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Ambitious Confusion: Recovering the Unthought in Contemporary Memorials to the Antebellum South

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Ambitious Confusion: Recovering the Unthought in Contemporary Memorials to the Antebellum South University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2015 Ambitious Confusion: Recovering the Unthought in Contemporary Memorials to the Antebellum South Aundeah Joann Kearney University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the African American Studies Commons, and the American Studies Commons Recommended Citation Kearney, Aundeah Joann, "Ambitious Confusion: Recovering the Unthought in Contemporary Memorials to the Antebellum South" (2015). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1805. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1805 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1805 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Ambitious Confusion: Recovering the Unthought in Contemporary Memorials to the Antebellum South Abstract Ambitious Confusion: Recovering the Unthought in Contemporary Memorials to the Antebellum South Aundeah J. Kearney Thadious M. Davis This dissertation examines how contemporary authors and artists who craft memorials to the antebellum South reconcile the presence of disruptive artifacts with narratives of history they inherit as members of a national collective, actively engaging with shared memories of critical moments in the nation’s past. In this study, I identify ambitious confusion as a generative state which moves beyond mere recognition of conflicting histories toward a memorial that successfully manages the reintegration of previously excised artifacts of history. I borrow the term “unthought” from Rinaldo Walcott, and deploy it rather than the more innocuous “forgotten,” to refer to these disavowed artifacts, as the term acknowledges the intentional actions that led to certain exclusions from the privileged narrative. Throughout the dissertation, I use ambitious confusion to read memorials that engage what I determine to be the four dimensions through which narrative is constructed as a rhetorical event: time, place, body, and law. In each chapter I demonstrate that an analytical posture informed by ambitious confusion illustrates how contemporary artists, for instance Kara Walker, and authors, such as Harryette Mullen, Natasha Trethewey, and Edward P. Jones, destabilize the boundaries that demarcate each of these four dimensions to provide space for the reintegration of the unthought. Attending to the formal qualities of the memorials, which include Walker's silhouette tableaux, and her more recent Sugarbaby, Mullen's Sleeping with the Dictionary, Trethewey’s Native Gaurd, and Jones' The Known World, ambitious confusion exposes fractally dense temporalities, slippery subjectivities, and a unique state of temporally ambiguous being which I call “static animation” as fecund sites for memorial projects. Memorial narratives, as continuously revised and performed rhetorical events, allow for understanding ambitious confusion as a new method of reading that can account for the diverse influences and innovative techniques that often surface in contemporary memorials as moments of disjunction or even nonsense. Ambitious confusion allows for reading not only memorials that blatantly resist the excision of the unthought, but also for looking again at memorial sites deemed beyond reclamation, such as controversial monuments to heroes of the Confederate Army, for the dynamism that belies voices long thought lost. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group English First Advisor Thadious M. Davis Keywords antebellum south, cultural studies, memory, narrative, poetry, slavery Subject Categories African American Studies | American Studies This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1805 AMBITIOUS CONFUSION: RECOVERING THE UNTHOUGHT IN CONTEMPORARY MEMORIALS TO THE ANTEBELLUM SOUTH Aundeah J. Kearney A DISSERTATION in English Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2015 Supervisor of Dissertation ____ ____________ Thadious Davis, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of English Graduate Group Chairperson _______________________ Melissa Sanchez, Associate Professor of English Dissertation Committee Thadious Davis, Professor of English Herman Beavers, Graduate and Undergraduate Chair, Africana Studies Salamishah Tillet, Associate Professor of English AMBITIOUS CONFUSION: RECOVERING THE UNTHOUGHT IN CONTEMPORARY MEMORIALS TO THE ANTEBELLUM SOUTH COPYRIGHT 2015 Aundeah J. Kearney This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-ny-sa/2. ACKNOWLEDGMENT Firstly, I would like to thank the members of my committee, Dr. Thadious Davis, Dr. Herman Beavers, and Dr. Salamishah Tillet. I greatly appreciate the advice and support they offered over the years and I know this project could not have been completed without their patient guidance. Secondly, I would like to express my gratitude to my friends and family who lent ear or eye and provided a much-needed sounding board throughout all stages of the project: my incredible wife, Mia Kearney-Bagneris, Sierra Lomuto, Omari Weekes, and Cameron Brickhouse, Debby Cougar, Jonathan Kearney. This list is by no means exhaustive, but many thanks as well to the following, whose encouragement and perspective brought levity and joy to the work: Michael Zamzam, Katrena Barnett, Ryan Morgan, Damond Harris, Melvin Labeaud, Osceola Scanlan, and Landries Jackson. iii ABSTRACT AMBITIOUS CONFUSION: RECOVERING THE UNTHOUGHT IN CONTEMPORARY MEMORIALS TO THE ANTEBELLUM SOUTH Aundeah J. Kearney Thadious M. Davis This dissertation examines how contemporary authors and artists who craft memorials to the antebellum South reconcile the presence of disruptive artifacts with narratives of history they inherit as members of a national collective, actively engaging with shared memories of critical moments in the nation’s past. In this study, I identify ambitious confusion as a generative state which moves beyond mere recognition of conflicting histories toward a memorial that successfully manages the reintegration of previously excised artifacts of history. I borrow the term “unthought” from Rinaldo Walcott, and deploy it rather than the more innocuous “forgotten,” to refer to these disavowed artifacts, as the term acknowledges the intentional actions that led to certain exclusions from the privileged narrative. Throughout the dissertation, I use ambitious confusion to read memorials that engage what I determine to be the four dimensions through which narrative is constructed as a rhetorical event: time, place, body, and law. In each chapter I demonstrate that an analytical posture informed by ambitious confusion illustrates how contemporary artists, for instance Kara Walker, and authors, such as Harryette Mullen, Natasha Trethewey, and Edward P. Jones, destabilize the boundaries that demarcate each of these four dimensions to provide space for the reintegration of the unthought. Attending to the formal qualities iv of the memorials, which include Walker's silhouette tableaux, and her more recent Sugarbaby, Mullen's Sleeping with the Dictionary, Trethewey’s Native Gaurd, and Jones' The Known World , ambitious confusion exposes fractally dense temporalities, slippery subjectivities, and a unique state of temporally ambiguous being which I call “static animation” as fecund sites for memorial projects. Memorial narratives, as continuously revised and performed rhetorical events, allow for understanding ambitious confusion as a new method of reading that can account for the diverse influences and innovative techniques that often surface in contemporary memorials as moments of disjunction or even nonsense. Ambitious confusion allows for reading not only memorials that blatantly resist the excision of the unthought, but also for looking again at memorial sites deemed beyond reclamation, such as controversial monuments to heroes of the Confederate Army, for the dynamism that belies voices long thought lost. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENT ................................................................................................ III ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... IV INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................. 1 THE SUBTLE GLUTTONY OF HOPE: THE POST-CIVIL RIGHTS GENERATIONS AND THE POETICS OF DEFERRAL .......................................... 23 Lyric Time .................................................................................................................................................... 28 Fractal Genealogies ..................................................................................................................................... 30 Sleeping with the Dictionary ........................................................................................................................ 36 Why you and I ............................................................................................................................................. 41 An incomplete lexicon ................................................................................................................................
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