With the 1912 elections, 18 years of Republican control of the Senate came to an abrupt end. In Chapter 6, we examine the institutional inventions of the 63rd Congress (1913–15), when, in a newly competitive world, the Democratic floor leader—John W. Kern (D, Ind.), a progressive senator closely allied with the newly elected president Woodrow Wilson—became the first person widely regarded as an elected majority leader of the Senate, with responsibility for devising and implementing party strategy. The Republicans, now in the minority, created their own position of elected floor leader in 1913, following the generation-old Democratic model, and both parties invented the position of whip. Other developments, such as the emergence of the modern use of unanimous consent agreements, the creation of party floor staff, and, for the Democrats, entrusting committee assignments to their leadership, were accomplished in the 1910s and 1920s.

This chapter describes the critical and speculative capacities of the Occupy novel, or contemporary novels that represent Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy movement more broadly. It argues that such fiction represents the financialization of everyday life, that is, the colonization of personal life and political subjectivity by Wall Street or finance capital. In doing so, it returns the question of social class to the center of US political debates. However, the Occupy novel also speculates on the possibilities of postcapitalist social life; it treats Occupy Wall Street as prefiguring new kinds of economic relations and social conducts. The chapter frames the Occupy novel in terms of its predecessor, the fiction of the post-2008 financial recession (“crunch lit”). Whereas crunch lit diagnoses financialization as a problem of households (personal debt, family crisis, and so on), the Occupy novel asks whether literature (and art in general) might have the capacity to engage in social struggle, to imagine new forms of public life.

In the 1970s, due to the Nixon administration’s decision to abolish the gold standard, money entered into an ontological crisis. This crisis has reverberated, via an avalanche of other financial events in the decade and after, all the way into the twenty-first century. In this chapter, I consider various novels (and some films as well) that point to deep philosophical relations between the kinds of questions that money’s post-1970 ontological crisis opens up, and the art of fiction-writing. These relations are especially evident in the tensions between literary realism – exemplified in the field by Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) – and postmodernism, which comes to challenge realism in the early 1970s, exactly when money’s ontological crisis opens up. Whereas the realist project, which has seen a revival after the 2007–8 global market crash, seeks to provide epistemological responses to money’s ongoing crisis – a descriptive and explanatory project that is necessary, even if it may be doomed to failure – post-1970s postmodernism and more experimental fiction are better placed to engage money’s ontological crisis, which has laid bare the ways in which money exceeds what we can know about it and demands a realism that is speculative – like contemporary finance itself.

On their first arrival in North America, Europeans entered a strange land but, most of all, an unfamiliar Indigenous economy. While capitalism functioned on a disembodied trade of goods or an abstract exchange of currency, Native societies honored the idea of the gift. On this belief in a gift economy, Indigenous people nurtured trade relations, but also diplomacy, war alliances, marriage, friendship, and peoplehood and ecology themselves. This chapter elucidates the idea and operation of an Indigenous gift economy, as it served and serves Native nations, and explores the gift’s impact on and disruption of European and American capitalist market economies. From this alternative Indigenous economic approach, as presented in anthropology as well as in traditional Indigenous thought, we turn to several representative works in American literature, from ancient myth and early testimony to autobiography, novel, and poetry, to illustrate the place of Indigenous ceremony, such as the giveaway and the potlatch, in its resistance to destructive colonial policy such as removal and allotment. Ultimately, Indigenous gift exchange economies give voice to America’s haunted money, from wampum to bucks, in which Native land was never “the gift outright.”

The Electoral College can misfire, electing a president who loses the popular vote (as in 2000 and 2016), but the presidential nomination process can misfire as well, producing a nominee (as in 1952 or, more recently, 2016) who is less popular among party voters than other candidates in the party. The cause of this is the byzantine web of state laws and party rules governing the process. This book explores those rules, enabling us to make sense of the process and understand how presidential candidates have been selected throughout American history. Surprisingly, for much of American history, the major party’s nominees were chosen by party leaders, not ordinary voters, and even today, the process is far less democratic than many imagine. Not every voter is able to participate in the process, and not every vote is weighted equally. This book examines the evolution of the rules governing the nomination process and how those rules contribute to the increasing ideological polarization of our politics today.

This essay addresses the role of whiteness in slave narratives, a body of writing that featured the voices and experiences of African Americans, arguing that white American culture is fundamental to these narratives. This foundational presence is clear in the narratives’ representation of white slave owners, in the prefaces or other material added to slave narratives by white writers, and in the fact that some narratives were wholly written by white writers, representing the experience of formerly enslaved African Americans. But it is important to understand that white American culture made the slave narratives necessary and that these narratives work to persuade white Americans of moral imperatives for which African Americans needed no persuasion.

