Dr. J. Michelle Coghlan
American Studies, University of Manchester
AMER 30422: Spring 2022
Office hours: Mondays 2-3 pm (Sam Alex N1.10) & Thursdays 2-3 pm (via Zoom)
Email: [email protected]
Course Overview
This interdisciplinary course unit explores the figure of revolution and the role of radical memory in American culture. Because the time of revolution is always “out of joint”—always looking backwards to 1776 and 1789 and forwards to the flash of the wished-for/ever-feared yet-to-come—our study will proceed on a loosely chronological approach that begins with two takes on revolution in contemporary U.S. culture: Occupy: Scenes from Occupied America, a collection of eyewitness accounts from NYC, and Christopher Nolan’s nightmarish vision of class warfare in The Dark Knight Rises. We’ll then turn to the ways that nineteenth-century American writers and orators recollected the 1791 Haitian revolution as an abolitionist clarion call, a revenant of 1776, and a terrifying portent of antebellum slave revolt before exploring the ways that returning to the Paris Commune of 1871 allowed Americans to refashion their own revolutionary past even as it gave them a new road map for occupying revolution. We’ll conclude our study by examining the aftershocks and promise of revolution in a variety of literary and cultural responses to the 1886 Haymarket bombing and the 1968 trial of the Chicago 8 before considering where we go from here by way of Andreas Malm's recent book on climate activism, How to Blow Up a Pipeline. In addition to situating literary texts within their wider historical contexts, our aim in this module will be to link these cultural issues back to the larger question of the relationship between literary form and cultural memory, interrogating the ways that a variety of genre—among them, manifestos, poetry, oratory, realist fiction, and film—mediate and refashion national narratives of, as well as debates on, revolution and the larger meaning of American identity and democracy. This research seminar will also introduce you to a variety of relevant conceptual approaches to the study of media and cultural memory as well as radical forms and popular culture. Finally, it will give you the opportunity to hone your archival sleuthing skills in relevant digital archives and develop group presentations on your findings.
Required Texts (available at Blackwell’s on Oxford Road and via amazon.co.uk):
Carla Blumenkraz, Keith Gessen, et. al., eds. Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America. [Verso]
Leonora Sansay, Secret History: Or, the Horrors of San Domingo. [Broadview Press]
Jack London, The Iron Heel. [Penguin]
Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline [Verso]
All other required primary or secondary readings will be available online or in your Course Reading Packet.
Required Viewings
Week 2: Dark Knight Rises dir. Christopher Nolan (2012)
Week 10: Chicago 10: Speak Your Peace dir. Brett Morgan (2007)
Week 11: Punishment Park dir. Peter Watkins (1971)
The Trial of the Chicago 7 dir Aaron Sorkin (2020)
You are not required to purchase these films, but you are expected to view them in advance of the corresponding week’s seminar. All films are available in the High Demand section of UoM’s library.
Digital Archives
Some of our required texts will be available online through Cornell University’s Making of America collection or via Social Book, a collaborative reading platform being developed by the Future of the Book Institute. Links to these digital resources can be accessed through our course Blackboard site (see “Digital Resources and Links”). The Digital Resources tab on Blackboard also contains links to a variety of materials related to our course readings, including oral histories from Occupy Wall Street, documentary film footage from the 1968 demonstrations at the Democratic Party’s National Convention in Chicago, illustrations of scenes from the Haitian Revolution, photographs taken during the Paris Commune, newspaper coverage of the Haymarket anarchist trial, and essays by radical orators such as Voltairine de Cleyre. You are cordially encouraged to draw on these materials in your in-class presentations.
Social Bookmarking/Collective Occupations
Collective movements are at the center of our course: collaborative research and what scholars in the digital humanities have come to call “social reading” will therefore be at the heart of much of our work together this term. This means that we will experiment with a collaborative online collection of related course resources via Yammer as a way of building an archive of annotated supplementary course materials and digital resources which you can draw on in every piece of writing that you produce for this course. Over the course of term, you will be responsible for contributing and annotating 4 online finds to our collective archive (e.g., a relevant image/film/literary/sonic text; a contextualizing source such as a newspaper article or map; a passage from a scholarly book or article); you’re welcome to contribute additional ones as you find them.
