Keywords for American Cultural Studies, Second Edition

Bruce Burgett, Glenn Hendler

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780814707975
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Since its initial publication, scholars and students alike have turned to Keywords for American Cultural Studies as an invaluable resource for understanding key terms and debates in the fields of American studies and cultural studies. As scholarship has continued to evolve, this revised and expanded second edition offers indispensable meditations on new and developing concepts used in American studies, cultural studies, and beyond. It is equally useful for college students who are trying to understand what their teachers are talking about, for general readers who want to know what’s new in scholarly research, and for professors who just want to keep up. Designed as a print-digital hybrid publication, Keywords collects more than 90 essays—30 of which are new to this edition—from interdisciplinary scholars, each on a single term such as “America,” “culture,” “law,” and “religion.” Alongside “community,” “prison,” "queer," “region,” and many others, these words are the nodal points in many of today’s most dynamic and vexed discussions of political and social life, both inside and outside of the academy. The Keywords website, which features 33 essays, provides pedagogical tools that engage the entirety of the book, both in print and online. The publication brings together essays by scholars working in literary studies and political economy, cultural anthropology and ethnic studies, African American history and performance studies, gender studies and political theory. Some entries are explicitly argumentative; others are more descriptive. All are clear, challenging, and critically engaged. As a whole, Keywords for American Cultural Studies provides an accessible A to Z survey of prevailing academic buzzwords and a flexible tool for carving out new areas of inquiry. Visit keywords.nyupress.org for online essays, teaching resources, and more.

1

Affect

Ann Cvetkovich

“Affect” names a conceptual problem as much as a tangible thing. As such, it is best understood as an umbrella term that includes related, and more familiar, words such as “feeling” and “emotion,” as well as efforts to make distinctions among them. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) traces the history of the term to the seventeenth century, aligning it with “desire” or “passion” and opposing it to “reason.” Further specifying that “affect” is both a “mental” and a “bodily” disposition, the OED sets in place a persistent ambiguity that challenges distinctions between mind and body. More technical uses of the term emerge from mid-twentieth-century scientific psychology, where “affect” designates sensory processes or experiences prior to cognition and distinguishes such sensations from the cognitive processes that produce emotions (Damasio 1994). Because affect, emotions, and feelings stand at the intersection of mind and body, cognition and sensation, and conscious and unconscious or autonomic processes, it is not easy to identify the material basis for their social and historical construction, which includes parts of the body (nerves, brains, or guts) as well as environments and transpersonal relations.

As the recent declaration of an “affective turn” in American studies and cultural studies suggests (Clough and Halley 2007; Gregg and Seigworth 2010), the current prominence of “affect” as a keyword represents the convergence of many strands of thinking. Foundational for both fields are French theorist Michel Foucault’s histories of the social construction of categories such as body, gender, and sex that seem like natural phenomena. These categories form the basis for modern notions of subjectivity and power that conceive of the self as possessing a depth or interiority evident in the supposed natural truth of feelings (Foucault 1976/1990). Following this line of research, the affective turn takes up debates about the construction of binary oppositions between reason and emotion and the reversal of hierarchies that subordinate emotion to reason as part of a mind/body split often associated with the seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes. In the Cartesian worldview, passions, instincts, and feelings are unruly and uncontrollable, requiring subordination to the rational control of reason and the mind—a hierarchical ordering that has sometimes led to a romantic embrace of their subversive power. In response to such reversals, Foucault’s critique of the idea that freedom of expression and resistance to repression constitutes political liberation has inspired cautionary accounts of the politics of affect. Efforts to historicize subjectivity and to conceive of the self in non-Cartesian terms have required new conceptions of affect, emotion, and feeling. Indeed, the use of the term “affect” rather than “feeling” or “emotion” arguably stems from the desire to find a more neutral word, given the strong vernacular associations of “feeling” and “emotion” with irrationality.

Within cultural studies, the project of accounting for social life and political economy through everyday and sensory experiences, including feelings, has an extensive history. Affect, emotion, and feeling have been central to long-standing efforts to combine Marxism and psychoanalysis and to theorize the relations between the psychic and the social, the private and the public. Psychoanalysis has used “affect” and related categories as part of a vocabulary for drives, unconscious processes, and the psychic energies created by both internal and external stimuli. The term “affect” is also present in social and cultural theories that seek alternatives to psychoanalytic models, such as Eve Sedgwick’s use of Sylvan Tompkins, who describes nine affects that link outward behavior with mental and physical states (Sedgwick and Frank 1995; Sedgwick 2003). Whether drawing on psychoanalysis or on its alternatives, accounts of psychic life and felt experience have been important to cultural studies in its efforts to explain the social and political uses of feeling (including the divide between reason and emotion) and to negotiate differences of scale between the local and the global, the intimate and the collective. Raymond Williams’s elusively suggestive term “structure of feeling” (1977/1997, 128–35) is a good example of the use of the vocabulary of feeling to describe how social conditions are manifest in everyday life and how felt experience can be the foundation for emergent social formations. Rather than being attached to one theoretical school or discipline, “affect” has named multiple projects and agendas, including broad inquiry into the public life of feelings. Following Williams, the vernacular term “feeling” remains a useful way to signify these projects, which extend beyond the question of specifying what affects are.

