Recycling Fantasies: Whitman, Clifton, and the Dream of Compost

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-50
Author(s):  
Michelle C. Neely
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Leaves Of Grass ◽  
Human Waste ◽  
Material Recycling ◽  
Ecological Vision ◽  
Lucille Clifton ◽  
Antebellum Period ◽  
Common Practices

Chapter one takes up the paradigm of recycling in Walt Whitman’s first two editions of Leaves of Grass (1855 and 1856). While scarcity of materials meant scavenging and reuse were common practices in the nineteenth century, organic material recycling first emerged as a scientific principle during the antebellum period. Whitman’s documented journalistic and poetic interest in “compost” has led scholars to elevate the once-overlooked Whitman into the ecopoetic pantheon. Chapter one challenges this increasingly standard reading by placing Whitman’s interest in compost and organic recycling alongside his even more famous poetic investment in an indiscriminate, “omnivorous” consumption. Compost emerges as the twin of appetite in Whitman’s poetic environment, which reveals how recycling authorizes consumption without limits and yields a fundamentally static, and therefore nonegalitarian and anti-ecological vision of community. The last part of the chapter explores resistance to this paradigm in the poetry of Lucille Clifton, a twentieth-century African American poet self-consciously rewriting Whitman’s vision of democratic and environmental community. Ultimately, chapter one suggests that while Clifton resists the dream of cyclical, effortless material recycling and consequence-free consumption, it is nineteenth-century Whitman’s fantasy of the earth endlessly recycling and renewing human waste that remains more characteristic of contemporary U.S. life.

scholarly journals The urge to begin anew: Visions of America in some American long poems

Literator ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-110
Author(s):  
T. Ullyatt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Leaves Of Grass ◽  
Philip Freneau ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Historical Importance ◽  
Basic Purpose ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Long Poems

The basic purpose of this article is to survey the visions of America embodied in a number of American long poems from different literary periods. Since there have been a considerable number of long poems written in America during its almost 350-year history, it has been necessary to make some stringent selections. The texts used here have been chosen for their literary-historical importance. Starting with Michael Wigglesworth's 1662 poem, The Day of Doom, the article proceeds to the work of Joel Barlow and, to a lesser extent, Philip Freneau from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries before approaching Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass from the late nineteenth century, and Alien Ginsberg's poem. Howl, from the mid-twentieth century.

The Effect of Geography and Vitamin D on African American Stature in the Nineteenth Century: Evidence from Prison Records

2008 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 812-831 ◽  
Author(s):  
SCOTT ALAN CARSON
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Vitamin D ◽  
African American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Living Standards ◽  
Established Method ◽  
Black Farmers ◽  
Antebellum Period ◽  
Blacks And Whites ◽  
Height Data

The use of height data to measure living standards is now a well-established method in economic literature. Although blacks and whites today reach similar terminal statures in the United States, nineteenth-century African American statures were consistently shorter than those of whites. Greater insolation (vitamin D production) is documented here to be associated with taller black statures. Black farmers were taller than workers in other occupations, and, ironically, black youth statures increased during the antebellum period and decreased with slavery's elimination.

scholarly journals Fanthorp Inn State Historical Park (41GM79), Grimes County, Texas: Archeological Excavations, 1983-1989

1998 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Septic System ◽  
Parking Lot ◽  
Communication Center ◽  
Architectural Restoration ◽  
Tableware Glass

This report summarizes archeological investigations conducted by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department at Fanthorp Inn State Historical Park from 1983 to 1989. This work was necessary to accompany architectural restoration of the inn as it appeared during the period between 1850 and 1867. Since restoration was completed, Fanthorp Inn State Historical Park in Anderson, Grimes County, has been run as an interpretive site representing a transportation and communication center of the mid-nineteenth century. The archeological excavations were intended to evaluate the areas impacted by the architectural restoration and to determine the appearance of the grounds during the mid-nineteenth century. Attempts were made to locate and identify several outbuildings shown on an 1850 map of the inn, but only the kitchen was located in this manner. Also, areas of ground disturbance such as the locations of the septic system and utility trenches were investigated archeologically. As currently configured, the grounds are made up of the L-shaped inn building, a barn that houses restrooms and a display, a parking lot, fences and paths, the kitchen as represented by a stabilized foundation, and one cistern that has been rebuilt to its original appearance. This report, by Prewitt and Associates, Inc., summarizes the excavations from 1983 through 1989 and provides analyses of diagnostic artifacts (i.e., bottles and jars, pressed glass, other tableware glass, lamp chimney rim sherds, flaked glass, transfer-printed ceramics, marked ceramics, smoking pipes, marked spoons, coins, arms and ammunition, dolls, marbles, and artifacts believed to be associated with African American religious practices). In general, the assemblage reflects a typical nineteenth- and twentieth century site in southeastern Texas.

The Legacy of Anna E. Hall, African American Missionary to Liberia

2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-103
Author(s):  
Jenny McGill
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Methodist Episcopal ◽  
The Us ◽  
Methodist Episcopal Church ◽  
Missionary Service ◽  
Free African Americans

This article, which tells the life story of Anna E. Hall, highlights the significant role that this African American missionary played in Liberia for the US Methodist Episcopal Church in the early twentieth century. The latter half of the nineteenth century saw increased migration of free African Americans as ministers . . . and missionaries overseas, especially to Africa. Standing as a paragon in missionary ventures, Anna E. Hall represents one of many who were responsible for the resurgence of Christianity in Africa and provides an exemplar for missionary service.

