This essay analyzes the collective historical memories of the Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction for African Americans which were narrated by the members of the National Negro Business League (NNBL), an organization of black business men and women founded by Booker Taliaferro Washington in 1900.

The delegates to NNBL annual conventions reiterated the story of rugs to riches through persistent and “manly” practice of industry, thrift, saving habit, and so on. They merged their own personal success stories with the collective progress of African Americans since their emancipation at the end of the Civil War. The story of black progress in freedom had at least four purposes: rebutting the negative black stereotypes, showing a positive vision for the future of African Americans, articulating the leadership status of business classes in the black community, and honoring their own upward mobility.

NNBL speakers’ commemoration of black achievement had, however, negative impacts. Emphasizing the story of rising from the bottom, their narrative imagined Reconstruction Era as naught, thereby denying the achievement of grass-root democratic politics of both black men and women at that time. The speakers predicated their hope of black progress in the future on the premise that any black man with thrift and industry could achieve economic successes and this logic resulted in claiming that the poor conditions of black masses were the natural consequence of their lack of hardworking and thrifty habits. Moreover, the League’s speakers repeatedly labeled the American Indian as degenerative and idle in comparison to the rugs-to-riches story of African-American progress. The black business leaders of NNBL were forced to confront the dilemmas of collective memory they made.

The accomplished poet and translator Lilla Cabot Perry (1848-1933) is better known as one of the American Impressionists who studied with Claude Monet in Giverny and later championed him when introducing his works to the American public. The artistic pilgrimage from the United States to Europe that she and countless others made was popular by the end of the nineteenth century, but what is unusual about Perry is that she lived in Japan for three years at the turn in the twentieth century, from 1898 to 1901, because her husband, Thomas Sergeant Perry (1845-1928), a scholar and critic, was invited by Keio University to teach English literature. In this paper, I argue that this sojourn in Japan at the turn into the twentieth century allows Lilla Cabot Perry to reassess and revise her identity as an artist, wife, and mother through a consideration of how she configures domestic space and her relationship to it.

Unlike many women artists of her generation, Perry’s training in painting began relatively late in life: she was thirty-six when she started taking lessons in Boston, after twelve years of marriage and the birth of her three daughters, Margaret, Edith, and Alice. Her commitment to her marriage and to her family, despite shaky finances, suggests that she privileged her domestic space as her daughters were growing up on both sides of the Atlantic, even as she developed into a critically acclaimed painter whose artwork sales supplemented the family income. By the turn of the century, her reputation as an artist had taken hold but that did not assuage her worries about her husband who no longer seemed to desire professional work. However, he did accept the Keio professorship, which in turn made it possible for the family to live and travel in Japan.

Perry’s home in Tokyo served as a venue for her remarkable skills as a hostess and cultural ambassador. For instance, after a few months in Tokyo, Perry organized a “grand musical reception” at her home for eighty guests, mostly from the foreign community, and entertained them with musical performances by her daughters and other musicians, both amateur and professional, and then provided refreshments for all afterwards. This event, staged within her domestic space, showcased how she seamlessly adapted her Boston Brahmin values and European hospitality with great ease within Tokyo’s small cosmopolitan community. However, once her home base was established, she gradually relinquished social engagements in preference for her painting which she pursued enthusiastically both in Tokyo and Karuizawa, where the family spent their summers, and in other parts of Japan to which she traveled. This was possible because their move to Tokyo had solved many of her problems: her husband now had a job which provided them with a steady income, he enjoyed most of his social engagements in Tokyo and compensated for her detachment from society, the daughters were old enough to not require constant supervision, and Japan provided her with new material for her paintings.

Arguably, Perry’s most interesting painting from her Japan period is The Trio, Tokyo, Japan (1898-1901) which depicts her three daughters playing the piano, the cello, and the violin in what we may assume is a Japanese-style room in their home in Tokyo. We can see that in this painting, especially when compared to John Singer Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882) which uses Japanese urns to accentuate the otherness of the children portrayed, Perry incorporates and naturalizes Japanese elements instead of making them exotic. This painting, then, represents the lived reality of the Perry household in Japan and illustrates how Perry earned the freedom to expand and hone her skills and sensibilities as an artist while she explored a Japan most of her contemporaries only knew secondhand.

This article focuses on the U.S. policy toward the Korean Peninsula during the Imperial Era, from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. The twentieth century is sometimes called the “American Century.” The U.S. sustained its commitment to Northeast Asia, including the Korean peninsula, especially during World War II. Exploring its first meeting with the Korean Peninsula would facilitate an understanding of the international environment surrounding the related events.

When the U.S. showed an interest in the Pacific for the first time over the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, China was the most important market in the Northeast Asia. The second country they focused on was Japan, and the third was Korea. The main interest of the U.S. with respect to Korea concerned missionary activities, and thus, U.S. missionaries brought educational institutes to Korea.

