‘Pioneers for the mind’: Embodiment, Disability, and the De-hallucination of American Empire
Journal
Atlantis-JROf The Spanish Association Of Anglo-American Studies
Journal Volume
34
Journal Issue
1
Pages
27
ISBN
02106124
Date Issued
2012-06
Author(s)
Abstract
This essay charts the discursive dependency between the ideology of us expansionism during its most aggressive period (1803-1845) and the social construction of disability. My case study is Washington Irving's 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow'. Ichabod Crane —the tale's agent of national expansion— oscillates between embodied and disembodied states of being. His absent/present body illustrates the larger tension between a nascent us imperialism and the egalitarian republicanism of the national creed. Using Lacan's notion of the mirror stage, I theorize Ichabod's disabled body as an important visual cue of imperial formations: an incomplete body politic to be rehabilitated through the creation of empire. When citizens of the early republic stared into the collective mirror of their national literature, they discerned a fragmented and shapeless body politic. This traumatic exposure produced a compensatory reverie in which onlookers hallucinated nation and empire as complete, cohesive entities. Undoing this assemblage, Ichabod's anomalous, ever-changing body symbolizes the incongruous us body politic and invites readers to de-hallucinate American empire, exposing the artificial wholeness of body and nation.
Event(s)
"Disability, the Mirror Stage, and the De-hallucination of American Empire.” Future of American Studies Institute. Hanover, New Hampshire (USA). June 23, 2011.
Subjects
US expansionism; disability; Washington Irving; Lacan; body politic; imperialism, national allegory
Publisher
AEDEAN (Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies)
Type
journal article
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