Islands and American Literature
Session Chair:
Mikayo Sakuma, Wayo Women's University
Time:
Session 6: Saturday 10 – 11:30 am
Location:
Henry 207
Topic Area:
Presenters/Papers:
-
Megan Barnes, Loyola Marymount University, Los AngelesThis paper boldly resituates James Fenimore Cooper's 1826 novel, The Last of the Mohicans, away from its deeply Americanized roots and into a larger conversation of Caribbean literature as Cooper utilizes the violent and economic involvement in the Caribbean sugar and slaves trades. Through his attention on waterspaces in the novel, one of Cooper's most frontier works in the American canon transforms into an extremely oceanic and transatlantic text.
-
Maki Sadahiro, Meijigakuin UniversityThis paper analyzes Walt Whitman's sea images to historicize his nautical imagination. I will locate it within the context of the development of the US navy--the development from an illegitimate group that rebelled against the Royal Navy to a national institution heading towards achieving sea power under the President Theodore Roosevelt by the end of the 19th century.
-
Paul Lyons, University of Hawaii, ManoaBy juxtaposing early-to-mid nineteenth century U.S. discourses about globalization in and across Oceania—often involving Pacific Islanders--with accounts of travel and settlement by Pacific Islanders, this paper considers intersecting perspectives on nineteenth century globalizing or worlding processes, ways in which peoples saw their worlds as expanding and/or existentially threatened.
-
Chad Luck, California State University, San BernardinoThis paper argues that Herman Melville's final novel, The Confidence-Man, carefully explores the trope of usury--or loaning at exorbitant interest--in order to think through the ways in which textual meaning is generated... and then lost. Prefiguring Derrida's much later discussion of usury, Melville here proposes a model of meaning-making that crucially links the economic and aesthetic generation of "interest."