Trans-Atlantic Inheritance
Alexis de Tocqueville claimed that the most important factor
distinguishing Anglo-American culture from its English origins was the
Americans' refusal to pass property and titles down through the
generations. But of course the United States has its own, equally
vexed, structure of inheritance: the inheritance of race. It has since
become commonplace to claim that British culture is organized around
class, while the United States is divided by race, but this seminar
takes as its starting point the fact that both of these categories have,
at various times and in various ways, crossed and recrossed the
Atlantic. We will be exploring two related premises: 1) that attacks
on racial and class inequality have been crucial in shaping the ways in
which Great Britain and the United States conceive of both themselves
and the other; and 2) that the very categories of race and class are
inevitably reconceptualized as they travel from one national context to
the other and back. Possible topics might include British responses to
slave speakers and slave narratives; U. S. adoptions of British
socialism; British reactions to the U. S. civil rights movement; and
U. S critiques of monarchical government.
The American Comparative Literature Association will be meeting this
year April 4-6 at Cal State San Marcos. Please submit 250-word
abstracts by 25 September to the panel organizers:
Amanda Claybaugh, Columbia University
ac602@columbia.edu
Caroline Levine, University of Wisconsin-Madison
clevine@wisc.edu
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