Cosmopolitanism and Character in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature

• Applicant: Dr. Hannah Spahn
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2017 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 353758087

Joining the methods of literary studies and intellectual history, the research and book project is a contribution to the current re-conceptualization of African American literature in a transnational research framework. In contradistinction to recent efforts to limit the field to a specific period in US history, the project argues for the longue durée of a cosmopolitan imagination in African American literature. It does so by examining the ways in which African American writers, throughout a long nineteenth century that resonates until today, negotiated their notions of global belonging through character, a key moral and political term of the nineteenth century that remains a central category of literary analysis. It is the contention of this project that studying African American cosmopolitanism through the lens of character provides important new insights into the long-term continuities of African American literary and intellectual history. The project begins by examining a satirical African American tradition of using character and caricature to expose the limits of the national cosmopolitanism of the American Revolution (chapter 1). Reflecting on the radical cosmopolitanism of the Haitian Revolution and its constitutional ban on human objectification, African American writers were in unique positions, the project argues, to come to terms with the structural problem that Deidre Lynch has identified as the thingness of character, and thus to pave the way for the development of realist literary characters (chapter 2). The so-called double character of slaves as property and person, combined with the etymological origins of character as currency, enabled African American forms of commercial cosmopolitanism with an emphatic idea of free (vs. slave) trade (chapter 3). The double valence of character as person and (written or printed) letter was crucial for African American approaches to the literary cosmopolitanism of the Republic of Letters, negotiating potentially fraught relationships to print and the public sphere (chapter 4). The middle position of character between the body and the literary sign was exploited by African American writers who evoked a future cosmopolitan society beyond race by deconstructing the racist science of the nineteenth century and its so-called characterologies (chapter 5). Introduction and Epilogue (Death of Character?) of the book project examine the simultaneous decline of cosmopolitanism and character after World War I against the backdrop of their recent critical revival, discussing how their conceptual and literary history can enrich current debates of transnationalism and identity in African American Studies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants