Researchers such as Sidone Smith have helped literary critics understand that autobiography has served as a “master discourse” in the West. Autobiography works to “define centers, margins, [and] boundaries” of nationhood, so it is not surprising that marginalized communities have used the genre to advance their political goals. Our first speaker, Ariel Lawrence, therefore approaches slave narratives as an undeniably important foundation for understanding nineteenth-century U.S. culture and Black people's experiences within it. However, Lawrence warns that the slave narrative's significance has also led to "overreading"—to seeing these works as inherently didactic, tasked with providing moral instruction to dismantle racism. Lawrence offers "quiet reading" as an alternative that reveals the full expanse of Black interior life. Believing these texts always emphasize Black interior life, but our reading practices have prevented us from seeing that, Lawrence offers a "quiet reading" of Lucy A. Delaney’s 1890s work, From the Darkness Cometh the Light.

Moving to a much more canonical text, Stephen Knadler sheds light on Elizabeth Keckley’s 1868 Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House. Scholars view this text as a repudiation of assumptions about freed people’s (limited) capacity and (outsized) dependency. That is, Keckley is understood to have offered counter-representations by featuring her own (and others’) industrious, self-reliant, and able-bodied labor and leadership. However, Knadler recovers Keckley as a theorist within a genealogy of early “Black disability politics” who troubles binaries, such as capacity/incapacity and self-sufficiency/interdependence. She achieves this by deliberately engaging “nervous vulnerability,” a capacious term widely used at the time.

Next, Jay Grossman reads the literary criticism of F. O. Matthiessen as a form of life writing. Matthiessen revivified the study of Walt Whitman with the 1941 publication of American Renaissance, but Grossman finds that few scholars realize the role Whitman’s writings played in Matthiessen’s experience of his own identity as a gay man and as a political activist. To trace Whitman’s presence in Matthiessen’s literary criticism is to restore the ways in which Matthiessen’s queerness permeated a literary history that is with us still. Grossman asks, What can we learn about the personal and the autobiographical as it infuses our scholarship by attending to the autobiography in Matthiessen’s criticism in this time of increased scrutiny of the university and its role in American life?

The discussion will end with a presentation that I believe will help the audience think about the possibilities and perils embedded in Grossman's challenge to all literary scholars as well as the insights offered by Knadler and Lawrence.

With the rigor modeled by trans studies, Eagan Dean reminds scholars of the dangers that accompany the interpretive weight we give to autobiography. Specifically, "When we ask too much of trans life writing, we reproduce the surveillance of the gender clinic." Researchers apply twentieth-century standards of medical care to literary interpretation of gender-nonconforming figures, and this is especially the case with life writing because of its supposed authenticity. Unfortunately, measuring historical and literary gender transgression against contemporary medical standards like “persistence and insistence” reproduce the violence of medical gatekeeping. Using Louisa May Alcott’s autobiographical Hospital Sketches, Dean asks us to reconsider how we depend on life writing to satisfy the surveilling, biopolitical, racist gaze of the gender clinic. What do we have to gain or lose from backdating gender diagnoses? What trans “proof” can we be willing to accept from creative works, including those from authors we understand as cisgender? In an era of shocking anti-transgender repression, how can scholars think maximally about trans roles in cultural history?

I am excited about how these four presentations will model the critical self-reflection (regarding our assumptions and methods) that will strengthen our work. A self-aware scholar understands that they are a political actor in that the power differentials of their own historical moment shape their experience no less than power differentials shaped the experience of the figures they study. Each of these scholars grapples with that reality in different ways. Their doing so—in relationship to these different case studies—will be generative for everyone in attendance because LLC 19th-Century American is full of people who understand autobiography's importance to the field.