Performng Bodies and Performative Texts
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
PERFORMING BODIES AND PERFORMATIVE TEXTS: THE BODILY CULTURE OF THE ANTEBELLUM UNITED STATES AND FLESHY WRITING A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY JEWON WOO IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY JOSEPHINE LEE, MICHELLE WRIGHT JULY 2013 © Jewon Woo, July 2013 i Acknowledgements This dissertation has benefited immeasurably from the responses of teachers, friends, and family. If I have omitted anyone as an oversight, then I want to apologize up front. I also want to note that any errors that may still exist in the dissertation are entirely my responsibility. It is my great pleasure to thank all of the people who have made it possible for me to write this dissertation. First of all, I am grateful to my advisers, Michelle Wright and Josephine Lee. They have been my idols because of their passion for scholarship, dedication to students, and beautiful minds. When taking Michelle’s “African Diaspora” seminar in 2008, I decided to work with her. She inspired me to work hard, pushed me to think critically and extensively, and warmly encouraged me to understand the value of my project. Even after her move to Northwestern, Michelle has never let me feel a distance between us by continuously advising me. Josephine’s seminar “Race and Performance” in 2009 became the foundation for my project. She led me to see the importance of performance, language, and the body in American literature. I stopped by her office whenever I needed someone who could listen to me. John Wright and Keith Mayes provided me with a model of the erudite yet approachable scholars to whom I aspired. Jane O’Brien at the Center for Teaching and Learning knows my humble beginning as a naïve foreign student. Although it was not her responsibility, she met me every other week to talk with me for the first three years at the University. Without her, I could not have overcome many obstacles I faced during the early years at the U. Without my friends in Korea, Iowa, and Minnesota, I would not have completed this dissertation. Jiyeon Byun, Sunyoung Cho, Soohyun Lee, Sook Lee, and I grew up together, and our friendship has enriched one another’s life throughout the past twenty years. Even though we now live far away from one another, this geographical distance never matters to solidify our friendship. When I studied at the University of Northern Iowa, Julie Husband noticed my needs, inspired me in and outside the classroom, and remains supportive of me. She and her husband, Jim O’Loughlin, show how a couple can wisely manage both family and academic life. I had so much fun with my roommate, Haley Thompson (Stemig), with whom I moved up to the Twin Cities together. Lucie Kotěšovská and I spent late evenings on talking about our dear home countries and now share our maternal joys. At the University of Minnesota, I am lucky to have friends who have showed warm, gentle, but constant affection toward me. I always miss the good time spent with Chang-hee Kim and Yeonbo Jeong who now teach in South Korea. Minsu Kim has read the Bible together since we met six years ago. I do not have to be other than myself when I am with her. Rachel McWhorter and I have been a wonderful dynamic duo in the classroom and church. If I want to visit the South, this “Bama” wonder woman must be the reason for my visit. I am lucky to have Eunha Na, a person with wisdom and good heart whom I have known for eleven years. Emmanuel Senewo, he is my brother. I am particularly indebted to my loving church family: the Tondras, the Titzlers, Mary Markgraf, Carol Fine, the Gumbrells, Wynn Richardson and Lori Mikesell, the Jamirs, Pastor Melanie, and Deena Strohman. I deeply appreciate that Donna Martinson and the ii Padgetts believe in me and support my family with their abundant love. To me the study of antebellum literature is perhaps an act of faith that I have learned from them, as this dissertation investigates how African Americans transformed antebellum America by rebelling against the unjust institution of slavery and racism (Romans 12). My study would not have been possible without my only one sibling, Kyungim Woo, who is a prolific writer and keen journalist. She patiently taught me how to read and write when we were little, respectfully challenged what I already had known, and has become a model of Big Sister. Her recent book publication of world classic literature reminds me of the amusing memories of those days when we read books together in Dad’s small library. My sincerely thanks go to my parents, Youngkyun Woo and Junghee Joo, who do not fully understand why I study literature but never fail to believe in me. My daughter, Danah, arrived when I was working on Sojourner Truth, and has given me indescribable joys of motherhood. I see that this happy, bright, and strong baby in the future will have Truth’s courage, wisdom, and compassion. Finally, I am deeply grateful to my partner, Hyunsoo Jang, for his unfailing support, sacrifice, and love. As an arduous scholar, passionate teacher, faithful