PG Forum --- Mara Curechian

Fourth-year PhD candidate Mara Curechian will be giving an exciting paper entitled ‘Familial Rhetoric & Queer Temporality in Thomas Wentworth Higginson's Army Life in a Black Regiment (1869)'. An abstract for her paper can be found below:

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, radical New England abolitionist, Unitarian clergyman and colonel of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, the first federally sanctioned regiment of freedmen, wrote extensively of his experience in the Civil War in his private diaries and later published memoir Army Life in a Black Regiment (1869). Throughout both his diary and Army Life (1869), Higginson employs what Keith Wilson has described as a “paternal, essentially racist attitude” (“In the Shadow of John Brown” 315). However, Higginson's reliance on familial language and images as a means through which to envision the participation of African American men in a future egalitarian American nation not only obscures a tradition of Black military participation and Black agency in the process of emancipation but continually disrupts normative temporalities whilst doing so. Using Elizabeth Freeman's theorisation of “sense-methods” and the ways through which they enable “fictional characters and actual historical actors … to tap into other rhythms, other ways of feeling like they belong to a history, and/or other modes of arranging past, present, and future, that will foster new forms of being and belonging” (“Beside You in Time” 8) this paper will examine Higginson's depiction of Black song and dance in the military camp alongside his use of familial rhetoric. In these performances, Higginson observes a competing, embodied African American genealogy rooted in performance that he deems incommensurate with Black civic participation as well as national and historical timelines.

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