Christopher Castiglia

A “Hive of Subtlety”: Aesthetics and the End(s) of Cultural Studies

A talking head on the evening news in spring 2004, describing the Democratic primaries underway at the time, claimed that there was so little disagreement between candidates running for president that, at best, their differences were ‘‘aesthetic.’’ What the commentator meant by aesthetic is unclear; probably, he simply meant superficial. In the current cultural moment in the United States, aesthetics have come to seem superficial and even suspect; even television, in its distaste for anything that smacks of the scripted (much less crafted), has taken to passing off the implausible and highly artificial as ‘‘reality’’ to avoid the taint of the aesthetic. And in the public and professional cultures of academia, this aversion to aesthetics has been claimed as particularly salutary, allowing criticism and interpretation to concentrate on the real political matters that demand our attention. But let’s assume that the commentator was going a little deeper. Could he have meant, literally, that difference per se is (related to the generation of the) aesthetic? Ian Hunter describes aesthetics as the dreamwork of a fractured subject, a sanctuary of illusion where coherence and symbolic unity can be imagined. In an era in which subjects conceive of themselves increasingly as self-divided (between, just to take Jane Austen’s list, sense and sensibility or pride and prejudice), when American citizens in particular are encouraged to fracture their self-conceptions on the hard edges of panic and plentitude, suspicion and sympathy, particularity and universalism (the novels Austen never wrote), the desire for integration, however contingent and fleeting, drives the subject into a space withdrawn from the unsatisfying and incomplete work of intimacy and democracy. There the citizen can

Sex Panics, Sex Publics, Sex Memories

‘‘All profound changes in consciousness by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesia,’’ Benedict Anderson writes, explaining the rise of national identity from a deep historical and historiographical dialectic of memory and forgetting; ‘‘out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives.’’ 1 In this essay, I will focus on the formation of a subcultural or countercultural, rather than national or supercultural, identity. My premise will be that the last decade has witnessed a profound shift

Approaching Ahab Blind

Because it’s the alchemy of the crossing, the intersection, the braiding, far more than any chosen road: the encounter, the addition, the thick, unnamable, unreasonable, adherent richness of what comes between. Whether we want to or not, we get our feet wet. We are open systems: we are moved, changed, made more populous, made dif fer ent: by things, people, places we may not have intended, did not choose. And that stunning, often inexplicable betweenness is what makes us, propels us, returns us to ourselves over and again as amazed strangers, and sends us again, seeking, outwards.

Robert S. Levine, Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism

Over the past decade, numerous critics have reminded us that ‘‘race’’ and ‘‘nation’’ are ill-defined concepts, rendered unstable by histories of migration, colonization, cosmopolitanism, global economics, and their attendant intermarriages, rapes, and dispossessions. The intrinsic relationship among these dislocations since the very founding of the United States becomes uncontrovertibly clear in Robert S. Levine’s astute Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism. Throughout his lucidly compelling study, Levine shows how a hemispheric approach to conventional US literary nationalism generates—for contemporary critics as for writers in the early Republic—what Levine calls ‘‘a wise bafflement about the meaning, trajectories, and plots of the unfolding narratives of history’’ (2). Rather than resolving tensions or contradictions into positions proor antinationalism, for or against racial identity, Levine allows the fractures, fissures, and flip-flops of early national literature to reveal the complexity and range to the ongoing project of building and racializing a national literary canon. In a series of surprising and carefully crafted readings of four historical ‘‘episodes’’—Charles Brockden Brown and his writings on the 1803 Louisiana Purchase; David Walker and his response to the 1820 Missouri Compromise; the challenge posed throughout the 1850s to nationalizing conceptions of racial purity and uninterrupted bloodlines by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Hannah Crafts; and Frederick Douglass’s career-long fascination with Haiti— Levine cogently illuminates the complex relationships to race and nationhood held by these important literary figures. Arguing against a ‘‘critical bi-

Cartographies of Desire: Captivity, Race, and Sex in the Shaping of an American Nation (review)

Captivity narratives are tricky texts. On the one hand, they purport to convey a direct and deeply personal relation of the captive’s unexpected and often disorienting experiences among her captors. On the other hand, the texts often draw, sometimes heavily, from previous published accounts, biblical typology, ministerial discourse, and propaganda tracts, making it hard to distinguish ‘‘personal experience’’ from cultural commonplaces. While captivity narratives suggest an immediate relation of historical events, then, they simultaneously bury their own textual history, submerging their influences, predecessors, and coauthors beneath the foundations of a fictionally autonomous narrating ‘‘I.’’ Captivity narratives, furthermore, offer peepholes into cultures perceived as ‘‘other,’’ informing those in the captives’ ‘‘home’’ cultures of exotic practices and manners, of unchartered terrains. On the other hand, the ‘‘exoticism’’ of the narratives is always produced within a framework of the familiar: building upon the stereotypes and preconceptions of her home culture, the captive reproduces, even as she transgresses, the expected codes of alterity. Captivity narratives are, furthermore, documents of astonishing individual agency, testimonials not only to a captive’s ability to withstand often bitter ordeals using her intellectual and spiritual resources, but also to ruminate upon her experiences in often surprisingly imaginative ways. Yet no captivity is, finally, an individual experience. Despite her strengths, no captive survives by her wits alone, but must comprehend and assimilate the cultural codes of her captors, as well as those technologies of reincor-