Book Abstract

“Abandoned Subjects: The Sociality of Survival in Modern American Literature”

This book project reads American novels from the early to mid-twentieth century that theorize the form subjectivity takes in socioeconomically abandoned communities. This study is particularly interested, for example, in literary representations of poverty, homelessness, and forms of marginalized labor. As these literary representations lay bare, the inequitable distribution of resources requires groups and individuals to pursue recognition, as they petition for more resources, within injurious power structures and hierarchies that manufacture scarcity. This project defines abandonment, however, not simply in terms of structural dispossession but also in terms of the surprising ways people respond to dispossession by disengaging from these injurious structures and hierarchies and conceptualizing, instead, collectivist social and economic forms. My focus is, therefore, more specifically on the historically disproportionately vulnerable economic and political status of women whose literal and figurative abandonments allow them to imagine alternatives to upward mobility, assimilation, and democratic representation, and by extension, alternative forms of subjectivity that unfold in undervalued spaces.

In this way, Abandoned Subjects fills a major gap in American literary studies, which seldom attends to representations of poor and dispossessed women. My project examines depictions in American literature of how these women recover the means to live by inhabiting, often illicitly, spaces typically deemed uninhabitable. It thus extends the standard literary and historical emphasis on increasing representation for minority groups, focusing on how practices of inhabiting challenge representation itself. By inhabiting, I mean the unearthing of ways to be in the world where one’s being is impossible or illicit—consider, for instance, the practices of marronage, squatting, and tenement dwelling. In accounts of a black woman in the Jim Crow South secretly growing cotton in the swamp or a group of homeless women illicitly occupying an abandoned warehouse during the Great Depression, the novels this project brings together all tell a story about the discovery by women of alternative socioeconomic structures. I read these depictions in the work of authors including WE.B. Du Bois, Will Cather, Anzia Yezierska, and Meridel Le Sueur as distinguishing a body of literature that addresses how politically and economically marginalized populations employ spatial practices to simultaneously resist and demand representation. The female protagonists of these novels resist forms of representation that would enable those seeking to dispossess them—e.g. white planters, the state—to intervene in or criminalize their means of survival; yet these protagonists must also navigate forms of representation that provide the resources necessary for more secure modes of living. This body of literature therefore expresses a deep ambivalence toward representational structures and uplift projects. The authors included in this study imagine what I call an “abandoned subject” produced from the creative exploitation of concealed and obscured spaces, or nonrepresentational geographies. These authors turn to literary form, I argue, to make visible the currents of dispossession while preserving the means of concealment vital to inhabiting derelict spaces.

By asking how the literature of abandonment rebuffs the practice of seeking recognition within a dominant structure of power, this monograph builds on and intervenes in projects that “recover” for critical attention previously neglected or understudied literatures and epistemologies. While this study takes seriously discussions, led by scholars such as Barbara Foley and Paula Rabinowitz, and, more recently, Saidiya Hartman, of the tangible harms resulting from poor and otherwise marginalized women’s missing stories, it also considers the tangible benefits to the poor of hidden economies that elude narrative form. The body of literature I study brings to light the abandoned subject’s struggle to reinvent representational structures by inhabiting seemingly uninhabitable spaces and thereby imagining modes of existence beyond survival. My study of “inhabiting” therefore engages with the question of community formation, asking how nonconforming socialities are negotiated within marginal networks formed in particular spaces and across populations. At stake in the theories of abandoned subjectivity is an appreciation for how the poverty-class adapts to social and physical environments in which the resources that promote the production of a legible self are scarce.

Abandoned Subjects argues that the novels it takes up both foreground a literary ambivalence toward the representational structures that legitimize or delegitimize modes of being in the world, and stage dispossessed women’s negotiation of this same ambivalence. Each chapter of this book investigates different negotiation strategies, such as reimagining the social settlement, grieving as a mode of reproductive labor, and assembling care networks. While the humanities have all but ceded poverty studies to the social sciences, this project demonstrates the unique capacity of literature to grapple with these problems of representation abiding within economic deprivation. I show how literature, in voicing ambivalence toward representation, stages the value of minoritized people’s unsanctioned spaces and practices, which rely on not being represented to exist, without negating their condition of possibility. Such literature is particularly relevant in our contemporary moment, in which systems designed to surveil economically vulnerable populations have become more advanced. The literature of abandonment offers insight into how groups and individuals can navigate this landscape of compulsory visibility.