Though the affective turn has conceptual roots in Marxism and psychoanalysis, it has also been significantly catalyzed by feminist critiques of the gendering of dichotomies between reason and emotion, which made their way into the academy from popular culture and political movements. The 1970s feminist cultures of consciousness raising reversed the disparaging association of femininity with feeling and, in a version of the discourse of sexual revolution, celebrated emotional expression as a source of feminine power associated with social and political liberation (Sarachild 1978; Lorde 1984b). Subsequent generations of scholarship in feminist cultural studies have been more skeptical about an easy reversal of the reason/emotion binary, the often essentializing assumption that women are more emotional or nurturing than men, and claims for affective expression’s liberatory possibilities. Instead, this scholarship has provided rich and nuanced histories of the centrality of feeling to the relations between private and public spheres and especially of how the intimate life of romance, the family, and the domestic sphere serves as the foundation for social relations of power (Davidson and Hatcher 2002). In the field of American studies, scholarship on categories such as sentimentality, sensationalism, sympathy, melodrama, and the gothic has shown how cultural genres, especially fiction, produce social effects through mobilizing feeling (Tompkins 1985; S. Samuels 1992; Cvetkovich 1992; Halberstam 1995). Attention to affect is the culmination of several decades of feminist scholarship on clusters of related terms such as “domesticity,” “family,” and “marriage,” as well as on the historical continuities that link women’s popular genres, such as domestic and sentimental novels, theatrical melodrama, and women’s film (L. Williams 2002; Berlant 2008).

The far-reaching impact of feminist approaches to feeling and politics, including their relevance to histories of racism and colonialism, is exemplified by scholarship on the sentimental politics of abolition in texts such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852/1981), nineteenth-century slave narratives, and contemporary neo-slave narratives. Stowe uses representations of slave mothers separated from their children and innocent slaves being beaten to generate appeals to universal feeling as the marker of the humanity of slaves and as the inherent result of witnessing the evils of slavery. Scenes of sexual intimacy between master and slave prove more affectively complex, however, in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861/2001), in which Harriet Jacobs grapples with how to represent her sexual relations with white men without losing the reader’s sympathy. Toni Morrison’s historical novel Beloved (1987) further challenges the tradition of the sympathetic slave mother by telling the story of a woman who tries to kill her three children in order to protect them from slavery, aiming for a more complex representation of the affective life of slavery than stark scenes of innocence and guilt. The powerful fusion of secular forms of religious feeling and maternal sentiment in abolitionist discourses provides a model for the representation of social suffering that has had a lasting impact on U.S. cultural politics in both popular entertainment and the news media. What Lauren Berlant (2008) has called the “unfinished business of sentimentality” persists not just in popular genres produced for women but also in realist and documentary forms of representation, including human rights discourses, in which spectacles of suffering are used to mobilize public action. Affectively charged representation is part of everyday life across the political spectrum, and images of political prisoners at Abu Ghraib, children of war, and unborn babies prompt ongoing debate about the politics of sensation, sentiment, and sympathy (Berlant 2004; Staiger, Cvetkovich, and Reynolds 2010).

Another important area of scholarship in which feeling and affect are central are discussions of trauma and cultural memory that have emerged in American studies as it reckons with the legacies of slavery, genocide, and colonialism. Although the urgencies of Holocaust memory have inspired the creation of public memorials and testimony as forums for emotional expression in Europe and elsewhere, slavery and genocide provide a specifically U.S. genealogy for trauma studies and cultural memory. In seeking to address traumatic histories, public cultures of memory raise questions about what emotional responses constitute a reparative relation to the past and whether it is ever possible to complete the work of mourning, particularly while social suffering is ongoing. Drawing on psychoanalytic categories of mourning and melancholy, critical race theory and queer studies (especially work on AIDS) have produced new theories of melancholy or unfinished mourning as productive rather than pathological. These fields depart from psychoanalytic categories of affect and trauma in favor of vernacular vocabularies of affect in indigenous, diasporic, and queer cultures (Crimp 2002; Eng and Kazanjian 2002; Cvetkovich 2003). Queer studies has also made important contributions to embracing ostensibly negative emotions such as shame and melancholy, as well as theorizing queer temporalities that favor affectively meaningful representations of the past rather than accurate or realist documentation (Love 2007; E. Freeman 2010).