A Word on Pedagogy, Attendance & Participation
A Level 3 research seminar is a collegial, semester-long conversation; attendance and engaged participation are vital to our process. Unlike a Level 1 or Level 2 lecture course in which one person (an expert lecturer) provides a body of knowledge that other people (students) write down, and where a tutor guides you through the content of the lecture and each week’s readings, our discussions each week will be based around your intellectual interests, responses, and curiosity. Each of you will also take a turn introducing the readings and opening our discussion by way of your group presentation. To make the most of our time together, I expect that you will have closely read the primary text and familiarized yourself with our secondary reading; I also expect that you’ll come prepared to discuss the readings, regularly contribute your insights and questions, and thoughtfully engage the ideas raised by your colleagues. This means that your regular attendance, preparedness, and active, collegial participation in our discussions will directly factor into your overall Participation mark.
American Studies, University of Manchester
AMER 30422: Spring 2022
Office hours: Mondays 2-3 pm (Sam Alex N1.10) & Thursdays 2-3 pm (via Zoom)
Email: [email protected]
Course Overview
This interdisciplinary course unit explores the figure of revolution and the role of radical memory in American culture. Because the time of revolution is always “out of joint”—always looking backwards to 1776 and 1789 and forwards to the flash of the wished-for/ever-feared yet-to-come—our study will proceed on a loosely chronological approach that begins with two takes on revolution in contemporary U.S. culture: Occupy: Scenes from Occupied America, a collection of eyewitness accounts from NYC, and Christopher Nolan’s nightmarish vision of class warfare in The Dark Knight Rises. We’ll then turn to the ways that nineteenth-century American writers and orators recollected the 1791 Haitian revolution as an abolitionist clarion call, a revenant of 1776, and a terrifying portent of antebellum slave revolt before exploring the ways that returning to the Paris Commune of 1871 allowed Americans to refashion their own revolutionary past even as it gave them a new road map for occupying revolution. We’ll conclude our study by examining the aftershocks and promise of revolution in a variety of literary and cultural responses to the 1886 Haymarket bombing and the 1968 trial of the Chicago 8 before considering where we go from here by way of Andreas Malm's recent book on climate activism, How to Blow Up a Pipeline. In addition to situating literary texts within their wider historical contexts, our aim in this module will be to link these cultural issues back to the larger question of the relationship between literary form and cultural memory, interrogating the ways that a variety of genre—among them, manifestos, poetry, oratory, realist fiction, and film—mediate and refashion national narratives of, as well as debates on, revolution and the larger meaning of American identity and democracy. This research seminar will also introduce you to a variety of relevant conceptual approaches to the study of media and cultural memory as well as radical forms and popular culture. Finally, it will give you the opportunity to hone your archival sleuthing skills in relevant digital archives and develop group presentations on your findings.
Required Texts (available at Blackwell’s on Oxford Road and via amazon.co.uk):
Carla Blumenkraz, Keith Gessen, et. al., eds. Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America. [Verso]
Leonora Sansay, Secret History: Or, the Horrors of San Domingo. [Broadview Press]
Jack London, The Iron Heel. [Penguin]
Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline [Verso]
All other required primary or secondary readings will be available online or in your Course Reading Packet.
Required Viewings
Week 2: Dark Knight Rises dir. Christopher Nolan (2012)
Week 10: Chicago 10: Speak Your Peace dir. Brett Morgan (2007)
Week 11: Punishment Park dir. Peter Watkins (1971)
The Trial of the Chicago 7 dir Aaron Sorkin (2020)
You are not required to purchase these films, but you are expected to view them in advance of the corresponding week’s seminar. All films are available in the High Demand section of UoM’s library.
Digital Archives
Some of our required texts will be available online through Cornell University’s Making of America collection or via Social Book, a collaborative reading platform being developed by the Future of the Book Institute. Links to these digital resources can be accessed through our course Blackboard site (see “Digital Resources and Links”). The Digital Resources tab on Blackboard also contains links to a variety of materials related to our course readings, including oral histories from Occupy Wall Street, documentary film footage from the 1968 demonstrations at the Democratic Party’s National Convention in Chicago, illustrations of scenes from the Haitian Revolution, photographs taken during the Paris Commune, newspaper coverage of the Haymarket anarchist trial, and essays by radical orators such as Voltairine de Cleyre. You are cordially encouraged to draw on these materials in your in-class presentations.
