Neither the Time nor the Place: The New Nineteenth-Century American Studies

By Christopher Castiglia and Susan Gillman

The usefulness of time and place as defining categories would seem to be baked into the very notion of nineteenth-century American literary studies, yet they have challenged scholars practically since the field's inception. In Neither the Time nor the Place seventeen critics consider how the space-time dyad has both troubled and invigorated Americanist scholarship in recent decades and make explicit how time and place are best considered in tandem, interrogating each other.

Taken together, the essays challenge depictions of place and time as bounded and linear, fixed and teleological, or mere ideological constructions. They address both familiar and unexpected objects, practices, and texts, including a born-digital Melville, documents from the construction of the Panama Canal, the hollow earth, the desiring body, textual editing, marble statuary, the sound of frogs, spirit photography, and twentieth-century Civil War fiction. The essays draw on an equally wide variety of critical methodologies, integrating affect studies, queer theory, book history, information studies, sound studies, environmental humanities, new media studies, and genre theory to explore the unexpected dimensions that emerge when time and place are taken as a unit. The pieces are organized around considerations of citizenship, environment, historiography, media, and bodies—five political, cultural, and/or methodological foci for some of the most provocative new work being done in American literary studies.

Neither the Time nor the Place is a book not only for scholars and students already well grounded in the study of nineteenth-century American literature and culture, but for anyone, scholar or student, looking for a roadmap to some of the most vibrant work in the field.

Contributors: Wai Chee Dimock, Stephanie Foote, Matthew Pratt Guterl, Coleman Hutchison, Rodrigo Lazo, Caroline Levander, Robert S. Levine, Christopher Looby, Dana Luciano, Timothy Marr, Dana D. Nelson, Ifeoma C. Kiddoe Nwankwo, Mark Storey, Matthew E. Suazo, and Edward Sugden.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: May 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9780812298277

Book preview

Cover Page for Neither the Time nor the Place

Neither the Time nor the Place

Neither the Time nor the Place

The New Nineteenth-Century American Studies

Edited by Christopher Castiglia and Susan Gillman

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2022 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved.

Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8122-5366-5

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8122-2511-2

Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8122-9827-7

Contents

Introduction

Christopher Castiglia and Susan Gillman

Part I. Citizenship

Chapter 1. Roma Redux: The Analogical Nineteenth Century

Mark Storey

Chapter 2. African Americans and the Panama Canal Zone as a Third Space

Ifeoma C. Kiddoe Nwankwo

Chapter 3. Something Awful in the Voice of the Multitude: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred on Power and Social Struggle

Dana D. Nelson

Part II. Environment

Chapter 4. Uneven Improvement: Swamplands and the Matter of Slavery in Stowe, Northup, and Thoreau

Matthew E. Suazo

Chapter 5. Vanishing Sounds: Thoreau and the Sixth Extinction

Wai Chee Dimock

Part III. Historiography

Chapter 6. Beyond Space: The Speculative Dimension of Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Edward Sugden

Chapter 7. Exorbitant Optics and Lunatic Pleasures

Timothy Marr

Chapter 8. The Other South: Time, Space, and Counterfactual Histories of the Civil War

Matthew Pratt Guterl

Chapter 9. Apocalypse Then: Southern Speculative Fiction, Slavery, and Civil War, 1836–1860

Coleman Hutchison

Part IV. Media

Chapter 10. Editing Melville’s Pierre: Text, Nation, Time

Robert S. Levine

Chapter 11. American Literary Studies @ Scale

Caroline Levander

Chapter 12. Place Out of Time: LatinX Studies, Migrant Fictions, and Israel Potter

Rodrigo Lazo

Part V. Bodies

Chapter 13. Shame and the Emotional Life of the Realist Novel

Stephanie Foote

Chapter 14. Ghosts of Another Time: Spiritualism, Photography, Enchantment

Dana Luciano

Chapter 15. Not to Mention: (the marmorean unconscious)

Christopher Looby

Notes

List of Contributors

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Christopher Castiglia and Susan Gillman