friend, feminist husband, and loving father, he shows me the love that I did never imagine before meeting him. I cannot find a proper word to describe what he means to me. iii Abstract “Performing Bodies and Performative Texts” explores the reciprocal relations between black and white Americans in antebellum culture as both performers and observers. This dissertation covers the roughly twenty-year span, from the Amistad revolt in 1839 to the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, when the lived experiences of slaves were introduced ever more audibly and visibly through live testimonials at antislavery fairs in the North. Looking at sentimental novels, slave narratives, and the popular press in this period, I introduce the concept of “fleshy writing” as it helps us understand the bodily performances of racially and sexually embodied subjectivity. My dissertation moves in three important directions. First, it spotlights how participation in abolitionist discourse shifted antebellum American concepts of the conventional democratic subject from a disembodied-white-male to a corporeal-sensorial- performing individual. By expanding scholarly discourses on transcendentalism and sentimentalism, I maintain that this new bodily culture explains the dynamics between institutionalized power’s authority and an individual’s agency, between a performer’s expressiveness and an observer’s spectatorship, and between verbal performance and written texts. Second, my research envisions the body not only as a private and subjective site but also as an aggregate of politicized spaces. Through corporeal experiences, an individual could recognize and resist how dominant discourse controls over the self. Finally, my dissertation theorizes fleshy writing in order to explain how a subjective perception of the bodily experience constitutes a writer or storyteller’s language of agency. Fleshy writing reveals the process of ideological construction of the black body through various observers’ records of a black performer, and, by exemplifying how the black body produces a written text, breaks down the nineteenth-century cultural and political hierarchies of body/mind, illiteracy/literacy, and performance/written text. In advancing these directions, “Performing Bodies and Performative Texts” shows how performative aspects of antebellum culture are key to approaching themes of the collective double-consciousness of being seen and of seeing. The performance of ex- slaves’ bodies on actual and conceptual abolitionist stages prompted their observers to reconsider the integrity and political expressiveness of the human body as regulated by the States, commodified in a capitalist economy, and brutalized under slavery. At the same time, because free (both black and white) Americans were forced to prove their legitimacy under proslavery laws such as the Fugitive Slave Act, these Americans then identified themselves as the performing counterparts of the enslaved. The moments of a politicized body’s display in public stressed the human body as a means of affirming the humanity and civic interiority necessary for a democratic subject. By examining bodily representations and written texts about them in this period, “Performing Bodies and Performative Texts” argues for antebellum writers’ recognition of their own performing bodies as these bodies engage in collaboratively building American democracy through abolitionism. This dissertation consists of five chapters. The first two chapters argue that a black performer and a white observer reciprocally constructed each other in the era of antislavery movements. By juxtaposing Amistad African captives and Madison iv Washington from Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave (1852) as black performers, I point out that the interventionist nature of performance at antislavery meetings functioned as an educative tool to shape civic interiority of both black and white Americans. Chapter 1, “Staging Blackness: Amistad Africans on the Abolitionist Stage,” discusses the racial tensions between white observers’ spectatorship over black performers and these performers’ resistance to being made into spectacles. While white abolitionists tried to sensationalize the black body in public for their propaganda, the Amistad Africans frustrated them by performing their own rather than the abolitionists' stage directions. Furthering this performer-observer relationship, Chapter 2, “Performing Bodies: Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave,” suggests the example of a black performer who invites a white observer/reader to his situational stage and teaches him how to participate without ogling and thus fetishizing the black body in pain. Witnessing the former slave Washington’s heroism, a white sympathizer, Mr. Listwell, matures into an active abolitionist who performs for Washington’s rebellion on the board of the Creole. If abolitionists tried to appeal to observers’ sentiments by exhibiting ex-slaves’ bodies in public, sentimentalist women writers turned a private home into a place where public discourses on slavery would be tested.