The 36th annual meeting of the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies association – held in Salt Lake City and co-hosted by the University of Utah and Brigham Young University – invited participants to dig into the theme of “Nineteenth-Century Strata.” Celebrating the breathtaking geological stratigraphy that constitutes the state of Utah, from the red rock of the Colorado Plateau to the snowy peaks of the Wasatch Mountain Range, as well as the rich diversity of the peoples and species that have made Utah their home, the conference sought to showcase the varied ways that nineteenth-century scholarship can think about literal and figurative layerings.
Our conference opened with a welcome reception at the Natural History Museum of Utah, a copper-toned and terraced building nestled beautifully into the natural contours of the surrounding foothills. Inside, the Museum houses a vast array of specimens from Utah’s prehistoric past, and our guests enjoyed having the galleries all to ourselves in the after-hours reception. We walked among the colossal skeletons of Utahraptor, Triceratops, and other ancient species, learned about the bounty of fossils trapped in the gooey mud of the nearby Cleveland Morrison Formation, and, from the museum’s grand balcony, watched the sunset over Salt Lake City, whose deep prehistory as Lake Bonneville is still visible in the sedimentary layers of the Pleistocene rock that hugs its curves.
The more recent temporal dislocation was not lost on us either. Our conference was originally proposed for 2021 but, like so many of our plans, was disrupted by the COVID outbreak. The previous INCS conference in Los Angeles in early March 2020 was likely the last in-person humanities conference in the United States before the pandemic drove us online, and INCS 2022 in Salt Lake City may have been one of the first conferences to return face-to-face. We were very lucky. At the end of March, case numbers were low, vaccines had become widely available, our attendees were vigilant about masking in sessions, and spring temperatures allowed us to explore outdoors. The opportunity to engage with each other in ways that we had missed during the previous two years was indescribably invigorating, both professionally and personally.
When the organizing committee chose the theme of “Nineteenth-Century Strata,” we hoped to attract papers on geology and deep time; stratifications of gender, class, and race; the rise of cities and urban architecture; layering in the visual arts through palimpsest and photomontage; and scholarly practices for digging into the archives. The papers that participants presented demonstrated how imaginatively and productively they expanded the scope of the theme, even beyond what we could have hoped. Pre-formed panels allowed groups of scholars to showcase their contributions to some of the most salient conversations within literary studies. These included the environmental humanities in “Layered Histories, Strategic Futures: Energy Humanities in the Nineteenth Century,” art and its role in society in “Seeing Across Strata: Art, History, and the Scaffolding of Visual Experience,” and pedagogical innovation in “Sifting Interdisciplinary Strata: Collaborative Pedagogy and Institutional Boundaries.” In a tradition that defines INCS conferences, panels relied upon and celebrated interdisciplinary connections. Other panels – among them “Race and the Politics of Representation,” “Fads, Fashions, and the Female Body,” and “Music, Resonance, and Silence” – provided opportunities for scholars of the nineteenth century to collaborate across disciplinary, theoretical, and national lines. Roundtables on “Epidemics in the Nineteenth Century” and the “Unprecedented Disruptions” of the pandemic enabled us to reflect on our current moment from historical and scholarly, as well as individual and intimate, perspectives.
Our featured speakers provided invigorating opportunities for attendees to join in discussing a range of approaches to the “Strata” theme. Tanya Agathocleous's (Professor of English, Hunter College, CUNY) keynote address, titled “Race, Propaganda, and the Long Arc of Imperial Censorship,” discussed the criminalization of affect in colonial India, where “disaffection” toward the government was prosecutable. Noting that Mahatma Gandhi was a self-proclaimed “disaffectionist,” Agathocleous uncovered the imperial and national discourses of affect that could facilitate an independence movement. Turning to Rudyard Kipling’s Eyes of Asia, she examined these variables in his fictional letters written in the voices of Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim soldiers. Kipling’s fictional letters are based on those of servicemen whose correspondence had been censored or confiscated, prompting them to adopt coded language to evade government intrusion. Reading these letters alongside Kipling’s fictional interpretation, Agathocleous revealed the stratification of imperial control, propaganda, mimicry, and resistance.