Time and place have challenged scholars of nineteenth-century American literature practically since the field’s inception. Especially over the past several decades, as both problem and possibility, they have troubled and invigorated Americanist scholarship, generating some of the most important turns in the field. To sample a few of the time-based questions that have arisen over the past decade: when the long nineteenth century begins and ends; whether periodization is a useful heuristic for studying literature and what other temporal models might serve in its place; how temporal scales and measurement have formed, deformed, and reformed nationhood; how and why time is queered; which temporal models have operated alongside and often in opposition to monumental or national time, sanctioned history, or imperial destiny; even the place of historiography as context for literary studies. Spatially, America as a stable object of study has been expanded, contracted, effaced, and estranged by an analogous set of place-based questions: the nation’s function in relation to region; the Black Atlantic; oceanic and archipelagic studies; the history of diaspora or borderlands; the transnational movements of people, cultures, languages, and economies; indigenous sovereignty and settler colonization; the place of the singular United States in the plural hemispheric Americas; the nation as an empire; the relationship of nation and state; and finally alternatives to the one-nation, one-language model. While it would be wrong to say that time and space have never been studied concurrently in recent decades, such studies remain the exception that proves the rule. For the most part critics have turned away from sustained investigations of time or space in ways that leave unexamined one category or even have reinforced one over the other.

The goal of this collection, in contrast, is to make explicit how time and place are structurally joined, are most productively analyzed in critical relation to each other. Different questions proliferate when these terms interrogate each other, as the variety of objects, methodologies, and perspectives represented by these essays demonstrates. How does the expansion of America to a hemispheric scale produce different temporal models or challenge the relation of text to context itself? What are the geopolitical locations in which disruptions of national temporalities occur, and what spatial logics do those disruptions involve? How is the queerness of time impacted by the integrity of bodies, or what different chronologies are produced on the commons?

We also bring time and place into the same critical frame to challenge the conventional coordinates that have separately and unequally organized scholarship in our own and allied fields, making collaborative conversations institutionally difficult. Two disciplines most clearly adjacent to literary and cultural studies are history (well known and the sometime object of field envy from literary critics) and geography (less well known, deserving of greater familiarity from literary perspectives). Historians have produced a substantial literature on the relations between the spatial and temporal turns in cultural and social history, while geographers have supplied their own critical self-reflection on the field’s engagement with emerging work on the interrelation of time and place from the 1960s to the present. Historians have repeatedly changed methodological practices in relation to seriatim turns (beyond the linguistic turn), whereas geographers, perhaps ironically, continually approach the place-time relation historically, as a simultaneity. Both disciplines are thus positioned to provide those in literary studies with instructively compatible rather than competing models of field self-criticism that respond differently to the same body of space-time theorists, from Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja, and David Harvey to Fernand Braudel.

Historians, for example, have debated the ubiquitous turns (cultural, linguistic, transnational, spatial) and their influence on social and cultural history while also engaging with big history and big data as parallel phenomena, counterpoints to the more intimate microhistories produced by the various turns.¹ Until relatively recently, traditional historical and geographic place/space, the grounds on which histories usually take place—nations, regions, and localities—had fixed borders defined by land, with human history written in relation to that place. But the limiting function of place remained for the most part unacknowledged, making temporal limitations seem to be coming from geographical fact, rather than the other way around. Now historians at the forefront of field innovation are engaged in a push for different geographical scales as measures of historical change, shifts that make clear how new spatial metrics generate different temporal ranges. Historians in Atlantic, hemispheric, and transnational studies have particularly taken up the challenge to define and defy the borders of a national place in tandem with changing concepts of historical time. Steven Hahn’s A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830–1910 (2016) argues, for example, that the imperative for conquest of places at home and abroad shaped the porous borders of the United States over a more extended time line, punctuated by what he calls the War of Rebellion (a.k.a. the Civil War) and defined by intervention in other civil wars, extending from the western hemisphere to the Pacific.² The downsides to this push beyond nationalism have not been ignored, among them the risks of assuming the advantage of global-sized spatial scales, characteristic of the capitalist present, as corrective to the artifice of the national and the imperial.³ Although one response from literary scholars to all this is to lament the trade gap with history, the contributors to our volume see far greater potential in making literary-historical use of this series of reflections on disciplinary methods in our field, nineteenth-century American studies, explicitly defined by its relations to time and place.

