Please join the United States Literatures & Cultures Consortium for a chapter workshop and discussion with Kya Mangrum and Liz Rodrigues.
Monday, October 21
3154 Angell Hall
4:10-5:30pm
Snacks provided!
Drafts are available for download at the USist website:
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Chapter synopses:
Kya Mangrum, "Fictions of Progress: The Visual Slave Narratives of the Civil War"
In "Fictions" I argue that mechanically reproducible photographs of former slaves inspired a new sub-genre of the slave narrative. This new genre was comprised of two contradictory impulses---a need to affirm the freedman's fitness for battle contrasted against a desire to disqualify his full claims for citizenship.
Liz Rodrigues, "W.E.B. Du Bois, Data, and the Re-assemblage Race and Self"
This chapter demonstrates how data collection—as a conceptual framework for empirical reality, as a method of sociological inquiry, and as a representational form—enables Du Bois to tell new stories about African American life and selfhood. I locate Du Bois's methodological interventions in sociology as engagements with the concept of data and trace how those engagements continue to surface in a series of his later, multi-formal collective works of autobiographical, literary, and sociological-historical writings.
