LTWL 201
Spring 2011
S. Gillman
Office: 640 Hum
Hours: W 1:30-3PM
sgillman@ucsc.edu
Theory and Methods
Comparative Race/Slavery, Nation/Empire Studies: Pre, Post, and Beyond
This course will explore the theoretical problems and possibilities of comparative studies,
comprehensively defined as a linguistic, literary-historical, and geopolitical analytic,
focusing on the specific case study of the 19th-century United States and Cuba.
Rationale for this choice: not only to compare the specific histories of slavery and
abolition, revolution and independence in the US and Cuba, ”events” that are themselves
subjects of debate within each historiographic tradition, but also to foreground the long,
intertwined history of US-Cuban relations, and the global context of nineteenth-century
empire, predating the so-called Spanish-American War of 1898, so often taken as the
“beginning” of US imperialism. How are these contested histories produced and
represented in the dominant literary modes of nineteenth-century Cuba and the US?
To frame the issues, we will start with several historiographical essays on race and
ideology in “American” history, as well as two key essays by José Martí and W.E.B. Du
Bois on nationalism and transnational movements. A series of both explicit and shadow
pairings structures the subsequent readings: both Catharine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, a
historical novel from the first, Cooperian wave of Indian novels in the 1820s, and Helen
Hunt Jackson’s 1884 Indian “reform-romance,” Ramona, comment on the politics and
aesthetics of sentimentality, for which the paradigmatic text is Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s
Cabin. The classic Cuban sentimental, anti-slavery novel, Gertrudis Gómez de
Avellaneda’s Sab, provides both a comparative approach to the reformist tradition of
sentimentality and a bridge to one of the few, known, extant Cuban slave narratives, Juan
Manzano’s Autobiography, as well as alludes to the hybrid genre of the US slave
narrative (both Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs as shadow texts). On the
comparative uses of realism and romance in representing the contradictions of interracial,
nationalist movements, black nationalist Martin Delany and Cuban patriot Cirilio
Villaverde are paired. Finally, we will return to activist-intellectuals Martí and Du Bois,
in the context of ‘father’ of Filipino independence José Rizal, focusing on their
adaptations, recognized and unrecognized, of anticolonial sentimental traditions,
dominant and emergent in contemporary popular culture, to produce revolutionary
histories for their nations and for the transnational communities for which each is known.
Our texts, both literary and filmic, confront imaginatively the traumatic New World
history of slavery and empire that marked the founding of the modern nations of the
Americas and continues to haunt the present. Works from the turn-of-the-century U.S.,
when film first emerged as a viable commercial medium, turn back to the history of
slavery as they register the shift from slavery to emancipation and Reconstruction, from
the Civil War to an era of national reconciliation and imperial expansion. Our readings
from the same period in Cuba foreground the vexed ties between the histories of slave
revolt and national revolution, linking past slave conspiracies to later independence
movements. Fundamental to the course are questions about interrelationships between
particular narrative genres and modes (slave narrative, sentimentality, realism, romance)
and the representation of historical “events” (Indian removal, slavery and abolition,
national independence and transnational movements). As genres travel both spatially and
chronologically, how are they adapted to specific political and historical circumstances?
What narrative (or non-narrative) forms are available for the fictional reconstruction of
factual events and figures from the past? Why do some nations need other nations’
histories as models for their own? How do imaginative adaptations of conflicted
histories, such as those of slavery, rebellion and revolution, serve the needs of the nation
at moments of both national crisis and consolidation? How may we use literature, film,
and historiography to produce histories that compare slavery and resistance, nation and
empire, in the Americas?
Note: We will screen two films, D.W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation (1915) and
Humberto Solás, Lucía (1968).
Requirements
Written Assignments
1) Each seminar meeting, a team of two students will be responsible for facilitating class
discussion and organizing the class period. In preparing questions and ideas for
presentation, teams should feel free to draw on material outside of the course. A
bibliography of further reading might be useful. For any xeroxing that might be required,
you are welcome to use my course account at Humanities Academic Services. Members
of a team may organize the three-hour period in any way they wish; the goal is to
generate a lively discussion among those present.
2) The written component of the course consists of three short (2-3 page) response
papers, written in advance of class for the weeks of your choice, plus one longer (10-12
page) paper, due at the end of the quarter. The response papers are intended to focus
your specific interests in the material and provide an expanded basis for our discussions.
For the longer essay, everyone will have a choice of different approaches to the project.
You may explore a set of texts and issues from our course, or you may work on allied
materials of your own choosing (including a significant revision of a work-in-progress).
If you are working on your MA thesis, you may decide to complete a new section or to
revise and expand a piece you’ve already written. If you are currently working toward
your Qualifying Exam, you may choose to develop one or two topics, inspired by, based
broadly on, or taking off from the texts and issues we cover.
Texts (at Literary Guillotine, 204 Locust St.; 457-1195)
Martin Delany, Blake; or the Huts of America (1861-2)
Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Sab (1841)
Helen Hunt Jackson, Ramona (1884)
Juan Francisco Manzano, Autobiografía de un esclavo/Autobiography of a Slave
(1840)
Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie; or Early Times in the Massachusetts (1827)
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1850)
Cirilio Villaverde, Cecilia Valdés (1839; 1882)
Course reader: includes required theoretical, historical, and critical material.
Syllabus
--Week 1: Introduction
--Week 2: Comparative American Historiography
Req: Martí, “Nuestra América/Our America;” Du Bois, “The Conservation of
Races;” Cooper, “Race, Ideology, and the Perils of Comparative History;” Hortense J.