This chapter traces the recent turn to form in Latinx literary studies. While the field has long privileged the historical in shaping debates and organizing Latinx cultural production, there is a growing group of scholars taking the formal as their point of departure by studying components that range from genre to word choice, from page layout to punctuation. Concerned less with the who, what, and where of literary texts, this new approach focuses more on how. That is, how our privileged objects of study – race and racism, community and coalition, gender and sexuality – are represented on and off the page. Linking these recent approaches to a longer tradition of queer Latinx performance studies, a branch of scholarship long attuned to the importance of gesture, corporality, and affect, this chapter models formal analysis by taking works by Carmen María Machado and Justin Torres as representative case studies.

This chapter situates three Latinx literary organizations – CantoMundo, Letras Latinas, and Undocupoets – in a trajectory of institution building dedicated to the support and development of Latinx poetry and poetics. Moving through organizational origins, concrete support strategies, founding members, and institutional alliances, the chapter maps out the practical as well as philosophical outcomes of developing Latinx poetry and poetics as a diverse, multiform set of voices. Coinciding with greater recognition of Latinx poets in terms of fellowship support, book prizes, and publication numbers, CantoMundo, Letras Latinas, and Undocupoets, as well as organizations that have built alongside and with them, have decisively shaped twenty-first-century Latinx poetry and given it many possible routes for future development.

This chapter traces the historical construction of whiteness in US law from the late eighteenth century, when the nation limited naturalized citizenship to “white” immigrants, through early twentieth-century Supreme Court cases in which individual Asian immigrants’ attempts to naturalize, citing the vagueness of racial prerequisite in federal law at the time, were denied on the basis of the court’s interpretations of the meaning of racial whiteness enshrined in the original 1790 statute. This genealogy of legal whiteness also examines how the boundaries and meaning of white identity evolve historically in relation to the racial logics of slavery in the law and post-Reconstruction segregationist legal orders. The chapter presents key critical paradigms for legal studies of whiteness and explores their generative potential for literary analysis through a reading of Charles W. Chesnutt’s 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition in relation to the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson.

This chapter examines the interconnectedness of whiteness, gender, and national identity in Hollywood movies. It begins with Birth of a Nation, Hollywood’s first blockbuster and its original sin. It then turns to films that bookend the Classical era – The Jazz Singer (1927) and The Searchers (1956) – to illustrate how much of the ideology put on screen in Birth of a Nation became profitable subject matter and generic habit in the studio era. It then turns to Rocky (1976), examining the centrality of Hollywood in shaping the racial ideology of colorblindness in the decades after the civil rights movement. The chapter concludes by discussing what the author calls Hollywood’s white racial imaginary, a critical framework that allows for a more adequate diagnosis of the implications of the machinations of whiteness in contemporary Hollywood.

Whiteness has been at the center of the history of American citizenship and naturalization. The exact definition of whiteness, however, was historically far from certain. This essay argues that whiteness was being negotiated not only in the courts, but also in the pages of literary texts: Legal naturalization and naturalistic literature show remarkable parallels in their respective definitions of whiteness. Looking at Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Stephen Crane’s Maggie in conjunction with nineteenth- and early twentieth-century court cases, the chapter suggests that the legal and literary logics of naturalization are in fact highly similar. In both literature and law, immigrants tried to prove their whiteness by denigrating other immigrant groups whose whiteness they contested. Finally, literary and legal histories are instructive for today’s understanding of whiteness since they reveal the shifting nature of whiteness: Some groups seen as non-white in the nineteenth century seem indisputably white to us today.

Contemporary US climate fiction articulates the climate crisis as a whiteness crisis. It often represents white, mostly privileged, characters and communities becoming destabilized, if not undone, by climate catastrophe. The existential precarity long experienced by people of color in the US and elsewhere is often figured in US climate fiction as a white apocalypse. This essay focuses on how contemporary US climate fiction stages confrontations with whiteness. Focusing on first-person narratives by Lauren Groff, Jenny Offill, and Ben Lerner that foreground a privileged whiteness by making it hypervisible, it analyzes how climate fiction not only reifies whiteness but also reflects, demystifies, and disrupts it. By submitting whiteness to the spotlight, these texts allow whiteness to become available for investigation and interrogation. The extent to which such critiques end up reifying or recuperating whiteness, however, remains a pressing question.

This chapter explores the impact of José Esteban Muñoz’s 2009 book Cruising Utopia on both the creative production and critical reception of queer Latinx literary work in the following decade-plus. While Latinx literature and its study were already “queered” and “queering” before Cruising Utopia, the chapter argues that Muñoz’s work prompted a greater focus on futurity, potentiality, and the speculative, thanks especially to the unique generativity of his (queer, ethnic) performance studies methodology (especially his inquiries into affectivity, ephemera, and brownness) for literary studies. The discussion engages critical work from the 2010s to gauge both the scope of Muñoz’s contributions to salient critical debates over that period and the scope of some skeptical responses to those contributions. It then turns in closing to a targeted close reading of Carmen Maria Machado’s literary production from the late 2010s and early 2020s as a “representative” archive of queer Latinx literature “after” the utopian “turn.”