“Unembedded, Disappeared”:

In her essays, Marlene NourbeSe Philip has been forthcoming about being “an unembedded, disappeared poet and writer in Canada” whose contributions to cultural life have been systematically obstructed, partly because of her public activism on behalf of Black communities. Her visibility is an oxymoronic, bedeviling combination of disappearance and unchosen hypervisibility, with the hypervisibility largely brought about by a radical misunderstanding and abjection of her work as a cultural activist. In this article, I examine how the “embedded, disappeared” and yet present, visible, audible literary and activist career of Marlene NourbeSe Philip challenges prevailing conceptions of authorship in Canada. In particular, I think about how and why Philip’s hypervisible invisibility offers a challenge to the regimes of visibility which tend to define literary celebrity. Any account of celebrity visibility needs to recognise the fact that the implications and consequences of visibility do not sit evenly on all public persons, as the theories of Katherine McKittrick, Jenny Burman, Sarah J. Jackson, and Toni Morrison testify. Neither is celebrity visibility the dualistic, either/or proposition so frequently framed by celebrity studies: either a much-desired good (an adoring audience) or a reviled evil, as in instances of notoriety, or in cases of overly intrusive, unwanted public attention. Instead, we need to reckon seriously with the ways visibility may be both systemically denied and reimposed as oppressive hypervisibility, as I argue it is in the celebrity of Marlene NourbeSe Philip and, by extension, in that of many racialised public figures.

Introduction

The Introduction to this book provides a framework for analyzing both the “lecture” and the “tour.” The first half presents the lecture as a pervasive yet unexamined authorial practice. It draws on current theories of literary celebrity to demonstrate how lecturing is primarily concerned with the construction of an author’s “personality.” However, it also shows how an analysis of lecturing demands a close attention to live, embodied performance generally lacking among the scholarship in this area. The second half of the Introduction then looks at the social and historical contexts surrounding the US lecture tour. Focusing on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it highlights two institutions—the lyceum and the Chautauqua—that were crucial in connecting the practice of lecturing to a larger traveling-show culture that hovered between public education and popular entertainment. Detailing this context underscores how the US lecture tour injected modernist authors into an environment of great social variety where they had to learn how to vary the presentation and performance of their own authorship.

Charles Lamb, Elia (1823), title-page

If Lamb had written only one book in his life, and it was this one, he would still be regarded as one of the great essayists in the language. By the time this collection was published, Lamb was already a literary celebrity because of the rage for everything to do with Elia generated by the individual essays published under that name in the London Magazine. The publisher was Taylor and Hessey, who had published Keats, among others, and who presumably thought the four letters spelling Elia's name would be more than enough to guarantee a brisk sale.

Transatlantic Traffic

This chapter examines the eighteenth-century transatlantic traffic in books by analyzing one extraordinary letter by Phillis Wheatley. Written in Boston on 18 October 1773, and addressed to David Wooster, in New Haven, the letter enlists Wooster’s help selling copies of Wheatley’s book, “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral,” describes Wheatley’s manumission from slavery, and mentions a number of books Wheatley acquired during her recent trip to London, including Paradise Lost, Alexander Pope’s complete Works, and Don Quixote. Many of the books Wheatley mentions have survived with her signed inscriptions. An examination of those particular books and the letter that describes them provides a rich understanding of Wheatley’s relationship to books as a reader and published author, an enslaved and freed person, and a literary celebrity. In emphasizing the intimacy of transatlantic traffic, Wheatley’s letter suggests printed books remain “unfinished” until they change hands from one person to another.

Settler Salvation and Indigenous Survival: George Copway’s Reconciliatory Vision, 1849–1851

From 1849 to 1851, Canada’s first international literary celebrity, the Mississauga writer Kahgegagahbowh, or George Copway, travelled the United States, Great Britain and Europe promoting his vision for the future of Indigenous peoples in the United States. Building on a theological critique of settler colonialism, he called for the creation of a new Indigenous territory west of the Mississippi led by a legislature made up of English-speaking Indigenous Christians. Copway believed that through the establishment of this territory he called Kahgega, European settlers would be able to atone for the sins committed against Indigenous North Americans, thus escaping the impending wrath of God. More importantly, believing that Indigenous peoples faced imminent extinction, he saw Kahgega as a permanent means of preserving his people and safeguarding their shrinking lands and political agency. Though Kahgega failed to impress the public, Copway’s vision offers a fascinating window into an early attempt at reconciling the Indigenous and non-Indigenous halves of North American society. Using the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s definition of ‘reconciliation’, this article shows that past, often failed, Indigenous political visions reveal the complexities and tensions inherent in dialogue surrounding reconciliation.