With the conclusion of the Spanish-American War (1898), the U.S. changed its policy toward East Asia after acquiring the Philippines. The U.S. implemented an open-door policy toward China and sought an adversarial relationship with Russia, which freed the port of Dalian in 1899. On the other hand, the U.S. enhanced its friendly relations with Japan, which tried to expand its territory in order to manifest itself as an imperialist state.

Korea asked the U.S. to do ‘good offices’ that is negotiating with Japan and China, since Korea became the turf of the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895). The U.S. considered doing good offices for a short while; however, it decided not to make a commitment to the war. Since the U.S. feared Japanese involvement in the Philippines, it entered into the Katsura-Taft Agreement (1905), in which it approved of Korea being placed under the Japanese rule in return for a pledge that Japan would not invade the Philippines. The balance of power in the Northeast Asia seemed to be preserved for a while.

After the Japanese annexation of Korea (1910), Japan intervened in China ―the point of contention was specifically the puppet state of Manchukuo, an important market for the U.S, which was established by Japan in 1932. As a result, the confrontation between Japan and the U.S. became inevitable. Eventually, the Japanese attack on the Pearl Harbor in 1941 led to the Pacific War.

From the end of the nineteenth century to the twentieth century, Korea had been in the “periphery” because China and Japan as well as the Western powers used strong-arm tactics vis-a-vis Korea. In 1910, the Western powers acknowledged the Japanese annexation of Korea, which ended in 1945. Therefore, I demonstrate in this article that with the influence of the international environment, the Korean peninsula has been a fool of fate up to the present day.

Since 9/11, numerous media have repeatedly referred to the attacks as a “major event.” Though what makes it seem “major” is the Hollywood-like spectacle of planes crashing into the twin towers and their subsequent collapse, Jacque Derrida pointed out that it was also ascribed to the English language itself as “an idiom.” If so, then how is the English language able to represent the unspeakable, the unrepresentable event, and establish what Don DeLillo calls “counter-narratives” in a world in which cinematic spectacle prevails? To address this question, this paper explores four works by American writers in regards to “Bodies,” “Language,” and “Time,” focusing on the fact that various art works employ the most haunting images of 9/11; that is, the people falling from the WTC.

In the “eerily prescient” work of Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul, narratives are conveyed to the audience not only through words but also by the presence of speaking bodies. Kushner’s bodies are staged as metaphors of national territories, which are already violated and abused by military force; the body politics employed in this play denotes that there are no distinct boundaries between private and public or local and global. Both the multi-lingual performances and Homebody’s peculiar use of language emphasize the hybridity of language and the impossibility of translation: by so doing, it is not what the play’s characters speak, but rather the speaking bodies themselves that are foregrounded as “counter-narrative” against terrorism.

On the other hand, a distinctive feature of post-9/11 novels is the effort their narratives make to engage with traumatic time in a particular fashion, and those works that use falling bodies as their vehicle make a call to involve reader’s experiences in order to open another space for commemoration. Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel, In the Shadow of No Towers, parallels his father’s experience of surviving the Holocaust to 9/11, and when Spiegelman performs in “Olympic dive as the last act,” he lives his life once again, vicariously. His inner sense of time moves forward discontinuously, just as the flow of time in a graphic novel is narrated by leaping from one frame to the next. In the last fifteen pages of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extraordinary Loud & Incredibly Close, in which the photographs of a falling man are inserted in reverse, as if he had flown upward until he returned to the interior of the building, traumatic still-time is rewound by the reader’s hand turning the pages of the book. Through literally handing the narrative to his readers, Foer’s technique invokes the materiality of books as well as of bodies. When the performance artist in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man dies from repeated performances, and the end of the novel returns to where it began in a loop, it can be read as the refusal of easy understanding and incorporation of Otherness; in addition, it implies that post-9/11 novels no longer narrate consistent, linear stories. Just as witnesses of traumatic events often believe that they have seen them without knowing what they have seen, DeLillo’s work suggests that post-9/11 novels can only narrate enormous fragments of people’s lived stories without knowing what they are. In these works, American writers are confronting and interrogating their own subject position, asking themselves for whom and for what they speak, in a way that has the potential to transform the entirety of American literature.

This essay compares seemingly unrelated literary works that critically reveal how two forms of violence―lynching and torture―are sanctioned: On Lynchings (1892-1900), a series of anti-lynching pamphlets by Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Guantanamo: ‘Honor Bound to Defend Freedom’ (2004), an anti-torture theater piece by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo. Through a close comparative reading of these primary texts, this project examines the extent to which we can see, first, a historical continuity between lynching and torture across two centuries and, second, the potential of literature to stop violence. This essay argues that On Lynchings and Guantanamo develop formal strategies as a means of critiquing and rewriting dominant narratives that sanction violence. At the same time, their rewriting constitutes a condition for the ethical reception by readers/audiences, enabling them to recognize the victims’ suffering.

