the week in we read “The Account of a Remarkable Conspiracy” or “Makandal,” as we came to refer to it, the seminar also read “Theresa, a Haytien Tale,” Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence and portions of Notes on the State of Virginia. For a week late in the semester, this turned out to be too much material. It was also not quite enough. I underestimated the knowledge my students would already possess (many were or had been educators) and in retrospect I recognize that more context was needed: about the West Indies, St. Domingue, and the Haitian Revolution and also about the revolution in the United States, as well as the cultural and political contours of the early republic. Though I directed students to the critical pieces in Ed White and Duncan Faherty’s “Suggestions for Further Reading,” helpfully included in the JTO edition of “Makandal,” next time I will explicitly assign them.

I underestimated, too, the magnetic pull of Thomas Jefferson. As a consequence, despite an excellent opening graduate presentation devoted to “Makandal” and “Theresa,” the seminar devoted most of its attention to Jefferson. In the future, I anticipate devoting more time to each of these texts, either spacing them over several seminar sessions/lectures or constructing a multi-week unit on the Caribbean colonies and the Haitian Revolution for the course.

Nonetheless, the juxtaposition of these texts generated productive conversation. By this point in the semester, the group was well attuned to the disparate and exclusionary way the designation of “citizen” could function among and within different populations. They engaged in a lively discussion of what “Haytien” could have and might mean. This, in turn, led to an interrogation of Jefferson’s uses of “population,” and his reservations about “migration.” The seminar returned to the varying constructions of “the people” in “Makandal,” the writings of Thomas Jefferson, and “Theresa,” and to the performative, improvised aspects of “country” and “nation” across all of these texts.

They had read Gordon Sayre’s chapter, “Logan” from his The Indian Chief as a Tragic Hero, and that essay directed their attention to representations of indigeneity in Notes, and to the construction (in this section) of “whiteness” against the category of the “Indian.” They were particularly taken with a line in Logan’s speech —“This called on me for revenge. I have sought it: I have killed many. I have fully glutted my vengeance,”— and the dissonance between the elegance of its language and the “savagery” it encoded. They observed a similar dynamic at work in “The Account of a remarkable Conspiracy” with its ambivalent presentation of Makandal as an “illustrious villain,” an “ambitious fanatic” and as “distinguished among the negroes.” Noting how this complicated binary notions of hero/villain, the seminar was also eager to discuss the forms “heroism” took in the context of resistance and revolution. Turning their attention to the titular character of “Theresa, a Haytien Tale,” they considered gendered expectations of the “heroic,” what constitutes agency, and speculated about why certain actions were presented as passive, or the result of irresistible forces of circumstance.

Reading “The Account of a remarkable Conspiracy formed by a Negro of the Island of St. Domingo” along with “Theresa, A Haytien Tale” had the effect of making the seminar tune into the contrasting tropes of masculinity at play in the narrative. They observed that Makandal is characterized by his qualities, not his physical attributes: learned, passionate, vengeful, both generous and treacherous. While the other noteworthy characters in “Makandal,” Zami and his lover Samba, display their nobility foremost through their exquisite bodies, incomparable physical beauty and their affection for each other. “Makandal,” variously presented as an enslaved African, as an escaped slave, a leader of and inhabitant among maroons, a murderer of “negros,” and a would-be assassin of the French Creole or European population of the island, is also Muslim, literate (a reader and writer of Arabic), and extraordinarily knowledgeable in botany and the medicinal properties of plants. Makandal’s fall from virtue is marked in “The Account of a remarkable Conspiracy formed by a Negro” by his ability to plot and conspire, to use his considerable knowledge to enact his own will rather than putting it at the service of someone else’s. His character should recall Melville’s Babo, that “hive of subtlety,” for students familiar with Benito Cereno — a pairing I will consider next time I teach the undergraduate survey course — and as such holds a place in a genealogy of fictional texts in which the intellect of black figures is underestimated and yet persistently feared for its capacity for vengeful insurrection.