Social Bookmarking/Collective Occupations
Collective movements are at the center of our course: collaborative research and what scholars in the digital humanities have come to call “social reading” will therefore be at the heart of much of our work together this term. This means that we will experiment with a collaborative online collection of related course resources via Yammer as a way of building an archive of annotated supplementary course materials and digital resources which you can draw on in every piece of writing that you produce for this course. Over the course of term, you will be responsible for contributing and annotating 4 online finds to our collective archive (e.g., a relevant image/film/literary/sonic text; a contextualizing source such as a newspaper article or map; a passage from a scholarly book or article); you’re welcome to contribute additional ones as you find them.
A Word on Pedagogy, Attendance & Participation
A Level 3 research seminar is a collegial, semester-long conversation; attendance and engaged participation are vital to our process. Unlike a Level 1 or Level 2 lecture course in which one person (an expert lecturer) provides a body of knowledge that other people (students) write down, and where a tutor guides you through the content of the lecture and each week’s readings, our discussions each week will be based around your intellectual interests, responses, and curiosity. Each of you will also take a turn introducing the readings and opening our discussion by way of your group presentation. To make the most of our time together, I expect that you will have closely read the primary text and familiarized yourself with our secondary reading; I also expect that you’ll come prepared to discuss the readings, regularly contribute your insights and questions, and thoughtfully engage the ideas raised by your colleagues. This means that your regular attendance, preparedness, and active, collegial participation in our discussions will directly factor into your overall Participation mark.
Nicholas Mirzeoff, "Why I Occupy" (September 2012 Public Culture audioessay)
PAST GUEST SPEAKERS
On 3 February 2015 we had a Skype chat with NYC-based artist Zoe Beloff about the production of Berthold Brecht's The Days of the Paris Commune that she staged "in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street" from March-May 2012. You can learn more about the production here and read an interview about the production here.
Secret Histor[ies]: Or, the Horrors of St. Domingo
"Strangely, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Slovenian intellectual Slavoj Žižek can help contemporary readers understand the significance of Leonora Sansay's fascinating and only recently rediscovered novel of Caribbean intrigue, Secret History; or The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808). Defending the Iraq War, Rumsfeld classified the threats posed by Iraq's weapons: 1) known knowns, or what we know that we know; 2) known unknowns, or what we know that we don't yet know; and 3) unknown unknowns, or what we don't even know that we don't yet know. According to Rumsfeld, these unknown unknowns were the gravest threat, the unanticipated weapons of mass destruction secretly in manufacture or ready for deployment. Žižek responded to this 'amateur philosophising' in the Guardian. He cleverly noted that Rumsfeld left out a fourth category: 'the 'unknown knowns,' things we don't know that we know," or, "the Freudian unconscious.' Although Rumsfeld believed that the unknown unknowns were most disturbing, 'the Abu Ghraib scandal shows where the main dangers actually are in the 'unknown knowns,' the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values.'"
-- Michael Drexler, "The Displacement of the American Novel." (available here)
-- Michael Drexler, "The Displacement of the American Novel." (available here)
Re-possessing the Haitian Revolution
"Benito Cereno is one of the bleakest pieces of writing in American literature. Published in installments in late 1855, midway between the commercial and critical failure of Moby-Dick and the start of the Civil War, the novella reads like a devil's edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which had appeared a few years earlier. Where Stowe made her case for abolition by presenting Southern slaves as Christlike innocents and martyrs, Melville's West Africans are ruthless and deceitful. They act like Toms—but they are really Nat Turners."
--Greg Grandin, "Who Ain't A Slave: Historical Fact and the Fiction of 'Benito Cereno'" (available here) |
Benito Cereno: Some Key Contexts
1791: Haitian Revolution breaks out on Saint-Domingue/San Domingo.
1799: The setting of Benito Cereno aboard the San Dominick.
1805: Slaves aboard the spanish ship Tryal mutiny; U.S. captain Amasa Delano of the Perserverance spends nine hours aboard the ship unaware of the uprising and fully believing Benito Cereno is in control of the vessel. (Melville includes official testimony from the subsequent trial in his novella.)
1829: David Walker’s sensational Appeal is published in Boston. Walker addresses the pamphlet to “My dearly beloved Brethren and Fellow Citizens.”
1831: Nat Turner leads a slave rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia.
1850: Passage of the Fugitive Slave Law.
1851-2: Serialization of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; immediate backlash of Southern “Plantation Novels.”