The conference plenary panel, “Excavating the Land,” caught the thread of transgressive affect introduced by Agathocleous and interwove it with discussions of the land as manifest in ecology, cartography, and archeoacoustics. Göran Blix (Professor of French, Princeton University) explored the concept of ecological affect as suggested in le sentiment de la nature (one’s feeling for nature). Working in the realm of intellectual history, he suggested a movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from biophilia to ecoapathy. Judith Madera (Associate Professor of Literature, Wake Forest University) continued the strain of tracing the human response to nature, this time from the perspective of Black American authors. Drawing upon A Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince and other related texts, Madera suggested that a counter-cartography was developed by those whose tactical knowledge of local geography could re-envision civic boundaries. Turning from cartography to archeology, Shundana Yusaf (Associate Professor of Architecture, University of Utah) explored the acoustic properties of the land itself, as seen in Sufi shrines sculpted within caves and used by women in Pakistan. The acoustic properties of the shrines amplify the women’s religious devotions, creating a sonic relationship among land, individual, and community. Together, the plenary panelists addressed surprising and compelling ways of comprehending and interpreting the land and the complex systems of life that it supports.
In our second keynote address, Jennifer Tucker (Associate Professor of History, Wesleyan University) brought together the topographical stratification of land, soil, and chemicals with the aesthetic layering that creates a photographic image in “Camera Atmosphaera.” She considered nineteenth-century photography as both “a material process” and “an extractive resource.” Photographers recorded the natural and built environments that surrounded them, including industrial scenes as well as landscapes and skyscapes. Adopting the case history of Widnes, a town in Cheshire, England, Tucker explored the deep irony of photography’s double role in exposing the ground pollution that its processing, at least in part, created. Alkali, Tucker demonstrated, was a lead ingredient in many widely-consumed industrial products in Victorian England – including soap, textiles, and glass. A by-product of the process of alkali production, notably, was a chemical used in the processing of film. Tucker’s presentation revealed the material and theoretical connections among multiple stratifications: layering the land, class hierarchies, memory, and palimpsests of artistic form. A revised portion of this address is the final essay included in this special issue.
So many of the papers delivered at the 2022 meeting, like those of these plenary sessions, were innovative and thought-provoking, and since it was impossible to hear all the presentations that one wanted (especially as organizers), we appreciated the INCS format that asks presenters to upload full versions of their papers onto the conference website and present briefer synopses in their sessions. This format encourages attendees to read papers ahead of time, and it has the additional benefit of allowing us to revisit papers in the calm after the conference. There were an abundance of engaging papers, too many to assemble in a special issue. Instead, we are happy to include here five articles that foreground the theme of strata in creative and intersecting ways.
These papers interrogate physical and temporal strata in order to engage with more abstract relations between the past and the present, the living and the dead, memory and representation, people and land. Amanda Lowe’s article, “The Political Ecology of Slavery: Edmund Ruffin and the Simbi of South Carolina,” invites us to reconsider the meaning of dirt. Through the records of soil scientist Edmund Ruffin, Lowe shows how geological and chemical conceptions of the land are inexplicably intertwined with contemporary assumptions about the peoples who inhabit them; agriculture is culture. Embedded in Ruffin’s account of soil composition is an anecdote about the simbi – guardian spirits of natural resources, according to lore of the African diaspora – who challenge presumptions of human mastery. While the simbi represent the limits of human agency over the physical world, the second article by Ashley Miller explores the similarly elusive figure of the dead child who nonetheless, for nineteenth-century spiritualists, promised human legibility in the heavenly realms. Miller’s article, “Stratified Heavens: Growing Up in the Victorian Afterlife,” traces the ways in which the “Summerland” map – which projects ascending spheres of human development – was overlaid onto Victorian ideas about the afterlife, reassuring bereaved parents that their deceased children continue to develop into happy adults spiritually after death. In so doing, however, this theology twisted the shape of the conventional family into surprising new forms. Both Lowe’s and Miller’s articles, basing their studies in stratigraphic metaphors, pose more comprehensive and vital questions about the human quest to control the soil beneath and the heavens above, as well as the means of production, reproduction, development, and death.