While these critical histories of affect as a cultural and social construct have been extremely generative in American studies, a second important line of research has returned to theories of embodiment and sensation to ask new questions about the material basis for affect, emotions, and feelings. The use of the term “affect” by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to describe the impersonal intensities, forces, and movements that cause bodies and objects to affect and be affected by one another has been especially influential in recent scholarship (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Massumi 2002b; Stewart 2007; Puar 2007). Deleuze’s work usefully displaces psychoanalysis and decenters the individuated subject of cognition, locating unconscious bodily processes and sensory life at the center of social life. Deleuze has also been a major catalyst for new materialist notions of affect that distinguish more sharply between “affect” and “emotion,” preserving “affect” for noncognitive processes and using “emotion” to describe socially constructed behavior.

Clearly, the multidisciplinary question of what it means to be a sensory being cannot be confined to one theoretical school, and American studies and cultural studies have been invigorated by proliferating forms of affect studies. Phenomenology and cultural geography have provided resources for materialist histories of sensory experience as well as new accounts of the relations between bodies, objects, and environments and of terms such as “mood” and “atmosphere” (Ahmed 2006; Thrift 2008). Neurobiology and cognitive science have been embraced by scholars in the humanities interested in the interface between brain and body in constituting sensory experience, including reading and other forms of aesthetic and cultural reception (E. Wilson 2004; Zunshine 2006). Animal studies and ecocriticism contribute to a posthumanist concept of humans as integrated with animals, things, and nature and to understandings of affective experience as bodily sensation and vital force (Haraway 2008; Grosz 2011; J. Bennett 2010). With the project of overturning old hierarchies between mind and body, cognition and feeling, reason and emotion largely accomplished, affect studies is now promoting new interdisciplinary inquiry across science and humanities. In so doing, it offers answers to the long-standing problem in social theory of how to think the relation between the psychic and the social worlds and provides resources for building new cultures of public feeling.

2

African

Kevin K. Gaines

The keyword “African” has been and remains a touchstone for African-descended peoples’ struggle for identity and inclusion, encompassing extremes of racial denigration and vindication in a nation founded on the enslavement of Africans. Both the African presence throughout the Americas and its significance for constructions of national culture in the United States have remained fraught with racialized and exclusionary power relations. In a nation that has traditionally imagined its culture and legislated its polity as “white,” “African” has often provided for African Americans a default basis for identity in direct proportion to their exclusion from national citizenship.

As scholars ranging from Winthrop Jordan (1969) to Jennifer L. Morgan (2004) have noted, there was nothing natural or inevitable about the development of racial slavery in the Americas. Nor was the emergence of the racialized category of the African as permanent slave foreordained. European travelers who recorded their initial encounters with Africans did not perceive them as slaves. But their ethnocentric self-regard informed their descriptions of Africans as extremely different from themselves in appearance, religious beliefs, and behavior. European constructions of the bodily difference, heathenism, and beastliness of Africans mitigated occasional observations of their morality and humanity. As European nations experimented with systems of forced labor in the Americas, initially enlisting indigenous peoples and European indentured servants as well as Africans, ideologies of African inferiority facilitated the permanent enslavement of Africans as an expedient labor practice. With the legal codification of lifetime African slavery, European settlers completed the racial degradation of African men and women, a process anticipated in Enlightenment conceptions of difference and hierarchy. In keeping with the contingency of its origins, the idea of the African in America was subject to change and contestation. An awareness on the part of travelers and slave owners of ethnic and regional distinctions among peoples from Africa yielded to the homogenizing idea of the African. Throughout the eighteenth century, slave owners in the Caribbean and North America attributed rebellions to “wild and savage” Africans, leading, on occasion, to restrictions on the importation of African slaves.

During the nineteenth century, free African Americans held an ambivalent attitude toward all things African. It could hardly have been otherwise, given the existential burdens of chattel slavery and the exclusion of Africa and its peoples from Enlightenment ideas of historical agency, modernity, and civilization. Prominent African Americans such as the shipping merchant Paul Cuffee championed emigration to West Africa. Despite his personal success, Cuffee despaired at the prospects for African-descended people to achieve equality in the United States. Inspired by the global antislavery movement, as well as the establishment of the British colony of Sierra Leone as an asylum for Africans rescued from the slave trade, Cuffee believed that emigration would allow Africans and African Americans to realize their full potential. But Cuffee led only one voyage of settlers to West Africa, leaving his entrepreneurial and evangelical objectives unfulfilled. African American enthusiasm for emigration was further dampened by the rise in the early nineteenth century of an explicitly racist colonization movement. The impetus for this movement, which sought the removal of free blacks and emancipated slaves to Africa, came from powerful whites, including slave owners and members of Congress.