Early Black Chicago Entrepreneurial and Business Activities from the Frontier Era to the Great Migration

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Robert Reed
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Migration ◽  
World War One ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Black Entrepreneurs ◽  
The Great Migration ◽  
White Clients

This chapter surveys the evolution of African American-owned businesses in Chicago from the mid-to-late nineteenth century until the early twentieth century. During the nineteenth century, the most successful black entrepreneurs, such as tailor John Jones and caterer Charles H. Smiley, primarily served white clients. By the early twentieth century, as Chicago’s African American population grew, a new breed of black entrepreneur emerged. Even before the World War One “Great Migration,” persons such as newspaper editor Robert Abbott, real estate professional and banker Jesse Binga and personal care products manufacturer Anthony Overton saw the enormous profit potential associated with catering to the needs of the city’s burgeoning “Black Belt.”

Catholics, Communism, and African Americans

2019 ◽  
pp. 240-263
Author(s):  
Cecilia A. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
Ethnic Communities ◽  
Racial Solidarity ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter demonstrates how the integrity of “integral Catholics” was put to a stern test by the American church's willingness to countenance racism in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century. Although white ethnic communities had been provided with national parishes of their own since the late nineteenth century, expressions of African American ethnic/racial solidarity were widely viewed as an affront to the all-encompassing theology of the mystical body of Christ. The chapter shows how this patronizing racial ideology was shaken only after the Communist Party won substantial numbers of black converts in the 1930s and beyond.

“Motherwork”

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-218
Author(s):  
Jean T. Corey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper ◽  
The Bible ◽  
To Come ◽  
Interpretive Strategies

Born in 1825, a free African American in Baltimore, Maryland, author Frances Ellen Watkins Harper devoted her life to the struggle for freedom. An abolitionist, and suffragist, the Bible figured prominently in Harper’s poetry, fiction, essays, and speeches. This essay considers how Harper’s poetry particularly challenged her nineteenth century reader to engage in more meaningful biblical interpretive strategies. Anticipating twentieth century Womanist interpretations, Harper disrupts and revises interpretive strategies that had been used to read against the biblical narrative’s message of liberation. Rereading commonly known texts with a different perspective or highlighting lesser known biblical stories, Harper’s biblical interpretations give voice to the voiceless women in the biblical text. Whether writing about women found in the biblical text or women in her own nineteenth century context, Harper’s poetry testifies to the mothers and “othermothers” who have struggled to ensure the dignity and rights of all people, in their own generations, as well as for generations to come.

Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 233-238
Author(s):  
Aston Gonzalez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Expanded Access ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Visual Technologies

The epilogue shows how the democratization of photography allowed black people to produce images of themselves and their communities when a massive wave of racial caricatures flooded homes in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Visual technologies of the nineteenth century vastly expanded access to cameras which enabled more people to record African American communities and challenge racist ideas. W. E. B. Du Bois exhibited hundreds of photographs taken by Thomas Askew, the African photographer, at the Paris Exposition of 1900. These scenes of black life in Georgia conveyed the power of the ordinary and Du Bois himself wrote that they challenged “conventional American ideas” of black people.

African American Poetic Responses to Faulkner

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chiyuma Elliott ◽  
Rachel Eliza Griffiths ◽  
Derrick Harriell ◽  
Randall Horton ◽  
Jamaal May ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Writers ◽  
Verbal Art ◽  
Lucille Clifton ◽  
To Come ◽  
Twentieth Century America ◽  
White Southerner

This chapbook brings together five young writers, Chiyuma Elliott, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Derrick Harriell, Randall Horton, and Jamaal May, in a chapbook of poems that employs an invigorating range of tonalities and moods to engage directly with Faulkner’s writings, characters, and verbal art, as well as with his historical example as a race-haunted white southerner who struggled, often unsuccessfully, with the changing racial landscape of twentieth-century America. A brief preface by Elliott and Harriell situates the group’s efforts in relation to those of precursors like Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), who called on black writers to come to a fuller, firmer reckoning with Faulkner in their work. In the nineteen poems gathered here, Elliott, Griffiths, Harriell, Horton, and May take their place alongside the Komunyakaa of “Tobe’s Blues,” the Lucille Clifton of “My Friend Mary Stone from Oxford Mississippi,” and other black poets who have risen to Madhubuti’s challenge.

Songs of the spirit from Dufftown

2019 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-54
Author(s):  
Shelagh Noden
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Church Music ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Liturgical Music

Following the Scottish Catholic Relief Act of 1793, Scottish Catholics were at last free to break the silence imposed by the harsh penal laws, and attempt to reintroduce singing into their worship. At first opposed by Bishop George Hay, the enthusiasm for liturgical music took hold in the early years of the nineteenth century, but the fledgling choirs were hampered both by a lack of any tradition upon which to draw, and by the absence of suitable resources. To the rescue came the priest-musician, George Gordon, a graduate of the Royal Scots College in Valladolid. After his ordination and return to Scotland he worked tirelessly in forming choirs, training organists and advising on all aspects of church music. His crowning achievement was the production, at his own expense, of a two-volume collection of church music for the use of small choirs, which remained in use well into the twentieth century.

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