Browse

What happens if we abandon the assumption that a person is a discrete, world-making agent who acts on and creates place? This, this book contends, is precisely what occurred on eighteenth-century American plantations, where labor practices and ecological particularities threatened the literal and conceptual boundaries that separated persons from the natural world. Integrating political philosophy and ecocriticism with literary analysis, the book explores the forms of personhood that developed out of New World plantations, from Georgia and Florida through Jamaica to Haiti and extending into colonial metropoles such as Philadelphia. The book’s examination of the writings of naturalists, novelists, and poets; the oral stories of Africans in the diaspora; and Afro-American fetish artifacts shows that persons in American plantation spaces were pulled into a web of environmental stresses, ranging from humidity to the demand for sugar. This in turn gave rise to modes of personhood explicitly attuned to human beings’ interrelation with nonhuman forces in a process we might call ecological. Certainly the possibility that colonial life revokes human agency haunts works from Shakespeare’s Tempest and Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws to Spivak’s theories of subalternity. In this book’s interpretation, the transformation of colonial subjectivity into ecological personhood is not a nightmare; it is, rather, a mode of existence until now only glimmering in Che Guevara’s dictum that postcolonial resistance is synonymous with “perfect knowledge of the ground.”

While other scholars have demonstrated that the global marketplace is timeful and complex and not timeless and simple, my book is unique because I analyze how four academic groups-historians, economists, literary critics–and ecologist have responded to the failure of the prophecy of a new world. I am not aware of other scholarship that makes comparisons and contrasts among these four academic groups. I demonstrate that because of the long segregations of the physical sciences from the humanities and social science, historians, literary critics, and economists in the 1990s were not aware that the modem science of the Enlightenment that defined space as timeless had been replaced in the nineteenth century by the heretical sciences of geology, biology, and the physics of Einstein which defined space as timeful. Ecologists, who are aware of this revolution, have used the theory that nature is always timeful and complex to criticize the modem faith in a timeless, single global marketplace. I make a contribution by showing how the humanities have been moving toward the ecological critique of the modem metaphor of two worlds. They are seeing a single world that is timeful and complex.

This book presents a full biography of a key figure in Minnesota’s past: Thomas Sadler Roberts (1858–1946), a doctor for three decades, a bird lover virtually from birth, the father of Minnesota ornithology, and the man who, perhaps more than any other, promoted the study of the state’s natural history. Roberts came to Minnesota as a boy and began keeping detailed accounts of Minneapolis’s birds. These journals, which became the basis for his landmark work The Birds of Minnesota, also inform this book, affording a view of the state’s rich avian life in its early days—and of a young man whose passion for birds and practice of medicine among Minneapolis’s elite eventually dovetailed in his launching of the beloved Bell Museum of Natural History. Bird enthusiast, doctor, author, curator, educator, conservationist: every chapter in Roberts’s life is also a chapter in the state’s history.

Restaurant Republic examines the nascent restaurant landscape in Boston in its entirety, from the most plebian of eateries to the extremely elite and refined. Focusing on the rise of commercial dining in one specific city provides the opportunity to systematically explore the varied networks of public dining venues that catered to distinct groups of Americans. The story of why Americans embraced dining out and the wide variety of ways in which they began to do so is an important one. Restaurants were a major part of a growing trend in urban public venues dedicated to consumer leisure in the nineteenth century. Along with theatres, department stores, and hotels, restaurants provided a public stage at a time when, still fresh from their revolution, Americans were eager to enter into the public sphere and define themselves as a people. But perhaps more than these other public commercial spaces, restaurants were also sharply differentiated. Thus, the study of restaurant dining in this period provides an opportunity to cast new light on how Americans attempted to balance the revolutionary ideal of egalitarianism against a growing capitalist consumer culture that both reflected and contributed to social hierarchy.

A Shadow over Palestine brings a new, deeply informed, and transnational perspective to the decades and the cultural forces that have shaped sharply differing ideas of Israel’s standing with the United States—right up to the violent divisions of today. Focusing on the period from 1960 to 1985, author Keith P. Feldman reveals the centrality of Israel and Palestine in postwar U.S. imperial culture. Some representations of the region were used to manufacture “commonsense” racial ideologies underwriting the conviction that liberal democracy must coexist with racialized conditions of segregation, border policing, poverty, and the repression of dissent. Others animated vital critiques of these conditions, often forging robust if historically obscured border-crossing alternatives. In this rich cultural history of the period, Feldman deftly analyzes how artists, intellectuals, and organizations—from the United Nations, the Black Panther Party, and the Association of Arab American University Graduates to James Baldwin, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Edward Said, and June Jordan—linked the unfulfilled promise of liberal democracy in the United States with the perpetuation of settler democracy in Israel and the possibility of Palestine’s decolonization. In one of his last essays, published in 2003, Edward Said wrote, “In America, Palestine and Israel are regarded as local, not foreign policy, matters.” A Shadow over Palestine maps this jagged terrain on which this came to be, amid a wealth of robust alternatives, and the undeterred violence at home and abroad unleashed as a result of this special relationship.