Contextualizing Hope and Fear

Virtually every historical moment is one in which people are afraid of something, but we seem to be living in a period of time that is particularly marked by a mood of collective fear and anxiety. This was perhaps most obvious during the 2016 presidential campaign, when Americans (and many millions of observers around the world) on both sides of the ideological divide were quite afraid of the consequences should their preferred candidate lose. But the mood of fear extends well beyond politics. Both before and after the electoral dust settled, fears relating to climate change, terrorism, economic stability, and race relations (to name just a few issues) hung over the heads of people throughout the developed world. Given this climate, we in the various humanities departments at Carroll College in Helena, MT, decided to host an interdisciplinary conference in the humanities on the theme of "Hope and Fear" during the 2016–17 academic year. With generous grant support from both the Hearst Foundation and Humanities Montana, we were able to invite proposals from scholars in history, philosophy, literature, and religious studies to address hope and fear through their own disciplinary lens but with an appeal to those in other fields. The call for papers included the following language:

Our social, political, and religious climate has been dominated recently by a mood of collective fear, regarding everything from economic anxiety, the outbreak of new and frightening diseases, mass shootings, social tension, and violence between law enforcement and communities of color, environmental and technological dangers, and the threat of terrorism both foreign and domestic. Where is there room for hope in such times of uncertainty and fear? Indeed, what would hope look like? What might the interplay be between hope and fear as we reflect on the past, present, and future not only of this country, but of humanity as a whole? How might respect and compassion overcome division and mistrust in our discourse and interactions? What do the various disciplines of the humanities have to offer on the subjects of hope and fear, both in our own time as well as for all time?

As is typical for an academic conference, we received more proposals than we could accommodate, but we wound up with 22 presenters from across the humanities and social sciences. Papers presented at the conference touched on hopes and fears related to themes ranging from global warming and undocumented Latinos to Vietnamese water puppetry and South African politics. There were also papers on social and political history, philosophy, theology, and literary classics. The scope of the conference was thus large, but always connected by the thread of hope and fear. Six of the 22 conference papers have been selected and revised for publication in this special issue of Soundings. Of those six, three analyze specific examples of hope and fear in their particular literary or historical context, while three examine from a more philosophical or theoretical framework how people tend to respond to fearful times.

Max Uphaus uses author C. L. R. James's reinterpretation of Moby Dick while he was imprisoned on Ellis Island in the early 1950s to shed light not only on how James reinterpreted Melville's nineteenth-century classic in light of the totalitarian horrors of the twentieth century, but also on how James dealt with the uncertainty and fear of being a victim of McCarthyite hysteria. Uphaus lays out how James applied the primal fear of the ocean that runs throughout Moby Dick to the twentieth century, by painting the ocean not as untamed force of nature, but as the man-made force of the unintended consequences of industrialized society, including those which gave rise to totalitarian political structures. As such, for James, Ahab played the role of totalitarian tyrant par excellence, most strikingly evidenced in his dehumanizing treatment of his crewmen. James ultimately found hope in Melville, however, in the diversity and resiliency of that very crew, according to Uphaus. The crew's racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity stood as a rebuke to the ideal of racial purity espoused by the Nazis, but also to the...