Revolutionary Style and Founder’s Chic

John Funchion
University of Miami

A group of graduate students discussed “Account of a remarkable Conspiracy formed by a Negro in the Island of St. Domingo” in a seminar that I structured around “Revolution and Recovery.” The course began with a discussion of Cathy Davidson’s Revolution and the Word and the expansion of the canon in the 1980s. In the weeks that followed Davidson, we read work by Charles Brockden Brown and Susanna Rowson. In addition to attending to print and literary history, we read a wide array of political documents such as The Declaration of Independence and The Articles of Confederation alongside theoretical work by Antonio Negri and Hannah Arendt. These readings set the stage for “Account,” a literary work exceptionally well-suited to a seminar invested in staging debates over the canon and over competing accounts of revolutionary politics. In addition to reading “Account,” students also looked at Leonora Sansay’s Secret History and a chapter from Michael Drexler and Ed White’s The Traumatic Colonel.

Examining the story of Makandal and the Haitian Revolution at this point in the semester led immediately to a reassessment of how we had been thinking about the state of the canon and of the field of early U.S. literary studies. Rather than approaching this debate as a largely resolved one, the stakes of what counts as U.S. literature or the literature of the Americas seemed just as pressing in 2016 as in the early 1980s. Our discussion began with a brilliant set of questions prepared by two graduate students, Samina Ali and Ray Leonard. Given our graduate program’s strength in Caribbean Studies, both of them incorporated their own intellectual commitments to that field into our conversation about the assigned reading. Many of their questions revolved around Drexler and White’s notion of “Founder’s chic.” We had already enumerated the pitfalls of mythbusting the hagiographic discourse surrounding the Founders, so they considered how both Secret History and the Makandal narrative might be studied from a mythic-literary rather than from an empirical perspective.

What kind of myth did the story of Makandal create? Our perception of its cultural power shifted remarkably, depending on whether we approached it within the context of recovery or revolution. In the case of the former, the narrative disrupted the transatlantic, Anglo-American framework that we had brought to bear on previous readings. In one clear sense, the story played upon the fears of slave insurrection that many white Americans harbored. Maniacally desiring to possess women without their consent and murder Europeans without mercy, Makandal also embodied a fusion of melodramatic archetypes already in transatlantic circulation. My graduate students recognized how he behaved in ways both reminiscent of Belcour in Charlotte Temple and Queen Mab in Edgar Huntly. But his occult proficiency at poisoning also called to mind the practice of voudou, implicitly caricatured here as superstitiously menacing “voodoo” (here my students appropriately drew upon the work of my colleague Kate Ramsay). By pulling us toward the Caribbean, however, “Account” further helped to disrupt the overemphasis earlier generations of literary critics and historians had placed on New England literary production during the post-Revolutionary and antebellum eras. Even as it participated in the creation of a mythology of its own, “Account” demanded further revision of U.S. cultural history.

Unlike the white revolutionaries of North America, Makandal remains in a state of perpetual revolution. The notion that a Haitian could found a state lay beyond the imagination of this narrative. “Account,” in my seminar, became another way of understanding the ascent of “Founder’s chic.” Whiteness figures as a fundamental quality of what it means to be a founder, and Makandal reinforced that perception. Blackness is the quality that renders Makandal unredeemable, because—as several students would later note—the insurrectionary activity of Makandal and his “zealous partizans” did not appear all that different in character from the actions of William Gilmore Simms’s white partisans (we read Simms later that semester).

My students concluded that while “Account of a remarkable Conspiracy formed by a Negro in the Island of St. Domingo” belongs to the white racist mythology of the Haitian Revolution, it is also reminder that we are only recently grappling with the formative role the Haitian Revolution played historically and presently in U.S. literature and culture (thanks especially to work by Ashli White, Marlene Daut, and Colin Dayan as well as the recently published collection of essays edited by Drexler and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon). Teaching the story of Makandal thus underscored that the process of literary recovery is a messy but necessary and unfinished business.