Unsettled States

Dana Luciano is Associate Professor of English and Women's & Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America (2007), which won the 2008 MLA Prize for a First Book. She co-edited, with Ivy G. Wilson, Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies (2014), and "Queer Inhumanisms," a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, with Mel Y. Chen (2015).Ivy G. Wilson is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Program in American Studies at Northwestern University. His most recent book is Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Politics in the Antebellum U.S.

"Innovative and thought-provoking, this collection will be of broad interest, opening up discussions on an array of texts, critical approaches, and developing conversations in the study of of nineteenth-century literature. With essays that are accessible, lucid, and utterly fascinating,Unsettled Statesoffers arresting analyses andmakes a real contributionto the field." - Dana Nelson,author of Bad for Democracy "Unsettled Statessheds light on the papers long swept under the rug ranging from early Hispanic literature to polar periodicals. More importantly, the authors of the articles conscientiously build up their discussions in relation to contemporary literature and critical theory, which makes the collection even more distinguishing and valuable for the twenty-first century reader." (American Studies Journal)

• Contents Introduction: On Moving Ground 1 Dana Luciano Part I: Archives Unbound 1. Confederates in the Hispanic Attic: The Archive against Itself 31 Rodrigo Lazo 2. Historical Totality and the African American Archive 55 Lloyd Pratt 3. Race, Reenactment, and the "Natural-Born Citizen" 76 Tavia Nyong'o 4. Doing Justice to the Archive: Beyond Literature 103 Shelley Streeby Part II: States of Exception 5. Unsettled Life: Early Liberia's Epistolary Equivocations 119 David Kazanjian 6. The News at the Ends of the Earth: Polar Periodicals 158 Hester Blum 7. Feeling Like a State: Writing the 1863 New York City Draft Riots 189 Glenn Hendler 8. Impersonating the State of Exception 232 Jonathan Elmer Part III: Speculative Sexualities 9. Eat, Sex, Race 245 Kyla Wazana Tompkins 10. Connecticut Yankings: Mark Twain and the Masturbating Dude 275 Elizabeth Freeman 11. What Came Before 298 Peter Coviello P.S.: A Coda 307 Ivy G. Wilson About the Contributors 315 Index 317