Similarly addressing the bonds between earthly and spiritual existence, Jordan T. Watkins’s “‘Neither should they be dimmed any more by time’: The Book of Mormon, the Bible, and Joseph Smith’s Prophetic Presentism,” discusses the way that Joseph Smith fashioned a seeming contemporaneity between the biblical past and his lived nineteenth-century present. According to Watkins’s argument, Smith presented the Book of Mormon to his followers as an essential bridge between the ancient Hebrew prophets and the modern Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as well as between the holy lands of the Middle East and a newly sanctified North America. While Watkins grapples with concepts of temporal and geographical conflation that revise religious tradition, Alissa R. Adams demonstrates how representing ghostly figures adapts concepts of time and place to consolidate national memory in “Adaptation and Layers of Influence in Napoleonic Silhouette-Ghost Prints.” Adams shows how a series of popular prints depicting Napoleon’s ghost, adaptations of French portrait artist Auguste Edouart’s silhouette images of the Emperor, played with viewers’ ability to recognize, remember, and reimagine the earlier works. Through analysis of these images, Adams’s article also attends to the class stratifications that determine viewers’ relationships to the silhouette-ghost prints, and the ways in which adaptation not only garners new audiences for once-elite aesthetic objects, but also reconfigures agency in acts of artistic appreciation. Adams and Watkins offer canny explorations of both the interplay of textual, visual, and theological palimpsests and strategies for bringing the past into the present.
The fifth and final essay in this issue, Tucker’s “Chemical Affinities: Photography, Extraction, and Industrial Heritage in Nineteenth-Century Northern England,” interweaves concepts from the previous essays – temporal slippage, geographical positioning, artistic layering, and resource extraction. Tucker’s focus on the local history of Widnes within a wider history of industrial expansion reminds us that the local is the global, and that the sacrifice of Widnes’s geological health points to a worldwide process of taking land for granted. Tucker’s approach complements Lowe’s analysis of Ruffin’s appropriation of the cultural valences of South Carolina’s soil and the legends of the simbi occupying the same cultural space. The overlay of Widnes’s nineteenth-century past and its post-industrial present finds affinities in both Watkins’s exploration of Smith’s temporal eclipse and Miller’s study of spiritualism’s attention to development during the afterlife. Meanwhile, Adams’s investment in class and visuality, and the layering of the seen and the unseen, dovetails beautifully with Tucker’s interrogation of photography’s role in both exposing and obscuring its own complicity in polluting the very land that gave it birth. Tucker’s attention to the yet-untold story of Widnes reminds us that the land and the people who populate it are never separable, and that their mutual fates depend on our unearthing their stories, in some cases dusting them off, and placing them side-by-side with our present cultural and environmental realities.
Nineteenth-century strata is geological, chemical, historical, economic, temporal, spiritual, memorial, textual, visual, and affective. Such stratigraphic formations are also constantly shifting under our feet, as scholars like Lowe, Miller, Watkins, Adams, and Tucker dig further into the multivalent and uneven ground of nineteenth-century studies. We invite all of you – those who attended our conference in Salt Lake City and, just as much, those of you contemplating joining future INCS conferences in the coming years – to think with us about the transformations, expansions, and radical disruptions to our discipline as the range of textual, visual, and cultural artifacts to explore widens. We offer our sincere gratitude to the five scholars featured here as well as to all those who shared their compelling work with us at the conference – for continually and innovatively expanding our discipline’s terrain, discovering new levels of inquiry, and encouraging the rest of us in our continuing efforts to re-map, re-ground, and re-envision our way forward.