Representing “The Other India” in Transnational Public Spaces

Marlon Ross in his chapter in The Construction of Authorship (1994: 231) claims that what differentiates a writer from an author is the latter’s ability to “transmute” and “transport” knowledge to a public space, thus “transversing” the distance between the self and the other. Such knowledge or experience is then rendered “knowable, shareable and answerable”. This article explores some of the ways in which the Indian non-fiction writer and journalist, Sonia Faleiro, is positioned as someone with a privileged knowledge about the lives of Indian marginalised subjects, and the ability to translate those experiences for a transnational middle-class audience. She is also tasked with having an ‘authentic’ personality that her readers can relate to, interact with, and in some ways hold to account. This article, with its focus on empirically understanding Indian middlebrow writing, showcases some of the characteristics of literary celebrity in the postmodern cultural sphere, its focus on affective citizenship, and purported significance to upholding the cosmopolitan values of plurality, social justice and democracy.

Atwood’s Reinventions: So Many Atwoods

In The Malahat Review (1977), Canadian critic Robert Fulford described Margaret Atwood as “endlessly Protean,” predicting “There are many more Atwoods to come.” Now at eighty, over forty years later, Atwood is an international literary celebrity with more than fifty books to her credit and translated into more than forty languages. This essay focuses on the later Atwood and her apparent reinvention since 2000, where we have seen a marked shift away from realistic fiction towards popular fiction genres, especially dystopias and graphic novels. Atwood has also become increasingly engaged with digital technology as creative writer and cultural critic. As this reading of her post-2000 fiction through her extensive back catalogue across five decades will show, these developments represent a new synthesis of her perennial social, ethical and environmental concerns, refigured through new narrative possibilities as she reaches out to an ever-widening readership, astutely recognising “the need for literary culture to keep up with the times.”

Serena Partridge’s ‘Accessories’: Fabricating Uncertainty in the Brontë Parsonage Museum

The 1861 sale of the Brontës’ personal effects sent relic hunters scrambling to collect the material remains of the famous family. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the collection, preservation, and veneration of relics, particularly those associated with a writer’s private, domestic life, were important aspects of literary celebrity culture and commemoration, and both the Brontë Society and the original Brontë Museum were established to collect material remains. Yet when Virginia Woolf visited the museum in 1904, she viewed Charlotte Brontë’s clothing, shoes, and accessories with considerable unease. Anticipating the concerns of the literary establishment, Woolf feared that access to Brontë’s material remains would encourage the domestic cult which had formed around her following the publication of Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857). She feared it would diminish the importance of Brontë’s writing by privileging a narrative of domestic rather than literary labour. This essay considers the creative-critical intervention of Serena Partridge’s ‘Accessories’ (2016), a collection of newly created pseudo-relics of Charlotte Brontë, framed by semi-fictional narratives that dramatize the construction, use, and significance of her personal possessions. I argue that ‘Accessories’ and biographical fiction are analogous modes of engaging with Brontë’s legacy. They respond to the anxieties articulated by Woolf through the fabrication – both literal and literary – of new pseudo-relics that (rather than emphasizing Brontë’s perceived conventional, domestic femininity) enable multiple interpretive possibilities while simultaneously acknowledging the contingent nature of our understanding of her experience.

The Satanic Verses and the State (I)

This first of two chapters on The Satanic Verses discusses Salman Rushdie’s conflicted status as a critic of state racism and a feted literary celebrity that criticized multiculturalism. Beginning with his quarrel with Stuart Hall over the political and aesthetic commitments of ‘black’ art in 1987, it then shifts to two key sources shaping Rushdie’s early polemical essays and the London sections of The Satanic Verses: racism as an intellectual problem rooted in white society as discussed in Ann Dummett’s A Portrait of English Racism (1973), and the migrant underclass Rushdie encountered through the grassroots Camden Committee for Community Relations. The chapter concludes by tracing the emerging tensions between Rushdie’s idea of an anti-racist critical practice and his evolving commitment to free literary expression.