Geographers have produced an even more striking body of retrospective scholarship that looks critically and historically at the changing ways that place and time have been handled—together, separately, in tandem, at odds—in both physical and human geography. Increasingly, territoriality is recognized as a relational process, mutually constituted by spatialities and temporalities. Feminist geographer Doreen Massey’s oft-cited 1999 essay Space-Time,⁴ for instance, takes off from a speculative proposition: the possibility that there may be commonalities between physical geography and human geography in emerging ways of conceptualizing space, time and space-time (Massey 261). While human and physical geographies were long held apart, she says, by their relationship to physics as an assumed model of science (‘science’ and physics envy), the urge to think ‘historically’ is now evident in both physical and human geography (Massey 261). Massey’s essay was an overture to geographers working in fields very different from her own, an overture specifically made through the work of Jonathan Raper and David Livingstone, geomorphologists focused on the digital representation of complex coastal phenomena such as sea-level rise (where physicality and the sociopolitical intercept). Massey quotes Raper and Livingstone, specifically citing their argument against the traditional spatial modeling of environmental problems, dominated by more or less unthinking timeless, geometrically indexed (absolute) space, and the argument for a more self-conscious, object-oriented relative space in which time is a property of the objects (Massey, 262). Massey embraced Raper and Livingstone as physical geographers and fellow travelers alike, doing the kind of work with connections to my neck of the geographical woods: trying to rethink space as integrally space-time and to conceptualize space-time as relative . . . , relational . . . , and integral. . . . Sometimes it can make your head hurt to think in this way (Massey 262).

Self-mocking and at times strategically comic, Massey’s essay was followed by other, retrospective pieces that made it a touchstone in the developing disciplinary argument for reconceiving geography around a reconceiving of space-time. Raper and Livingstone themselves took on the Massey mantle two years later in an exchange written from their perspective as practitioners of geographical information systems (GIS) and designed to join the disciplinary debate through the history of the GIS community, looking back to earlier key figures (Henri Lefebvre, for example) just as geographers writing later (Robert Dodgshon’s 2008 essay, Geography’s Place in Time, reprinted in 2015, for example) also trace their roots to Massey.⁵ This geographical literature shares a self-reflective view, systematically brought to bear through a series of open-ended reflections, tracing an unfinished history from timeless space to spacetime in human and physical geography. Geography thus provides literary studies with a model of deep, disciplinary consciousness, disciplinary defined through the contours of the field itself and extending, capaciously, to cognate disciplines, most often a group of literary and cultural theorists, from Fredric Jameson to Edward Soja, among others, whose work is consistently engaged.

Other recent disciplinary innovations have involved explicit engagement with literature, language, and narrative, exchanges that have pushed conventional assumptions about time and space. Jane Bennett, for example, has brought together political science, environmentalism, and literature to explore eco-temporalities and spaces of vibrant matter often overlooked by humans. Bruno Latour has crossed disciplinary boundaries between literary studies, anthropology, and sociology to advocate for descriptive practices alert to emerging assemblages that don’t necessarily adhere to conventional sociological assumptions about space and time. The medical humanities have joined together the humanities, the social sciences, and medicine to imagine, through acts of storytelling and narration, new ways of training physicians through alternative models of caregiving. The new materialisms, arising from disciplines as diverse as philosophy, anthropology, and literary studies, have drawn attention to ontologies, (post)embodiments, and agencies existing apart from anthropocentric spatiotemporal concepts. These and other interdisciplinary explorations have used literature, language, and narration to explore new epistemologies of space and time.

These interdisciplinary conversations offer, by way of contrast, insight into a genealogy of literary studies, one that offers opportunities for disciplinary self-reflection. Theories of reading in the past—like those of geography and history—have involved conjoined temporal and spatial assumptions and practices rarely brought to the surface, much less interrogated. The New Critical ideal of the well-wrought urn, centered on the work of art disconnected from biographical and other historical contexts, produced a model of reading divorced, or freed, from particularities of time and place. When critics did address dimensions of time and place—as when René Wellek and Austin Warren claimed, Time and space in a novel are not those of real life, since fiction’s reference is to a world of fiction, of imagination⁶—the point was to separate the text from anything, even those most basic coordinates, outside itself. When history returned to criticism full throttle with the New Historicism of the 1980s and 1990s, literature again had a context in both macro- and microhistories, or, in the case of American New Historicists primarily influenced by Foucault, in the flexible temporal acts of genealogy. The point of such criticism, as Gregory Jay has asserted, was not simply to describe the past, but to change it (and so the present and future, too).⁷ Textual production moved away from authorial intent to the sociopolitical unconscious, while the temporal axis, as Jay’s comment suggests, shifted from the given teleology, the assumed progress of the Enlightenment male subject, to what geographers would call a world of multiple temporalities.

