Film Technology and the Lynching Narrative in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat. Maria Seger, University of Louisiana
Building on work that examines Cecil B. Demille’s The Cheat (1915) as a so-called yellow peril and new woman narrative, this essay examines The Cheat as working together with D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) through the emergent technology of film to codify another narrative circulating in US culture: the standard lynching narrative that white men lynch men of color for sexual violence against white women. While The Cheat villainizes Asian men in the Northeast instead of Black men in the South, like The Birth of a Nation, it portrays white women ultimately appealing to their status as white men’s property to incite violent protection from men of color. However, The Cheat momentarily troubles the standard lynching narrative by introducing the concept of white women’s property ownership. At stake in this argument is understanding how the parallel substance and technologically innovate form of two canonical 1915 films prove that new racist and sexist discourses like the so-called yellow peril and new woman narratives found expression through decades-old, familiar narratives like that of lynching.
Simon Pokagon’s Techno-Critique. Lloyd Kvin Sy, Yale University
This paper will examine how Simon Pokagon’s works navigate the paradox of Native techno-skepticism in an era of rapid modernization. While he critiques railroads, printing presses, and the forces of industrial capitalism as instruments of Indigenous displacement, he also insists upon Indigenous futurity, resisting narratives that cast Native people as relics of the past. His birch-bark booklets, often seen as nostalgic artifacts, thus emerge as complex interventions—performing a retrograde stance against technology but very much engaging in modern literary production. By situating Pokagon within broader late-nineteenth-century American literary responses to technology, this paper explores how his work strategically critiques industrial modernity while asserting Indigenous resilience. In doing so, Pokagon prefigures contemporary Indigenous techno-criticism, challenging the binary of primitivism and progress that has long framed Native engagements with modernity.
Affirming Life (and Limb) in an Unlikely Place: Poe’s Disturbing Medical Satire. Mable Buchanan Palmer, Independent Scholar.
Expressions of tuberculosis, psychosis, vague wasting processes, and epilepsy attract notice in a study of the fiction and satire of Edgar Allan Poe - less so his treatment of issues of bioethics as they applied to developing, pre-Civil War medicine. Yet Poe’s exposure to medical literature on topics beyond “The Red Death,” not uncommon for educated laymen of his time, is on display in his fiction as well as in his criticism; and in “The Man That Was Used Up” and “Some Words With a Mummy,” two of his less-celebrated works, Poe’s famous engagement with Gothic, infiltrative pathologies gives way to an exploration of technological empowerment and the vigilant humility required to avoid its corruptive influence. This paper will look at the ways these stories probe the ethical and social responsibilities of a technologically empowered society, redefining boundaries between life and death, human and posthuman, in a fraught era when invention seemed to outpace intentionality.
Lydia Burleson, Stanford University. Visualizing Poverty: The Effect of Photography on Depression Era Impoverished Novel Description
With the publication of Jason Mills’ 1890 How the Other Half Lives and the introduction of photographic technologies into literary production, the question of representing American poverty took on a notably visual lens. By the Depression era, hybrid photo-documentary texts from American novelists were increasingly common—from Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices (1941) to Erskine Caldwell’s You Have Seen Their Faces (1937). By comparing the representative problematics between Erskine Caldwell’s photo-text and Caldwell’s immense popularity as a fiction writer of poor white poverty, this paper will argue that Caldwell’s novel descriptions, previously read for their eugenic undertones, depict poverty at this intersection of entertainment and reform—sensationalizing and delineating poor white suffering while purportedly advocating for the improvement of these living conditions.