This essay builds on and extends a comparative study of torture and lynching, an emerging area that has started to gain more attention especially after the Abu Ghraib photos circulated globally in 2004. Scholars of many disciplines have argued that torture cannot be explained as a phenomenon peculiar to the Global War on Terror, but is best understood when placed firmly within a history of racial violence in the U.S. (Hazel Carby, Angela Davis, Susan Sontag, Amy Kaplan, Dora Apel, and Anne McClintock). They propose a controversial hypothesis that the resurgence of torture in the twenty-first century is, consciously or unconsciously, induced by a deeper historical knowledge of spectacle lynching―a technique of racism―at the turn of the twentieth century.

Although these critics provide a useful framework for visualizing the continuity of racism from lynching to torture, the question of how we can analyze the continuity between literary representations of lynching and torture remains largely unexamined. This essay aims to fill that void by comparing On Lynchings and Guantanamo, suggesting that the comparison reveals yet another important continuity, the one linking violence to language. These texts demonstrate that, in torture and lynching, the act of violence and the act of language not only intersect but also establish themselves as a mutually constitutive force of domination. Both lynching and torture serve as a ritual through which perpetrators inscribe the visible marks of racial/terrorist others on victims’ bodies (violence as writing). Equally importantly, violence is realized and sanctioned by mainstream narratives, the ones that control the reality they are designed to reflect and authorize violence as an exceptional but necessary, or even heroic, means to secure America’s democratic ideals (writing violence). These two types of inscription, empowering each other, seek to create readers/audiences who find the act of violence morally acceptable.

It is within this context that I trace the multiple ways that On Lynchings and Guantanamo utilize formal experimentations to rewrite new narratives about violence from victims’ and feminist perspectives. Their formal strategies encourage readers/audiences to be drawn close to the experience of sufferers, African American women, and Muslim women, and to discover alternative―and ethical―ways of receiving, responding to, and thinking about violence.

This article examines the human-animal relationship at the end of 19^th century by focusing on Jumbo, the elephant exhibited in P. T. Barnum’s “Greatest Show on Earth” and the Zoological Gardens of London. Jumbo awed visitors of the Zoo with its colossal body, but, at the same time, attracted them with its intelligence and affections. The star elephant was sold to Barnum in 1882 because the Zoo executives feared that such a huge animal might run wild in the mating season. This ambivalence of love and fear was juxtaposed with a gendered and racial desire of white men who were concerned that overcivilization would lead to effeminacy and decadence. They exploited the primitive land and culture to recover their masculinity. While the most prominent example was Theodore Roosevelt, who promoted a strenuous life and conducted big game hunting in Africa, exotic animals introduced to the domestic domain offered an opportunity to experience the American foreign relation in more accessible locations and in more moderate ways. Barnum’s circus, which sought to improve its reputation in the 1880s by emphasizing educational values and appealing to the middle-class morality, showed a changing relation between human and animals in the time of imperialistic growth.

The exhibition of animals had two meanings: to secure human control over non-human animals, and to demonstrate the superiority of civilization over savageness. Animals from the outside of civilization was recognized as an unknown threat that needed to be tamed. Although trainers in circuses and zoos subordinate fierce animals by force, they, including A. D. Bartlett, the superintendent of the Zoo, could not completely ease their concern over the potential danger of the animals. Violence could not prevent animals from going out of control. Even though Jumbo was just a chattel, its owners could not dispose of the elephant as they wished. The sale of Jumbo boosted a nationalistic and sentimental fever for the “poor” elephant. There was an opposition to the expulsion of Jumbo from the “home”. As the public sympathy escalated, the London Zoo switched its stance to argue that the migration was beneficial to Jumbo and Barnum started to utilize the affectionate bond around the pitiful animal for promotion. Barnum acclaimed the close ties between Jumbo and two partners―the so-called “wife” elephant Alice and the trainer Matthew Scott―as an ideal relationship of respectable middle class. Jumbo was characterized by female virtues like tenderness and sensitivity and therefore became a target of sentimentalism that celebrated compassions even for non-human animals. Jumbo died in an railway accident in 1885. Barnum romanticized its death as a tragedy of a noble and heroic animal. After the death, Jumbo continued to tour around the nation as a stuffed and skeletal specimens to evoke nostalgia for the lost innocence. Jumbo was transformed from an uncontrollable threat to a controllable comfort. The wild animals were domesticated through exhibition and remodeled into pets, nonresistant servant of human beings.