Each paper will de-center the human and explore the possibilities of the “parahuman,” what it allows us to think and think beyond. The central question running through all three papers is the malleability of the “human” opened up through Dr. Walls’ emphasis on para—a running alongside, a being in relation to, or being “part and particle” of (to use Emerson’s phrasing in Nature). Our current climate crisis, directly tied to issues of injustice and inequality, requires re-orienting our bodies in relation to a planet with finite resources, and metamorphosing our sense of belonging, “to the world, to the provinces, to particular plots of ground, to the world market, to lands, or to traditions” (Latour, Down to Earth). This panel works toward re-orienting literary scholarship, destabilizing the category “human,” and inviting metamorphoses in form and content, theory and praxis, to experiment with parahuman matter(s), aesthetics, affects, assemblages, epistemologies, and flows.
Responding to this panel’s investment in the “parahuman” as a defining problematic for early American culture, Dorin Smith, Ph.D. Candidate (Brown University), presents “Braining Oneself: Frederick Douglass and the Desire to Think the Self without a Brain.” His paper traces the historical development of—what Joseph Dumit and Catherine Malabou have termed—“the neural subject” as it emerges from the self-reflexive, popular discourse of “braining.” In the 1830s-1840s, “braining” was a ubiquitous threat (i.e. smashing in another’s skull) and one of the first expressions which identified one’s personhood with one’s brain. Smith explores the complicated relationship between black subjectivity and embrainment in the US, wherein the primary specimens used for neuroanatomical research were stolen black cadavers. By analyzing discourse about the brain in Frederick Douglass’ autobiographies, as well as in recent studies of blackness and science in the Antebellum period, Smith argues that ideas of self-reflexive experience and the embrained body were materially and phenomenologically inextricable from the illegal traffic in black cadavers that fueled Antebellum neuroanatomical education. He ultimately shows how the neural subject became defined against the racialized embrained body.
Challenging affirmative anthropocentric theories of our present climate, Associate Professor Matthew A. Taylor (UNC Chapel Hill), will present “Ahab’s After-Life: The Encantadas and The Parahuman,” which is an evolution of his work in Universes without Us: Posthuman Cosmologies in American Literature (2013). He considers the unlikely resemblance between Herman Melville’s Ahab and the “strangely self-condemned” tortoises of the Enchanted Isles. Starting with The Encantadas’ legend that “all wicked sea-officers . . . are at death . . . transformed into tortoises,” he takes Ahab’s and the turtles’ shared “half-unconscious, automatic motions,” “hopeless toil,” and “impulse to straightforwardness” in a “fallen” world as indexing Melville’s fascination with parahuman memento mori—vital embodiments of life’s deathly essence. Melville’s preemptive alternative to biopower neither manages nor liberates life but rather acknowledges its irrevocable decay; here, the living and the dead alike testify to a mortal but enchanting “crumbl[ing] from ruddiness into ashes.” Whereas Emerson and Thoreau imagine a single Life subtending the individually living, Melville conceives of a transcendental death-in-life that simultaneously animates and deadens human and nonhuman. Such a literal fatalism, Dr. Taylor contends, challenges the premises of both the optimistic evolutionary theories circulating in Melville’s age (including Robert Chambers’ and Herbert Spencer’s) and the affirmative bio-centric philosophies of our own (including Vickie Kirby’s, Elizabeth Grosz’s, and Roberto Esposito’s). By focusing on the nihilistic interconvertibility between human nature and nature as such, he offers a perspective on parahuman living that leans toward material as well as literary decomposition.
Karah M. Mitchell, Ph.D. Candidate (UNC Chapel Hill), in “Henry David Thoreau and the Possibilities of a Parahuman Approach” introduces an experimental engagement with parahuman form to the panel as well as an animal studies focus by examining Thoreau’s penultimate journal entry, in which he extensively reflects on the family’s kittens, as well as other moments of engagement with other living beings outside of the human. She utilizes the idea of the “parahuman” to suggest that Thoreau’s genre-bending experiments can assist in formulating a unique parahuman approach in 19th-century Americanist scholarship. Thoreau’s work, Mitchell argues, points toward the promises and possibilities of combining sound studies, poetry, creative nonfiction, systems theory, animal studies, and botanical studies with our more traditional literary approaches in ways that move beyond our current posthuman paradigm and into the parahuman. Mitchell engages Kristen Case’s argument that “Thoreau’s philosophy was, finally, an emergent one, characterized by all of the complexity of other emergent phenomena, and grounded in and by his daily practices” by asking how this philosophy might affect our own humanist paradigms when approaching Thoreau’s posture towards beings not understood as “human.”
Dr. Walls will respond, expanding on her formulation of the “parahuman.” She introduced the term in her 2018 keynote address at Heidelberg University, in which she recounted how Margaret Fuller told Thoreau that nature is no more his until he is more hers. This sentiment of embrace and exchange characterizes the papers on this panel. Dr. Walls persistently reminds us that there is no “not-me,” that we are all connected, and that we are the very criminals we are searching for in our present climate crisis.
Presiding over the panel is Christina Katopodis, Ph.D. Candidate in English at the Graduate Center, CUNY. All presentations will be 15 minutes in length to leave 15 minutes for audience Q&A.