No abstract

Emergent Worlds reframes the modernity of nineteenth-century America by displacing three central critical narratives about the era: the westward spread of imperialism, the redemptionist story of black freedom, and the notion that the United States constituted a new world. It begins by identifying dissonant forms of time that ought not to have existed if these three metanarratives were total: chance on a Pacific whaling vessel, a calm on a Caribbean slave ship, and a near apocalypse on an Atlantic merchant ship. These oceanic times provide a gateway into larger historical and geographical frames. They reveal that nineteenth-century America existed in historical interstices in the world-system: between colonialism and the nation, slavery and freedom, subject and citizen, old world and new. With this historical repositioning, Emergent Worlds makes visible a series of transitional ideologies and figures that emblematize them, such as the queer migrant, the suspended state, and the living dead, which are passed over if the modernity of the era is assumed. Such configurations in turn produced symptomatic forms of consciousness oriented around the perception of time. These four domains—oceanic space, transitional historical position, emergent ideology, and dissonant time—created the conditions of possibility for three previously uncataloged genres of the 1850s: the Pacific elegy, the black counterfactual, and the immigrant gothic. Emergent Worlds thus carries out a generic reclassification that brings together this international mix of canonical and noncanonical books of the 1850s, showing how they internalized and attempted to transcend their own historical conditions of possibility.

This essay teases out the significance of the allusion made to the oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury in “The Chart” chapter of Moby-Dick . It uses this allusion as a starting point for thinking about substantial shifts in the ways in which antebellum Americans charted time, before considering how these changes might allow us to characterize the modernity of the 1840s and 1850s. Maury, in creating charts of whale movements and currents, demanded an “oceanic standard time,” which is to say a perception of time in which the felt experience of individual sailors was outsourced to an abstracted set of scientific coordinates. Such an observation has substantive consequences for our understanding of Moby-Dick , as it allows us to see that Melville channeled these energies into the depictions of his characters and the natural world. The essay sets up a counterpoise between Ahab, who embraces and internalizes the methods of Maury, and the descriptions of whales in the book, which direct us to consider a more complex account of antebellum time. Following the movements of whales allows us to think more broadly about Melvillean historical consciousness and, by extension, issues of narrative time.

The nineteenth century saw significant shifts in the cognitive life of Americans. As transnational critics have suggested, the energies of imperialism and the contemporaneity of different claims on unsettled land engendered a radically unsettled perception of space, one that permeated into the fabric of day-to-day life. Meanwhile, the co-presence of different orders of time, as Lloyd Pratt and Dana Luciano have argued, undercut their attempts to articulate supralocal categories of affiliation, whether nation, race, or gender. Both national time and transnational space were, then, in a state of contestation, tending towards heterogeneity. As yet critics have not thought about whether the dynamics of transnationalism might permeate into formulations of time; conversely, little analysis has been given to the role of time in transnational discourse. This article aims to begin to fill this lacuna through an extensive reading of antebellum invocations of "simultaneity-across-time." Through rejecting the national framework that supported Benedict Anderson's use of this term, I demonstrate that antebellum Americans understood simultaneity in explicitly transnational terms. The first section argues that as globalization wrought significant changes in the composition of the globe, connecting US citizens, like Richard Henry Dana Jr., and European scientists, like Alexander von Humboldt, to others far distant, conceptions of simultaneity became equally extended, stretching out across oceans. But, as my second section, focused on Edgar Allan Poe's Eureka, suggests, rather than tending to a world in which a single co-extensive time was shared by all, this process tended toward heterogeneity, with spots of temporal locality warping the linear passing of the antebellum clock. There was, then, no absolute sense of a shared, planetary time, instead a deeply-felt terror at a sudden interconnectedness of the planet.

No abstract