Honorable Mention, Barnard Hewitt Award from the American Society for
Theater Research
Explores the intersection and history of American literary realism and
the performance of spiritual and racial embodiment.
Recovering a series of ecstatic performances in late nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century American realism, Realist Ecstasy travels from
camp meetings to Native American ghost dances to storefront church
revivals to explore realism's relationship to spiritual experience. In
her approach to realism as both an unruly archive of performance and a
wide-ranging repertoire of media practices--including literature,
photography, audio recording, and early film--Lindsay V. Reckson argues
that the real was repetitively enacted and reenacted through bodily
practice. Realist Ecstasy demonstrates how the realist imagining of
possessed bodies helped construct and naturalize racial difference,
while excavating the complex, shifting, and dynamic possibilities
embedded in ecstatic performance: its production of new and immanent
forms of being beside.
Across her readings of Stephen Crane, James Weldon Johnson, and Nella
Larsen, among others, Reckson triangulates secularism, realism, and
racial formation in the post-Reconstruction moment. Realist Ecstasy
shows how post-Reconstruction realist texts mobilized
gestures--especially the gestures associated with religious ecstasy--to
racialize secularism itself. Reckson offers us a distinctly new vision
of American realism as a performative practice, a sustained account of
how performance lives in and through literary archives, and a rich sense
of how closely secularization and racialization were linked in Jim Crow
America.
