ENG 735R: Relocating American Literature (LSE)
Racial Lives of Property
Prof. Hannah Manshel
Thursdays, 6:00-8:30pm, SAKAM B211 (in-person)
Course Description:
This course will examine property, and in particular property law, as a structuring force of American culture and literature. We will read literary, historical, and legal texts from prior to the first English arrival in what’s now the US up until the late nineteenth century (and a few contemporary texts) to study how the (attempted) transformation of both land and people into property, which undergirded settler colonialism and slavery, has also served as a governing ideology responsible for centuries of ongoing American state violence. We will focus in particular on the entanglement of property and race, tracing the long histories of legal ideas such as the Doctrine of Discovery which was created by Spanish Catholics to justify conquest in the late 15th century, adopted by the US Supreme Court as precedent in 1823, and cited in the Supreme Court as recently as 2005 as reason to deny Native people sovereignty over their land. The conceptual framework of property will allow us to think about the relationship between Black and Indigenous freedom struggles, and to consider the ways that those freedom practices might precede and exceed shared suffering.
The primary materials for the course will consist of both white-authored early- and nineteenth-century American literary and legal texts that manifest—either literally or symptomatically—this overarching concern with property law, and Black and Indigenous authored texts that offer alternative conceptions of life and land, not governed by property. These primary texts will be paired with theoretical readings from legal studies, literary criticism, Black studies, and Indigenous studies. The methods of the course will be literary-critical—we’ll do close reading—but disciplinarily this course will also align well with American studies (and should be of interest to graduate students from that department, and Ethnic Studies as well). This course will be of interest to students working in Black and Indigenous studies, students interested in the law, and to students interested in politics of abolition and decolonization. It will also provide students with some foundational knowledge in early- and pre-1900 American literature.
Students will be encouraged to take on final projects that speak to their own research interests, be that creating a syllabus for an undergraduate course around the course themes, developing an annotated bibliography in preparation for qualifying exams, or using course ideas to write about contemporary and local texts and problems.
Possible Texts:
I will do my best to provide free digital versions of all course materials, making this a no-cost course. Readings will likely include:
- William Apess, Indian Nullification (1835)
- Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)
- Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
- Laura Cornelius Kellogg, “Our Democracy and the American Indian” (1920)
- John Locke, Second Treatise on Government (1689)
- Layli Long Soldier, Whereas (2017)
- Robert Montgomery Bird, Sheppard Lee (1836)
- US Congress “Apology to Hawaii” (1993) and “Apology to Native Peoples” (2009)
- Various US Supreme Court Cases including Johnson v McIntosh (1823) and Cherokee Cases (1830s)
- Sarah Winnemucca, Life Among the Paiutes (1883)
- John Winthrop “Reasons to Be Considered for the Plantation in new England” (1631)
(selections will be provided from all books listed—we won’t be reading whole scholarly books)
- Anthony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (2005)
- Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence” (1921)
- Stephen Best, The Fugitive’s Properties (2004)
- Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property (2018)
- Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin (2018)
- Iyko Day, “Being or Nothingness: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and Settler Colonial Critique” (2015)
- Colin Dayan, The Law is a White Dog (2011)
- Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property” (1997)
- Sora Han, “Slavery as Contract” (2015)
- Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection (1997)
- Barbara Johnson, “Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law” (1998)
- Kehaulani Kauanui, Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty (2018)
- Robert Nichols, Theft is Property (2020)
- Josefina Maria Saldana Portillo, Indian Given (2016)
- Leanne Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy” (2014)
Assignments:
- Presentation with student-led discussion
- Book review assignment
- Project proposal with annotated bibliography
- Mid-semester project draft workshop
- Final project (options include 15-20 page seminar paper, syllabus for an upper-division undergraduate course + teaching statement, book review essay, collection of public-facing writing such as blog posts and/or op-eds adding up to 15-20 pages)
Student Learning Objectives:
- Analyze the racialized role of property in American culture
- Develop familiarity with critical, scholarly conversations about race, law, and history in the field of American studies and American literary studies, with a focus on pre-1900.
- Understand and apply theoretical methods from legal studies, Black studies, Indigenous studies to texts within and beyond the course readings
- Write a final project (seminar paper, syllabus, public-facing writing) demonstrating skills and knowledge learned in the class, that can then be used for future academic or professional endeavors (journal article, conference, area exam portfolio)