The return to (new) history coincided with the canon wars, in which authors forgotten due to race, class, sexuality, and gender entered, either expanding or busting, depending on one’s political perspective, curricula and philosophy of criticism. Yet the spatial locations of New Historicism frequently faded to the background. While a text’s historical moment became politically significant, where it was produced, although addressed, was rarely the featured player. And important recovery work often occasioned, as Jay’s comment makes clear, a problematic temporal assumption that not only did the past exist for our benefit but that its politics, cultures, and identities could without many contortions become reflections of ours. Criticism throughout the canon wars might well have benefited from interactions with temporal theorists working in the same period on the social construction of time (Lefebvre’s unevenness, Koselleck’s simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous, Fabian’s time and the other, Harootunian’s use of the Blochian idea of contemporary noncontemporaneity).⁸

In the wake of New Historicism and the canon wars, what Frederick Crews called the New Americanism produced myriad geopolitical analyses sensitive to time and place, with the added benefit, still to be fully harvested, of taking account of the languages in which texts are written, translated, and circulated. As transnational scholarship and its critique of the sovereign, exceptional, and imperial nation became hemispheric, oceanic, regional, and settler colonial studies, among others, history remained central. Revisionist accounts of the hemisphere, for example, were sparked by two centennials, the 1992 Columbian quincentenary of the renamed conquest (a.k.a. discovery) of America and the 1998 anniversary of the Spanish-American War (variously renamed to include Cuba). These commemorative events reflected and produced decades of borderlands scholarship by literary critics and historians working not only to dislodge 1865 from its centrality in U.S. national history but also to insert the alternate years of 1848 and 1898 as heuristics for fundamentally redefining what counts as American. And for the third and perhaps least appreciated dimension, American studies produced its own linguistic turn, bringing into view, if not always into the canon, a body of American literature written in languages other than English, which moves through multiple translations, adaptations, and significant editions and republications, each instantiation punctuated along the scales of time and place.⁹

For U.S. literary studies in particular, the potential three-dimensionality, operating simultaneously along axes of space, time, and language, is striking. These revisions of nineteenth-century American studies have opened numerous opportunities for examining the productive yoking of temporal, spatial, and linguistic analysis. From this perspective various historicisms have jostled for field dominance, with postwar New Criticism and 1980s New Historicism joined in American literary studies by the way they link temporal thinking with spatial underpinnings. The theoretical timelessness of the New Critics runs counter to their intensely local identification with a place in time, the regionalism of the southern agrarians defining the genres worthy of study, the well-wrought urns of what has become the global South. The New Americanists tested their Foucauldian theories of social power through a set of privileged genres, the old reliable spatially oriented regional, urban, and travel novels of the nineteenth century. Yet as the New Americanism has become institutionalized to the point of seeming synonymous with the field itself, its spatial, not primarily its temporal, theories have been most prominent. Looking at the titles of influential books in this period—Cultures of United States Imperialism, The Black Atlantic, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture, Writing to Cuba, Hemispheric American Studies, The Unsettling of America (and the list could go on)—one would easily see where, but not necessarily when, the study’s analysis is aimed. Paradoxically, the priority of place might itself be a function of time. Henri Lefebvre observes that the temporal disciplining of labor (and, one might add, biological reproduction) meant that other, non-work-related phenomena became associated with space. That separation of time and space—and the correlation of space and culture—was, for Lefebvre, a function of modernity, accelerated by nineteenth-century industrialization. The spatial turn of New Americanism might be said to reproduce modernity’s disciplinary hierarchy of time and place, as Harry Harootunian contends, in the process of critiquing other modern social constructions.