1852: Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” address in Rochester, NY.
"Fellow Citizens—Pardon me, and allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in the Declaration of Independence, extended to us?” –excerpt from Douglass’s address
1855: Benito Cereno serialized in the October, November, and December issues of Putnam’s.
1791: Haitian Revolution breaks out on Saint-Domingue/San Domingo.
1799: The setting of Benito Cereno aboard the San Dominick.
1805: Slaves aboard the spanish ship Tryal mutiny; U.S. captain Amasa Delano of the Perserverance spends nine hours aboard the ship unaware of the uprising and fully believing Benito Cereno is in control of the vessel. (Melville includes official testimony from the subsequent trial in his novella.)
1829: David Walker’s sensational Appeal is published in Boston. Walker addresses the pamphlet to “My dearly beloved Brethren and Fellow Citizens.”
1831: Nat Turner leads a slave rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia.
1850: Passage of the Fugitive Slave Law.
1851-2: Serialization of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; immediate backlash of Southern “Plantation Novels.”
1852: Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” address in Rochester, NY.
"Fellow Citizens—Pardon me, and allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in the Declaration of Independence, extended to us?” –excerpt from Douglass’s address
1855: Benito Cereno serialized in the October, November, and December issues of Putnam’s.
Parisian Amazons and the Visual Cultures of Sentiment and Sensation
"The Commune has entered into the present in a new way--has become more visible, has taken on a new significance [in light of Occupy Wall Street and Tahrir Square]."
--Prof. Kristin Ross (NYU), in a podcast available here |
Radical Futures, Anarchic Archives
"Jack London’s writing routine was the single unchanging element of his relatively brief adult life. From the age of 22 until his death at 40, he wrote a thousand words every day, a quota he filled as a rule between 9 and 11 a.m. He slept for five hours a night, which left him with 17 hours of free time. But in his writing hours he was prolific: he produced short stories, poetry, plays, reportage, ‘hackwork’ and novels, many of them bestsellers. In 18 years, he published more than fifty books. ‘I’d rather win a water fight in the swimming pool,’ he said, ‘than write the great American novel.’"
--James Camp, "In the Boat of His Own Making," a TLS review available here.
--James Camp, "In the Boat of His Own Making," a TLS review available here.
"And when Modern Revolution has thus been carried to the heart of the whole world--if it ever shall be, as I hope it will--then may we hope to see a resurrection of that proud spirit of our fathers which put the simple dignity of Man above the gauds of wealth and class, and held that to, be an American was greater than to be a king."
--"Anarchism and American Traditions" (available here)
--"Anarchism and American Traditions" (available here)
Haymarket & American Memory"William Morris, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, and Friedrich Engels signed petitions on behalf of the [Haymarket] condemned, but Howells was virtually the only American writer to do so. 'For many weeks, for months, it has not been for one hour out of my waking thoughts,' he wrote. 'It blackens my life.' The newspapers mocked him for caring—over one of his heartfelt letters, the Chicago Tribune printed the snide headline “MR. HOWELLS IS DISTRESSED”—and called the anarchists Europe’s “scum and offal”; they were hyenas, wolves, vipers, savages, cutthroats, and fiends. One student of the Haymarket affair has called it 'the first major ‘red-scare’ in American history.' In November, 1887, Parsons, Spies, Engel, and Fischer were hanged. Howells began “A Hazard of New Fortunes” and poured into it his disillusionment and anger."
--Caleb Crane, "The Terror Next Time," a March 2006 New Yorker article on Haymarket available here |
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Making it New: Revolution and the Ends of History
Forms of Dissent & Backward Glances
"Peter Watkins’ films are always situated in an uneasy relation to their subject matter. His films of historical reconstruction (such as Culloden, Edvard Munch, and La Commune) and, as Stuart Cunningham terms it, of historical “pre-construction” (The War Game, Privilege, The Gladiators, and Punishment Park) consistently push the formal and thematic limits of documentary practice in depicting events that never happened, or those that possibly never will. In so doing, Watkins uses his documentaries not only to interrogate the historical or imminent periods he is depicting, but also to question the assumptions and conditions of the present time."
--Leo Goldsmith, "The Radical Histories of Peter Watkins" (available here, with thanks to Rachael Delphine for this find!)
--Leo Goldsmith, "The Radical Histories of Peter Watkins" (available here, with thanks to Rachael Delphine for this find!)