Park Church Summer Lecture Series Continues July 29

Posted on by Joe Lemak
“The White Man’s World” published in Following the Equator (1897)

The 2020 Park Church Summer Lecture Series, hosted by the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, continues on July 29 with another online lecture.   All lectures in the Series are available for free to the public on marktwainstudies.org.

The July 29 lecture, “Between Spectacle and Structure: Mark Twain’s Anti-Imperialism,” will be presented by Stephen Pasqualina from the University of Nevada, Reno. In a moment when systemic racism has recently gained heightened visibility in the US, this talk explores how Mark Twain grappled with the difficulties of thinking systemically, of comprehending political structures that exceed individual experience. In his anti-imperialist writings, Twain registers that the difficulty of grasping structures lies in the limitations of sight, the sense most often associated with knowledge in modern Europe and the US. From around 1880 until his death in 1910, Twain explored various technological strategies for enfolding deep temporal and spatial structures into visual experience. These uses of “spectacle,” rooted in visual technologies that produce a false but powerful sense of immediacy, included a history board game, a history roadway game, and photography. Twain’s experiments with seemingly anti-historical visual technologies provide important parallels and lessons for our own uses of digital technologies in coming to terms with the relations between police brutality against Black Americans today and the long transnational history of anti-Blackness.

Pasqualina is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Nevada, Reno. His current book project, Mechanical Failure: Modernism, Technology, and the Mediation of History, examines the role of speed and visual media technologies in the US modernist historical imaginary. Work related to this project has recently appeared in Modernism/modernity, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Public Books, and MarkTwainStudies.org. Pasqualina is also a member of the 2020 Class of Quarry Farm Fellows.