The Weather in Dawson’s Landing: Twain, Chesnutt, and the Climates of Racism

Wolff, Nathan

doi:10.1093/alh/ajy011

American Literary History

2018

DOI: 10.1093/alh/ajy011

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The Weather in Dawson’s Landing: Twain, Chesnutt, and the Climates of Racism

Nathan Wolff¹

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2021

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Cited by 2 publications

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War on Dirt: Aesthetics, Empire, and Infrastructure in the Low Nineteenth Century

Kopec¹

2021

American Literature

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This essay considers the politico-aesthetics of infrastructure by focusing on poems that anticipate, justify, and critique internal improvements, from Joel Barlow’s early Republican vision of the Erie and Panama Canals to texts that document the ruin caused by the works Barlow imagined as glorious. Historical scholarship has long assessed the mania for cutting roads and canals into the landscape. But engaging an emerging infrastructuralism—and turning to imaginative texts that exist underneath the ground typically trod by US literary studies, from Philip Freneau’s celebratory ode to the Erie Canal to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ironic canal travel sketches to Margarita Engle’s recent historical verse-novel tallying the devastations of the Panama Canal—this essay identifies an infrastructural dialectic in which writers view infrastructure, initially, as awesome so as to justify its ecological and social violence and, subsequently, as banal so as to render it invisible within the settler state. Oscillating between awe and irritation, the sublime and the stuplime, then, these texts both expose the rhythm of infrastructure’s long—that is, low—relation to the structure of coloniality and, in Engle’s case, model how to disrupt it so as to imagine a more just life “after” infrastructure.

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War on Dirt: Aesthetics, Empire, and Infrastructure in the Low Nineteenth Century

Kopec¹

2021

American Literature

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Chesnutt, Turpentine, and the Political Ecology of White Supremacy

Kuhn¹

2021

PMLA Publ. Mod. Lang.

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Charles Chesnutt's fiction describes the forests of North Carolina not as the unspoiled wildernesses of the popular imagination but instead as an integral part of the extractive economy of the South. In the postbellum decades, many northerners visited the state's forests for health tourism even as the turpentine and lumber industries were decimating the local pine. By drawing on his readers’ familiarity with turpentine, a pine product that was both a household staple and a global commodity, Chesnutt shows his readers how the pine woods were anything but bucolic. Chesnutt's ecological vision disrupts the centrality of cotton in the environmental imaginary of the plantation and postplantation South. By linking the rise of conservation efforts to the logic of preserving white health, Chesnutt reveals that both deforestation and conservation were driven by the operations of white supremacy.

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The Weather in Dawson’s Landing: Twain, Chesnutt, and the Climates of Racism

Cited by 2 publications

References 8 publications

War on Dirt: Aesthetics, Empire, and Infrastructure in the Low Nineteenth Century

War on Dirt: Aesthetics, Empire, and Infrastructure in the Low Nineteenth Century

Chesnutt, Turpentine, and the Political Ecology of White Supremacy

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