Abstract: This paper excavates the critiques of American empire implicit in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) by interrogating the play’s imperial geographies. Miller’s most enduring domestic drama about the disillusioned traveling salesman Willy Loman and America’s postwar economic boom is often read as a national allegory, but such interpretations downplay its subtle yet revealing gestures to the colonized peripheries of the globe. Drawing on world-systems analysis and travel narratives from the late nineteenth century, I explore the inter-imperial tethers between America and European colonialism by attending closely to minor character Ben Loman and his narrative of profiting off African diamond mines. In situating the inconsistent details of his story in their historical context, I demonstrate how Miller undermines the myths of American exceptionalism and rugged individualism by showing that Ben capitalized on the existing imperial infrastructure and extractive economies in the British colonies. Ben’s self-aggrandizement serves to obscure America’s role in the exploitation of Black labor and appropriation of African natural resources that contributed to the nation’s wealth. Miller’s allusions to these histories, though, also introduce a subtext of class struggle to the play that is largely absent from its plot. By analyzing Ben’s transatlantic travels, then, I argue that Death of a Salesman not only critiques the liberalism prominent during the postwar era, but also uncovers the interconnections between the domestic sphere and the global economy.
Bio: David Buchanan is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his MA in English from Penn and his BA in English and Economics from Fordham University. His dissertation explores representations of global capitalism in drama from the Atlantic region from 1944 to the present. His other research interests include global Anglophone literature, world-systems analysis, and issues of political economy including development, globalization, and neoliberalism. He recently published an article in the Journal of West Indian Literature about economic structural adjustment in Jamaica and Margaret Cezair-Thompson's novel The True History of Paradise.
Abstract: "Scholars, such as J. Gerald Kennedy (2005) and Maria Karafilis (2015), among others, have considered what Poe’s lifelong doubts about U.S. national myths and foundational narrative in his short stories can reveal to us. Karafilis explores Poe’s resistance to a utopic vision of progress and expansion—the manifest destiny—that depends on the massacre of Native Americans, recoding expansionist militarism, and dystopic vision of white annihilation. Likewise, Kennedy recognizes Poe’s frustration in Jacksonian America that glorifies the military heroes of “dubious achievement” while “demonizing” victims of national violence through the “cultural agendas” that are served through the “production of Indian warfare.” This scholarship helps us reconfigure the relationship between Poe’s Orientalist time-traveling and the U.S. militarism.
Building on this scholarship, I will turn to Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” (1844), which stages a problem of imperialism through a time-lapse narrative. The story depicts the broken-bodied “Bedloe,” a man from a past imperial struggle in India participating in a present imperial struggle in the United States. In my essay, I argue that Poe, in “Ragged Mountains,” is prefiguring the “White Man’s Burden” critique of empire—the view that empire most harms the white men who are its instruments. In making this claim, Poe subtly critiques the conventional criticism of imperialism, which attempted to be sensitive to the views of colonized people but also simplified and mischaracterized those people. Thus, I read Poe’s story as a critique of empire and a defense of imperial instruments.
Bio: Shaibal is a Third-Year English-PhD student at the University of Southern California. His research interests are in American Studies and American literature, particularly in the Long Nineteenth-Century. Much of his research investigates material culture at the intersection of empire, coloniality, and racial pedagogies. Currently, he is working on an essay-length project, interrogating Edgar Allan Poe’s Orientalist time-traveling in his short stories.
Abstract: This presentation explores an ineffable element of “the conditions that we exist within”—time. What temporalities dis/connect us? Building on my concept of “traumatic palimpsests,” wherein the shock of cultural or meteorological impact yields jumbled temporalities, I view the nation-state’s investment in linear time as a smokescreen of White supremacist heterosexist capitalist patriarchy (bell hooks). Fictions of progress and technocratic prowess merely renovate the master’s house (Lorde) while repressing the traumatic witnessing that might yield collective healing and freedom. Such fictions play out in career discourses even as disruptive global economies belie notions of a “career path” and reveal the hubris of “strategic planning” at individual or institutional levels. Today, we are careening in the other etymological sense of “career”—to veer in an unpredictable fashion. Yet in the enfolded fabric of spacetime, different timescapes may touch, propelling "wayward lives" (Hartman) to find a way from no way. Excavating Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being as a wisdom archive, I link conceptions of “deep time” (Dimock), “trauma time” (Edkins), and “time management for mortals” (Burkeman) to view a commitment to presence as emergent strategy (brown). Against the “politics of certainty” (Edkins), regimes of toxic positivity, and the “cruel optimism” (Berlant) of hegemonic tropes of mastery, planning, and progress, I explore a poetic history that can distinguish between jobs and work, productivity and legacy, control and creativity—enabling us to slip from the timescapes of neoliberalism into future memories of finding our way.
Bio: Karen Cardozo received her B.A. in English from Haverford College. After working in career services and completing a Masters in Higher Education Administration at Harvard, she served in several dean’s roles at Mount Holyoke before completing her PhD in English with a focus on race, gender and trauma in 20th century American literatures. She has published articles on academic labor, cultural/literary studies, higher education, and feminist science studies and has taught on all five campuses of the Five College consortium, including under the auspices of the APA Studies program she helped steer for over a decade. After getting tenure in Interdisciplinary Studies at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, where she directed programs in women’s and leadership studies, she took up executive leadership roles at Hollins University and Northeastern University, where she was AVP of Career Design until May 2021. Currently she is a lecturer in Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at UMass Amherst while working on a holistic career guide for PhDs and a new book of critical university/American studies: Healing from Knowing: Wayward Epistemologies.
Abstract: District nursing in rural Ireland at the turn of the twentieth century was hugely successful both at improving health outcomes and at destroying indigenous cultural practices. Contending with imperialism’s impact in cases like this, where those in positions of power are drawn from the colony’s population, and where the outcomes are both healing and harmful, requires contending with the intersection between universal material needs and cultural specificity. In this paper, I begin to tackle this problem by performing a close textual analysis of language and tone in Glimpses of my Life in Aran, a memoir by district nurse B. N. Hedderman, using the framework of vulnerability. Vulnerability is not only a negative state that unjustly afflicts people at certain intersections of social positions; it is also a universal feature of humanity and therefore fertile ground for connecting across differences. This nuanced view of vulnerability presents a morally ambiguous picture of the successes of the district-nursing scheme in the Irish revolutionary period.
Bio: Theo Campbell is an MA student in the English department at Villanova University. Their research focuses on depictions of political economy in nineteenth century Irish literature as well as on reading scientific and political texts as literature.