Spillers, “Introduction: Who Cuts the Border? Some Readings on ‘America,’” in
Comparative American Identities; Quijano and Wallerstein, “Americanity as a concept,
or the Americas in the modern world system;” Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation,
Class: Ambiguous Identities; Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History.”
Rec: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
of Nationalism; The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the
World; Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination; Paul Gilroy,
The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness; Walter LaFeber, The New
Empire; William Appleman Williams, Empire as a Way of Life (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1980); Lisa Brock and Digna C. Fuertes, Between Race and Empire:
African Americans and Cubans Before the Cuban Revolution; Stoler and Cooper,
“Introduction” to Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World; Penny M.
Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anti-Colonialism, 1937-1957;
Louis A. Pérez, Jr., The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and
Historiography.
--Week 3: Catharine Maria Sedgwick, HOPE LESLIE
Req: Shirley Samuels, ed., The Culture of Sentiment (essays by Lora Romero and Dana
Nelson); Hayden White, “Interpretation in History” and “Fictions of Factual
Representation,” in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism; “The Value of
Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in The Content of the Form: Narrative
Discourse and Historical Representation
Rec: Lydia Maria Child, Hobomok: A Tale of Early Times (1824); James Fenimore
Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (1826); Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood:
“Woman’s Sphere in New England, 1780-1835; Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The
Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building; Philip Gould, Covenant and
Republic: Historical Romance and the Politics of Puritanism; Jill Lepore, The Name of
War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity.
-- Week 4: Harriet Beecher Stowe, UNCLE TOM’S CABIN
Req: Fredrickson, “Uncle Tom and the Anglo-Saxons: Romantic Racialism in the
North;” Brown, “Getting in the Kitchen with Dinah: Domestic Politics in Uncle Tom’s
Cabin;” Romero, “Bio-Political Resistance in Domestic Ideology and Uncle Tom’s
Cabin; Tompkins, “Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Politics of Literary
History.”
Rec: James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel;” Ann Douglas, The Feminization of
American Culture; Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853).
-- Week 5: Helen Hunt Jackson, RAMONA
Req: Martí, “Prologo/Introduction” to Ramona; Roberto Fernández Retamar,
“Sobre Ramona de Helen Hunt y Jackson y José Martí/On Ramona by Helen Hunt
Jackson and José Martí;” Gutierrez-Jones, “Mission Denial” in Rethinking the
Borderlands; McWilliams, “The Fantasy Heritage” in North From Mexico.
Rec: Valerie Sherer Mathes, Helen Hunt Jackson and Her Reform Legacy; Tomas
Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California;
David J. Weber, “The Idea of the Spanish Borderlands,” in ed. David H. Thomas,
Columbian Consequences: Volume 3, The Spanish Borderlands in Pan American
Perspective.
--Week 6: Gómez de Avellaneda, SAB
Req: Sommer, Foundational Fictions; West, Tropics of History: Cuba Imagined
[overview of Cuban history].
Rec: Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650-1838; Rebecca J. Scott,
Slave Emancipation in Cuba; Adriana Mendéz Rodenas, Gender and Nationalism in
Colonial Cuba; Leslie Bethell, Cuba: A Short History; Philip Foner, A History of Cuba
and Its Relations with the U.S. (2 vols.); Jaime Suchlicki, Cuba, from Columbus to
Castro; Louis Pérez, Jr., Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution.
--Week 7: MANZANO, Autobiográfia/Autobiography
Req: Molloy, “From Serf to Self;” Ramos, “The Law Is Other;” Luis, “Textual
Multiplications,” in Literary Bondage; Knight, “Slavery, Race, and Social Structure in
Cuba During the Nineteenth Century.”
Rec: Autobiografia del esclavo poeta y otros escritos. Edicion, introduccion y notas,
William Luis; by Juan Francisco Manzano; William Luis, ed., Voices From Under:
Black Narrative in Latin America and the Caribbean (see essay by Richard Jackson);
William Luis, Literary Bondage: Slavery in Cuban Narrative; Richard L. Jackson, Black
Writers in Latin America (Chapter 2).
--Week 8: Delany, BLAKE
Req: Paquette, Sugar Is Made With Blood Ch. 1 (“Introduction”) and Ch. 9, “La
Escalera Reexamined”); Sundquist, “Delany and New World Slavery,” in To Wake the
Nations.
Rec: Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (“Concerning Violence;” “Pitfalls of
National Consciousness;” “On National Culture”); Vera Kutzinski, Sugar’s Secrets: Race
and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism; Wilson J. Moses, The Golden Age of Black
Nationalism, 1850-1925.
--Week 9: Villaverde, CECILIA VALDÉS
Req: Pacquette, Sugar Is Made With Blood (Ch. 3, "Cuban Whites and the Problem of
Slavery;” Scott, “Explaining Abolition.”
Rec: Doris Sommer, “Who Can Tell? Villaverde’s Blanks,” in Proceed With Caution,
When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas; Verena Martinez Alier, Marriage,
Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba; Norman Holland, "Fashioning Cuba," in
Nationalisms and Sexualities, ed. Andrew Parker et al; Richard L. Jackson, The Black
Image in Latin American Literature; Lorna V. Williams, The Representation of Slavery in
Cuban Fiction; George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and
Sexual Norms in Modern Europe.
--Week 10: José Martí, José Rizal, W. E. B. Du Bois [a selection of essays]
Req: Fernández Retamar, “Caliban;” David Harvey, The New Imperialism
[selections]; Harry Harootunian, “Some Thoughts on Comparability and the Space-Time
Problem,” “Problems of Comparability/Possibilities for Comparative Studies,” ed. Harry
Harootunian and Hyun Ok Park, boundary 2:32 (2005): 23–52; “’Nuestra América’: The
Art of Good Governance,” in Julio Ramos, Divergent Modernities.