Free blacks resented the proslavery motives of colonizationists and increasingly rejected an identification with Africa largely as a matter of self-defense. While the initial wave of schools, churches, mutual-aid societies, and other institutions established by northern free blacks in the late eighteenth century often bore the name “African,” this nomenclature was largely abandoned by the mid-nineteenth century. The reasons for this shift were complex, including demands for U.S. citizenship, black abolitionists’ opposition to the colonization movement, the dwindling population of African-born blacks, and an acknowledgment, at some level, of a multihued African American community resulting from the systemic rape of enslaved black women by white male slave owners. Above all, the term epitomized the stark conditions of exile faced by African Americans, excluded from U.S. citizenship and society and deprived of an affirming connection to an ancestral homeland. Even for leaders of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, founded in Philadelphia in 1816 when white Methodists refused to worship alongside blacks, wariness toward Africa and a deep suspicion toward its indigenous cultures informed their efforts to evangelize the continent (J. Campbell 1995).

While emigration and colonization movements resulted in the resettlement of relatively few African Americans, the violent exclusion of African Americans from southern politics after emancipation renewed the appeal of Africa as a foundation of African American identity. As Africa came under the sway of European missions and colonialism, the involvement of AME Church missions in Africa and the scholarship of Edward W. Blyden (1887/1967) helped promote among some African Americans a general interest in the welfare of Africans and a greater tolerance for indigenous African cultures. Blyden’s work was part of a long-standing African American intellectual tradition seeking to vindicate Africa by documenting its contributions to Western civilization (Moses 1998). Such scholarship, combined with the worldwide impact of Marcus Garvey’s post–World War I mass movement, helped sow the seeds of African nationalism and anticolonialism. The Garvey movement, which flourished amid a national wave of urban race riots and antiblack violence, built on popular emigrationism and inspired African-descended peoples all over the world with its secular gospel of economic cooperation toward African redemption, even as some African American intellectuals dismissed it as a quixotic “back to Africa” movement. Such controversy may well have informed subsequent debates among black studies scholars over whether it was valid to speak of African cultural retentions, or “survivals,” among the descendants of enslaved Africans in the Americas. The sociologist E. Franklin Frazier and the social anthropologist Melville Herskovits represent the opposing positions in the debate (Raboteau 1978). Frazier believed that the traumas of enslavement and the rigors of urbanization had extinguished all cultural ties to Africa. Herskovits based his support for the idea of African cultural retentions on his research on Caribbean societies and cultural practices. If recent scholarship in history, anthropology, linguistics, religion, literary and cultural studies, historical archaeology, and population genetics is any indication, Herskovits’s position that some African cultural practices persisted in the Americas appears to have prevailed.

As African national independence movements capitalized on the decline of European colonialism after World War II, the idea of the African underwent yet another profound revision in the minds of many African Americans, from intellectual and popular stereotypes of African savagery to images of black power and modernity. The emergence of newly independent African nations beginning in the late 1950s became a source of pride for many people of African descent. Even as blacks believed that the new African presence in world affairs signaled the continent’s full participation in, if not redefinition of, the modern world, members of the U.S. and European political establishment opposed African demands for freedom and true self-determination, trafficking, more or less discreetly, in racist attitudes. In 1960, widely touted as “the year of Africa,” more than thirty African states gained national independence; that year also witnessed the bloody repression of demands for freedom in apartheid South Africa and the Congo. For many northern urban African Americans a generation removed from the violence of the Jim Crow South and facing marginalization in such cities as New York, Chicago, and Detroit, new African states and their leaders, including Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, rivaled the southern civil rights movement in importance. When Lumumba was assassinated during the civil disorder in the Congo fomented by Belgium, African Americans in Harlem and Chicago angrily demonstrated against the complicity of Western governments and the United Nations in the murder. In doing so, they joined members of the black left and working-class black nationalists in a nascent political formation that envisioned their U.S. citizenship in solidarity with African peoples, uniting their own demands for freedom and democracy in the United States with those of peoples of African descent the world over (Singh 2004; Gaines 2006).

Within this context of decolonization, the term “African” became a battleground. To the architects of U.S. foreign policy, African American solidarity with African peoples and their struggles exceeded the ideological boundaries of U.S. citizenship. Afric...