Sari Altschuler’s new book Before Disability is a literary, legal, and cultural history of disability, race, and citizenship between the Revolution and the Civil War. In this talk, she will focus on a new method she develops in the book, historical cripistemology, which begins from the historical experiences and epistemologies, rather than representations, of disability in particular times and places to examine early US history and culture anew. Emphasizing the vast and varied entanglements of those experiences and epistemologies with mainstream US culture, helps us see how central mental and physical difference has been to the production of American culture. The talk will conclude with an example: a discussion of The Scarlet Letter’s main character, the scarlet A itself, as a raised-print letter. Altschuler will show how Hawthorne drew on his sustained connections to blind education to imagine American culture and citizenship more expansively, even as literacy was becoming a racialized tool of civic exclusion.
Molly Farrell expands the work of literacy studies beyond the alphabet in her book New World Calculation, exploring the ways that arithmetic education in colonial America taught generations of children and adults ideological messages about themselves, their bodies, and their place in the world when they learned their “1,2,3s.” This paper focuses in particular on the ways that Brothertown Indian Nation co-founders like Samson Occom and Joseph Johnson redeployed the language of arithmetic textbook word problems to argue for sovereignty, equity, and cross-racial human dignity. Occom, already known for his innovative tactile, student-led approaches to teaching alphabeticity, engages with Newtonian mathematical quandaries like how to define infinity in his execution sermon on Moses Paul. In that best-selling pamphlet, he asserts that “arithmetic must fail”--but like others grappling with the lessons about identity they learned from their arithmetic lessons in colonial America, he argues for an expansive, culturally specific relationship to numbers that rejects the veneer of neutrality.
Finally, Lauren Klein will take the discussion of numbers and calculation into the present through her book, Data by Design: Visualization and Power from Abolition to the Dawn of Data Science. The book places the history of data visualization, previously understood only in terms of innovation of form, alongside the histories of colonialism, capitalism, and slavery. In so doing, it shows how visualization is always shaped by people and power. Her paper will focus on an interactive visualization of the Voyages database, designed by Klein and her project team, that aims to surface the “quiet” acts of resistance that went unrecorded within the 36,000 records of trans-Atlantic slaving voyages that the database contains. Framing her design decisions through theories of the archive of slavery as well as two key abolitionist texts–Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative and Thomas Clarkson’s history of British abolition–Klein will demonstrate how visualization can be used to show what cannot be captured by data, as well as to hold space for what cannot ever be known.
Cristobal Silva’s response will reflect on the possibilities these new methodologies open up for early American literary studies as well as the ways they draw upon previous work and overlap with each other. What questions do these new books enable us to ask and what questions might they foreclose, for good or ill?