Eric Olund

From savage space to governable space: the extension of United States judicial sovereignty over Indian Country in the nineteenth century

The ways in which Native American communities as well as American society at large are constituted today are in no small part the legacies of the Indian reform era, a period of time spanning the 1880s and 1890s during which the assimilation of Native people and their spaces into the American polity became an explicit project of US governance. This civilizing mission, however, was a double moment in American history, for not only was it intended to reconstitute ‘Indians’ as American citizens through the force of law - it also enabled a certain claim to innocence on the part of American society. In this paper, I explore ways in which the cant of conquest was transformed into the ‘gift’ of civilization through the arguments of reformers, including their appropriations of Native testimony. ‘Indians’ started to become ‘Native Americans’, citizens equal before (US) law in an ostensibly liberal polity, yet this assertion of Native equality was made on the terms of white reformers which erased colonialism from American political discourse.

‘Disreputable Life’: Race, Sex, and Intimacy:

Recent genealogies of the self-governing liberal subject have placed a renewed emphasis on the sphere of intimacy for its production. A critical narrative has emerged whereby liberal constructions of ‘appropriate’ intimacy as an autonomous sphere serves to actively disavow the racialisation and sexualisation of the liberal subject as white and heterosexual. At the same time, its constitutive outside, the nonwhite and the nonheternormative, positively require explanation to shore up its boundaries. Yet these widespread complementary assumptions miss places and times, such as the Progressive-era US, in which mainstream discourse has interrogated the liberal subject and has explicitly examined its heterosexual whiteness, while it has also strategically underexplained its others. Writings of Progressive figures such as Jane Addams and Louise de Koven Bowen on the productive regulation of intimacy, particularly marriage and prostitution, are put in conversation with current accounts of these issues. In doing so, the assumption of the liberal subjects invisibility to itself is problematised on an empirical basis, and the reification of distinctions between race and sexuality—even as their contingent production is being explained—is problematised at a theoretical level.

Traffic in Souls: the ‘new woman,’ whiteness and mobile self-possession

Traffic in Souls (Universal, 1913) inaugurated a spate of so-called white slave pictures at a time the US was experiencing a moral panic over prostitution. The film enacts a sexual and racial geography of the industrial city, one that is mobile and aleatory and requires a similarly mobile yet self-possessed subject to navigate it and its dangers successfully. Social reformers staffing the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures sought to steer the narrative outcome of the film toward a certain moral end, one that encouraged the production of a governmental subjectivity for its white, female spectators. This was a ‘constructive’ regulatory agenda toward sexuality through cinema that worked in tension with the more coercive statutory prohibition of prostitution, one that was thoroughly racialized through its exclusion of African Americans from concern.

Geography Written in Lightning: Race, Sexuality, and Regulatory Aesthetics in The Birth of a Nation

D. W. Griffiths racist masterpiece, The Birth of a Nation (1915), offers a potent imaginative geography of race, sexuality, and political agency that resonates nearly a century after its production. Prior to national release, the film was reviewed and approved by the National Board of Censorship, but on protest by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Board reviewed its decision and mandated changes. The archival traces of this moment are read through the concept of a “regulatory aesthetic,” which enables a fuller consideration of the aesthetic effects, both representational and affective, of regulatory, governmental, and political projects such as the production and regulatory reception of Birth and the geographies they produce. Through this lens, a reading of the National Boards changes to the film in tandem with the film itself shows that white agency was fractured by region, with the northern reformers staffing the Board claiming racial innocence to resist film director and southerner D. W. Griffiths incitement to historical complicity with racism and to bolster its claim to be a nationally representative yet “disinterested” regulatory body. Simultaneously the Board sought to marginalize African American agency, specifically the protests of the NAACP, through a combination of attenuating the affective links between black characters and white spectators and acquiescing to the films multiscalar geographies of exclusion from political space. This reading of the National Boards regulatory aesthetic underscores how cultural productions have material, political effects on and off the screen.

A Governmental Contest: Regulating US Cinema during the Progressive Era

Cinema was one of the hallmarks of early-20th-century urban life in the US, and it was quickly seen as symptomatic of a ‘crisis of governmentality’ faced by a rapidly changing society. Urban reformers debated how best to regulate it, but this was not only a debate over the unprecedented agency of the moving image itself. It was also a debate over how to understand the specific relations that constituted the ‘vulnerable and impressionable’ spectators who were the special concern of social reform and which underlay the more generic categories of population in reformist discourse. Also problematized was the precise relationship between spectators, the image, and the conditions of exhibition. While the problematization of cinema has largely been seen as a national phenomenon, in fact it had a geography that varied by scale and location and was constituted through local differences in population and governmental strategies.

Multiple racial futures: Spatio-temporalities of race during World War I

Using the example of the WWI-US Commission on Training Camp Activities, I argue that racialized biopolitical projects entail multiple, specific spatio-temporalities that seek to enact different racial futures within and between racial categories. What I call “victorious whiteness”, “infinite whiteness” and “static blackness” assembled by the Commission on Training Camp Activities, and an “advancing blackness” pursued by black elites in opposition, interacted in a complex topology of early 20th-century efforts to protect trainee soldiers from venereal disease, and efforts to prevent racial violence, both of which endangered the war effort and thus the future of the white nation. This counters a tendency in much current literature on racial biopolitics to assert a stark binary between and homogeneity within the facilitation of white futurity and black risk failure within individual biopolitical projects.

Book review forum

Ladelle McWhorter Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009, 440 pp.,

Public Domesticity during the Indian Reform Era; or, Mrs. Jackson is induced to go to Washington

27.95 paperback,

Cinema’s milieux: governing the picture show in the United States during the Progressive era

75.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-253-22063-9). Ladelle McWhorter begins Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-Ameri...