As this spatializing of American studies developed, a different critical movement, the mirror reflection of the one just described, analyzed time, often at the expense of place. Appropriately, given Lefebvre’s equation of space and modernity, queer temporal theory has shaped what Elizabeth Freeman calls a turn to the ‘premodern,’ not only to moments in time before the consolidation of homosexual identity in the West but also to how the gaps and fissures in the ‘modern’ get displaced backward into a hypersexualized or desexualized ‘premodern.’¹⁰ From that perspective, queer temporal theorists have shown how the somatic operations of time have been experienced, in Freeman’s words, as something felt on, with, or as a body, something experienced as a mode of erotic difference or even as a means to express or enact ways of being and connecting that have not yet arrived or never will (159). Conventional concepts of time—those underlying the periodization of national literary studies—have left queers feeling backward, in Heather Love’s phrase: belated, untimely, delayed, nostalgic, anachronistic, immature, or simply timeless.¹¹ From that alienated position (queer theory, unlike, say, hemispheric studies, is rarely mistaken for the field itself), queerness might form the basis of a temporal field imaginary stretching from F. O. Matthiessen and Constance Rourke (the former conceived nineteenth-century literature in temporal terms, a renaissance, and the latter brought American literary studies to the temporal circulations of regional folkways) to critics today, well versed in queer theory, who have offered incisive analyses of national time. Yet for the most part, queer temporal theory, at least as it has been anthologized, debated, and incorporated into graduate classrooms, has often addressed time detached from place (except for that of the body or a very generalized nation) and might well benefit, as several of the essays in this volume do, from the kinds of queer convergences promised by Jack Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place and by recent studies of queers in colonial, racialized, regional, and impoverished settings.¹²

Our collection is committed to engaging this work in order to make clear the varieties of scale and methodology involved in such challenges to a variety of orthodoxies and sacred cows, even as we acknowledge our intellectual debt to critics who, often in devastating circumstances, have made urgently clear the stakes in and possibilities arising from revising temporal-spatial-linguistic conventions. One striking example is C. L. R. James, who examined the revolutionary implications of historical time before, famously, taking up Melville to analyze state violence as he experienced it during his 1953 detainment at Ellis Island. James theorized the possibilities for transnational movements using the figures of Melville’s mariners, renegades, and castaways, whom James calls a miniature of all the nations of the world and all sections of society, a picture from a hundred years ago of the world we live in today.¹³ Melville’s insights, a powerful example of the politics of place and time, were, for James, true of his own condition and arguably are just as relevant in ours. That temporal folding—the fluid and multidirectional exchanges of 1855, 1953, and beyond, time traveling backward as well as forward—aided James’s prescient speculations, which might be described as a mapping of immeasurable yet thoroughly material futurity.

Another revolutionary simultaneity is evident in James’s 1938 The Black Jacobins, where he brings the Haitian Revolution across the three dimensions of place, time, and language, from 1790s Saint-Domingue to 1930s England, to the world of postwar decolonization. James’s book translates not only between French, Spanish, and English and between France, Haiti, the United States, and Cuba but also between past events (the revolution-as-lived), a present that has already been inscribed as the past (the history of our time), and a speculative future (the unfinished revolution that might yet be).¹⁴ As James wrote, Firm as was his grasp of reality, old Toussaint looked beyond San Domingo with a boldness of imagination surpassed by no contemporary (265). In The Black Jacobins, revised in 1963 after his encounter with Melville in Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, James plumbs the necessity of speculative thought to seeing the failed revolutions of the past as proleptic, Haiti in 1804 predicting Cuba in 1959, both forms of as yet unfulfilled, or untimely, history and at the same time waiting, to come into existence as event by virtue of future reckonings of the past. In telling this conjectural history, time running simultaneously forward, backward, and sideways, James explained temporally the colonial and postcolonial spatial logics of what was bound to happen in Africa and the rest of the colonized world.¹⁵ Today we might see James’s account of society, politics, and language as a kind of queer temporality. In so doing, we would recognize how he shows the far-reaching (as the spatial/temporal phrase would have it, the world historical) conditions most fully understood not only through time or place but through the revolutionary third dimension visible in their interconnections.

In a different register than James, but aspiring to similar speculative ends, the essays in this volume collectively suggest that we’re in another chapter in the history of American studies, centered in this space-time on recent theories of material and environmental agency, ontology, assemblage, and affect.¹⁶ Environmental criticism reminds us not only of places (the arctic, the ocean, the galaxy, the environments of biodiversity) that in many cases emerged as areas of critical interest in the nineteenth century, but of alternative temporal scales—the anthropocene, the sixth extinction, deep time—familiar to biologists, oceanographers, geologists, among others, and once again useful to those who study nineteenth-century literature and culture. Nonanthropocentric understandings of agency, furthermore, involve different concepts of place (networks, assemblages, ontologies) and related shifts in temporal scales (Over what span do climates change or species go extinct? Can the actions of objects be measured by conventional metrics of movement? When have we moved into the posthuman?). Although wonder and enchantment involve encounters with the spatiality of objects, phenomena, or nature, they also freeze time, form the stopped clock of epiphany, arrest the temporal orders of business as usual. Whether through environmental, materialist, or affect theory, new questions arise around language as well, including those centered on nonhuman modes of communication, signs circulating through the whole of the sensorium, translation and the transnational movements of information, writing from the realm of the dead, and the expressive possibilities of social media. Finally, a renewed interest in speculation, fantasy, and counterfactuals, signal features of many essays collected here, offers the possibilities for imagining a field organized around places and times currently off the map. We get a glimpse of pasts that are different from what we thought we knew, prematurely foreclosed—and it almost goes without saying, out of these worlds not to be, futures yet to come.

