Born, Again

This chapter reads Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel Quicksand as part of a vibrant debate within the Harlem Renaissance over the aesthetics of realism and the politics of representation. Critical attention to the novel’s secular critique of essentialisms has overlooked its insistence on the intersection of queerness and ecstatically embodied religion, a convergence that forces us to reexamine the potential that Quicksand invests in both spiritual and sexual forms of conversion. For the novel repeatedly links queer sexuality not to birth (as in contemporary “born this way” discourse) but instead, ambivalently, to rebirth. Even as it attends carefully to more repressive forms of sexual and spiritual administration, Quicksand traces a “queer sort of satisfaction,” a fugitive collectivity emerging from moments of ecstatic abandon. In turn, the novel treats ecstasy (and particularly Pentecostalism’s kinetically embodied forms of spiritual practice) as a suggestively queer nexus of sexual and religious modes of performance. Offering a timely reconsideration of Quicksand’s ostensible secularism, this chapter argues that to read its ecstatic episodes is to discover a more complex account of the ways in which the demands of race, class, sexuality, and religion might be borne or borne out by being performatively born again.

Archival Enthusiasm

This chapter examines the ecstatic performances haunting Stephen Crane’s 1895 narrative of the Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage. While much has been made of the way the novel strategically “forgets” the political history of the war, this chapter analyzes the novel’s complex overlay of religious enthusiasm and minstrel performance, exploring how Red Badge deploys these forms in order to grapple with the embodied semiotics of the Jim Crow era. Recovering traces of the midcentury minstrel figure “Dandy Jim of Caroline” in Jim Conklin’s exuberant death scene, the chapter argues that the narrative afterlife of such traces reveals the novel’s tendency to simultaneously erase and embed the excesses of war and postwar racial violence. Marking the historical resonance between minstrelsy and religious enthusiasm in their objectification of the moving body, Red Badge’s performances treat bodies as kinetic archives, whose stylized gestures offer stunning testimony to history’s traumatic returns. In this sense, the novel treats the ambivalence of performance as precisely the arena in which literature might grapple with history’s unaccountable remainders.

Touching a Button

This chapter examines turn-of-the-century electrification as a site of ecstatic possibility and violent materialization, analyzing little-known photographs by William Van der Weyde of the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison to describe how the electric chair mobilized electricity’s spiritual potential for the mass reproduction of death. Exploring how William Dean Howells and other opponents of the chair linked its technological effects to the mass popularity of the push-button photograph, the chapter examines photography’s collusion with the electric chair’s production of stillness as a form of racial terror, while analyzing Van der Weyde’s photographs as realist reenactments of an electrified touch. The chapter reads these photographs alongside James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), a text that mobilizes “electric affects” to theorize the circulations of religious feeling and racial terror at the nadir of American race relations, even as the novel itself becomes an electrifying performance circulating in and through the shock of spectacular violence. Yoking the “electrifying climax” of the camp meeting to the “electric current” of the lynch mob, Johnson channels the language of circuitry to suggest the centrality of both practices in defining and disfiguring the “real” of secular modernity.

Reconstructing Secularisms

“Reconstructing Secularisms” describes how turn-of-the-century arguments over the boundaries of literary realism were inextricably linked to the politics of secularism. This chapter follows tropes of religious excess as they circulate throughout realist fiction, from William Dean Howells’s interlocking diagnoses of racial and religious hysteria in An Imperative Duty (1891) to W. E. B. Du Bois’s more ambivalent description of the “frenzy” of the black church in “Of the Coming of John,” his early experiment with realist narrative in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Resonating through such descriptions is a question about the aesthetic and political function of ecstasy in the aftermath of Reconstruction. While Howells depicts the black church as a site of emotional and bodily excess, Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South (1892) and Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) radically challenge this formation, offering an important take on the uses of ecstatic collectivity. They also gesture to the imminent secularism of literary history, which has largely omitted these texts from the boundaries of realism, perhaps in part because they articulate a critical relationship to secularism as a silent but hegemonic force in the Jim Crow era’s hysterical regulation of racial difference.

Introduction

The introduction asks what it might mean to read realism beside itself: infused with longing, ecstasy, and violence, and haunted by histories it never fully forgets. Situating realism within the affective life of Jim Crow secularism, the introduction argues that it is in part through its ecstatic sequences that realism naturalizes a hegemonic regime of white Protestantism that governs the sensible contours of the real. Yet it also theorizes ecstatic embodiment and the performance of being beside as a crucial displacement of narrative interiority; being beside marks the self as fundamentally social, necessarily constituted by what lies outside or beside it. By examining how realism’s investigations of sociality often depend on ecstatic forms of collectivity, the introduction argues that the realist production of social data is ex-static and performative, reliant on the very forms of collective practice that it would seem to describe from a secure (and secular) epistemological distance. If realism often aims to colonize and defuse such collective forms, it nevertheless remains indebted to them for its construction of an affectively rich sense of the real.

Coda

The coda offers a reflection on the extent to which ecstasy abuts terror in post-Reconstruction realism. Rather than rehearsing fantasies of transcendence—of getting beyond histories of racial slavery, colonialism, genocide, and removal—ecstasy signals our being beside and within them.

The Ghost Dance and Realism’s Techno-Spiritual Frontier

This chapter examines the mediated life of the Ghost Dance, a pan-tribal religious movement that emerged in the 1880s in the context of U.S. colonial expansion, genocide, and dispossession. Spectacularly suppressed at the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890, the Ghost Dance proliferated in turn-of-the-century ethnographic realism, a project that included literary, photographic, filmic, and sonic texts. Focusing on efforts to record and reenact the dance, this chapter argues that such reenactments signal the reiterative life of colonial violence in the supposed afterlife of the frontier. Yet they also point to realist media as a temporally and affectively dense terrain of performance. In the aftermath of Wounded Knee, realist ethnography drew its authority from the very visionary practices it aimed to reproduce, insisting on realism’s capacity to adequately record spiritual performance while channeling the power of media to resurrect and reanimate the dead. Such performances signal a tight fit between the cultural logic of Indian vanishing and modernity’s dreams of high-fidelity preservation. At the same time, reenactment’s contingencies of performance and reperformance offer a way to rethink the historical nexus between recording and vanishing.