The period of literary production on which I focus is bracketed by two decades that witnessed both intensified dispossession through labor exploitation and the increasingly organized demand among the working-classes for political and economic representation, which would lead to redistribution of wealth. Bridging socioeconomic history, thematic readings and a study of literary form, this book project turns to texts that ultimately interrogate and often refuse this politics of repossession and distributive justice. Drawing on work in the spatial humanities, I trace, in four chapters and a coda, depictions of socioeconomic dispossession from the techno-economic development of “uninhabitable” rural landscapes to alternative forms of inhabiting abandoned or failed urban spaces. This arc allows me to examine how the consequences of modernization for marginalized populations, and how the consequent emerging modes of spatial resistance, undercut development and decline as meaningful critical categories.

Chapter Overview

Chapter one, “A Swamp in Name Only: Becoming-Geographic, the Archive, and W.E.B. Du Bois” illustrates how black literary production in the Jim Crow era grappled with the necessity of seeking representation shaped by an historically dispossessory archive. I show that in The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) the reinvention of swampland by an abandoned black woman into a farmable and habitable settlement—what I term becoming-geographic—constitutes a recovery that would secure representation for black tenant farmers. At the same time, I argue, this act of recovery, much like the multigeneric and multivocal form of the novel, exceeds the representation that, for Du Bois, both makes possible and regulates post-emancipation subjectivity.

Chapter two develops on my critique of agricultural settlement by addressing the figures who are incapacitated and made insolvent within the operations of settler-colonial capitalism. “Specters of Debt: Hauntological Relation and the Foreclosing of the Frontier in Willa Cather’s Prairie Fiction” examines grieving in Cather’s fiction for those who have disappeared from the prairie due to insolvency. In O Pioneers! (1913), I argue, such grieving facilitates the interruption of the production of a populace disciplined by remote and abstract financial technologies. Cather thus not only imagines ethical and what I call hauntological relation toward spectral and otherwise marginalized figures; her aesthetic also attempts, as seen in My Ántonia (1917), to reconstitute a form of subjectivity emerging from the abundance that indebtedness forecloses.

Shifting to an examination of urban poverty, chapter three takes up Anzia Yezierska’s rebuke of settlement houses and philanthropic reform. “Song of the Poor: Anzia Yezierska’s Negotiations of Worth” argues that the romantic and social abandonments of the heroines of Yezierska’s first novel, Salome of the Tenements (1923), and third novel, Arrogant Beggar (1927), prompt their turn away from a politics of recognition that relies on the construction of the worthy poor to instead develop a class-consciousness that obscures the boundary between necessity and luxury as a way to negotiate self-worth.

Chapter four, “Abandoned Being: Meridel Le Sueur Writes Ontological Repossession” argues that Le Sueur’s The Girl (1939; 1978) employs a vocabulary of “being” to challenge the rhetoric of uplift. This rhetoric markets to the poor and working-class forms of representation and subjectivity that are bound to exploitative practices. As the homeless women of this proletarian novel occupy an abandoned warehouse, they discover forms of being within precarious living conditions that, I argue, also allows them to imagine a subjectivity unbound from subjection.

The extended coda of the monograph shifts toward an examination of networks of dispossession and community inhabitance in Gwendolyn Brooks’ book of poems In the Mecca (1961) and Theaster Gates’ work revitalizing abandoned properties on Chicago’s South Side. Whereas Brooks interrupts the project of urban renewal by presenting “blight” as also a form of art, Gates sees redevelopment as art. These seemingly inverse modes of urbanism both affect systems of value by advancing the imaginative inhabiting of areas that urban developers marked as uninhabitable. The monograph thus concludes by reassessing the study’s narrative arc from the economic development of rural landscapes to noncompliant modes of occupying urban housing.