These interests show—and the essays here demonstrate—how bringing time and place into interpretive proximity might produce not only productive analysis in nineteenth-century American studies but also promising challenges to the concept of the field itself. Together, the essays in this volume challenge depictions of place and time as bounded and linear, fixed and teleological, assumed ideological constructions underlying the nation-state, the determined outcomes of historiography, and normative sexuality and bioknowledge, as well as language and its stable locations within global movements of texts, readers, and hermeneutics. They address both familiar and strange objects and texts: a born-digital Melville, a performance at Valley Forge, speculative historical fiction, the realist novel, textual editing, marble statuary, science fiction, labor records, the sound of frogs, spirit photography, twentieth-century Civil War fiction. They draw on an equally wide variety of critical methodologies, integrating affect studies, queer theory, book history, information studies, sound studies, environmental humanities, new media studies, and genre theory, to interact with multiple concepts of place and time.

Following cultural forms, artifacts, and peoples whose travels across nations, oceans, or galaxies not only challenge the validity of the nation-state but also offer nonbinding, temporally open-ended, linguistically mobile alternatives, the essays grapple with places that are not land-based, environments that are not human, worlds that are not material but virtual, affective, and fantastic. They represent interactions that are democratic, ecological, and theatrical. And they visualize times that are nostalgic, memorial, epochal, annotated, dead-ended, and endlessly futural. Whether by imagining the interrelations of textual materiality and empire, the transnational movements of the sonic environment, speculative projections of regions, the erotic sensations of marble, the queer time of the dead, or varied spatial-temporal scales arising from other disciplines and technologies, these essays demonstrate the necessity both of addressing time and place in the same critical frame and of incorporating new critical methodologies, ethical challenges, and objects into longer standing field imaginaries. Several essays differentially highlight work on languages, showing the variety of idioms and technologies that supplement and displace what we might think of as American literature with texts formed through exchanges, translations, and intermedial, intersemiotic, interdisciplinary reformulations that generate open-ended third dimensions. No longer mired in the old canon wars, in disciplinary divisions over national language, or in the opposition between ideological content analysis and textual materiality and composition, these essays take literature as an object never given in advance, always under construction, often disputed, opened up by book history, translation studies, information studies, and the influence of new media. The net effect: American literature 2.0.¹⁷

One final aspect of these essays, we note, is the attitudes with which they approach their objects. Systematically driven to bring to light and comprehend the operations of power and capital manifest in geographical and temporal environments, they demonstrate at the same time the pleasures, fascinations, whimsy, counterfactual speculation, and surprise that accompany the critical enterprise. Critique and enchantment, in short, are not opposed in these essays; they provide models for moving beyond the new culture wars, the polarizing battle between what is caricatured as the desperately seeking subversion agenda and the dissatisfaction of the so-called postcritique movements in American studies with a seemingly knee-jerk oppositional criticism.¹⁸ Rather than accepting the choice between enchantment and suspicion, these essays collectively offer socially and politically engaged scholarship, undertaken with a dispositional vitality that, we hope, might well strike readers as the opening of a window of time onto a space for air.

The Place of Space in Time

No concept has preoccupied the field of nineteenth-century American studies more than place, the expanded and contracted geo- of geopolitics, with America as only the first, most assumed and contested, of such place-based units. The essays in this collection in different ways reflect the field’s broad spatial imaginary, focusing on an unexpected group of heterogeneous places ranging from the hollow earth and intergalactic travel to the commons, the archive, the book, the hemisphere, and the desiring and affective body.

