2024年Trouble Begins Lecture Series: Mark Twain's Caste Studies in 跟随赤道

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Presented by 苏珊·吉尔曼, University of California, Santa Cruz.

Comparisons between the US and India have often fueled 种姓 studies today, and Mark Twain’s quasi-satirical, orientalist travel narrative, 跟随赤道 (1897) offers an unexpected late-nineteenth-century US literary example of comparative 种姓 thinking. 在这里, on the “hot belt of the equator,” Twain compares the injustices of the 种姓 system in India, which he sees dramatized before him, especially vividly in a Bombay hotel, to his memories of his boyhood in the US south. India, “the mother and home of that wonder of wonders—种姓,” thus becomes a conduit to the racial divisions of Mark Twain’s America—to resonate in the twenty-first century and beyond.

苏珊·吉尔曼 is Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She teaches 19th-century US literature and World Literature and Cultural Studies, and works on national literatures and cultures from a hemispheric perspective. 她是……的作者 Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain’s America (1989)和 Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (2003), honored by the MLA. She has worked collaboratively on several essay collections, most recently with co-editor Christopher Castiglia on Neither the Time nor the Place: Today’s Nineteenth Century (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). 她的新书， 美国蓝衣 (U. 芝加哥出版社, 2022) traces the strange career of the “American Mediterranean,” a scholarly metaphor and folk geographical concept used from 1799 to the present in multiple disciplines, 类型和语言, as a point of departure for a transnational and translational study of the Americas.