We use both space and place to describe the objects of these essays, often interchangeably, as the shifts between these concepts is in large part what takes the essays beyond established geographies. While the place that situates most of the essays in this volume is the expected one of America, the spaces in which identities, cultures, and phenomena both national and otherwise take shape are often microlocations that can reflect but can also significantly distort and reconceive what counts as their place. Place and space often function at different scales; the places imagined here frequently rely on dimensional shapes, whether in the hollowness of the earth, the vastness of the galaxy, or the soundscape of the environment. Place, then, comprises geometric as well as geographic location, senses as well as measurements, and imagination as well as land mass. Place and space frequently become interchangeable categories when the field takes up, as the essays here do, the relationships of the earth’s surface, changing environments, imaginative locales, the body’s senses and affects, the materiality of texts and other media, the translations of language, and built or material surroundings. It is within spaces—of embodiment, communication, transaction, saving, feeling, performing, or soundings—that place takes on materiality and meaning.

As our essays show, the changing conceptions of place/space emerge primarily from three specific areas of study. The first involves the materialization or localizing of citizenship, focusing on shared resources, collective self-governance, local identification and struggle, flows of information and data, microformations, and civic affect. The second, often related to the first, addresses environmental humanities, global climate change, biodiversity, un(human)populated places, multispecies and material assemblages, and the anthropocene. The third grows from theories of fantasy, imagination, wonder, and paranormal phenomena as indices of social desire and possibility. Although these areas involve vastly different scales, in our essays they come together productively under the umbrella of place/space.

Attention to place/space in any of these areas occasions an explicit ethical urgency as scholars confront threats to the environment, to democracy, and to critical thought and creativity. In responding to those hazards, in the nineteenth century or now, critics are reconceiving what spatial paradigms—beyond or in tandem with the imagined place of the nation-state—will prove most analytically effective. The answers offered by the essays enlarge, abandon, or redirect existing rubrics of place and space, taking us not only to entrenched spaces of mass social identification but to largely unpopulated and endangered regions, not only to abstract, political agencies but to the workings of the sensorial and bureaucratic, not only to macropolitics but to local interpersonal affect, and not only to the facticity of what Edward Sugden here calls the cartographic narrative but to fantasies, sensations, and otherworldly imaginings. Whether locating place in the archival mobility at the Panama Canal Zone, the affective exchanges in the commons, the knowledge-production of annotations, the soundscapes at Walden, or spaces of fantasy that make location nearly impossible to map, the essays in this collection refuse the fixity of position Harry Harootunian attributes to scholarship’s spatial turn.¹⁹ And the essays are themselves mobile, moving between disciplinary homes, speaking from interests other than human, marrying the empirical to ethical engagement and speculation. Their motivation is to strengthen places—the commons, the archive, the environment, the imagination—already undergoing, in the twenty-first century, destabilization and eradication. In so doing, they shift not only the places of American studies but also the political drives, desired outcomes, conceptual strategies, and willed agencies of the field’s spatial imaginary as well.

Whatever their ethical, intellectual, and political motivations, these essays locate place and space in time. Their temporal scales—the epochal time of environmental change, the reversed historical trajectories of speculative and counterfactual fiction, the unsettled progressive time of left melodrama, the suspended time of the body’s affects and desires, the overlapping times of monuments, performances, and edited texts, the warped time of dead pasts taking living shape in the present—move in step with places beyond the predictable confinements of geotemporal conventions. Time might be said to function as metamateriality, an abstract rationale for the ways the spaces of bodily, media, and geographical politics and culture are organized, or disorganized. At the same time, space gives material tactility, embodied experience, and visual or textual form to abstract temporal concepts that exert force as concepts. The essays in this volume support Jeffrey Insko’s assessment that the temporal turn has produced some of the most compelling Americanist scholarship of the twenty-first century. They show time shaping bodies, nations, populations, media, and worlds.²⁰ In these essays, progressive, teleological, and forward-reaching movement of national time, of manifest destiny, and of homogeneous empty time are disrupted by repetitive, backward-moving, layered, and frozen time. The essays foreground the deep and shallow temporalities of memory and labor, sensation and migration. They show that to question time’s orders is to denaturalize the regulated chronological progressions of reproduction, destiny, primitivism, climate, utopianism, nature, heteronormativity, tradition, colonization, labor, collectivity, governmental polices. In short, disjunctive time challenges the disciplinary regimes of what Dana Luciano calls chronobiopolitics.

Simultaneously, several essays caution against assuming the subversive, utopian, or liberating effects of counternormative temporalities. The risk is both to overlook what Stephanie Foote identifies as