MLA Abstracts for the PSA Panel

Pacific Sensations: Rebellions, Race, and Travel-Writing in Edgar Allan Poe's Sea Tales

Colleen Marie Tripp, California State University at Northridge

While Edgar Allan Poe's transatlanticism has been richly documented, the peculiar presence of sinister Malay figures amid the specters of rebellion and chaos in Poe's sea tales—from "MS. Found in a Bottle" to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym—reminds us of equally important transpacific contexts that played key roles in shaping American cosmopolitan culture. In fact, Poe's figuration of transpacific archipelagoes and their people underscores the complexities of nineteenth-century Orientalism and the myriad of historical moments where people, empire, and commodities connected the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

Poe's sea tales—while set abroad—suggest in form and content the significance of the figure of the Malay sailor in his stories and an evolving American frontier cosmopolitanism that both looked to its forebears (Old World Europe and its West Asian influences) while also considering the South Pacific and East Asia as its future mainstay of expansion, labor, and culture. Texts of travel writing, like Poe's, participated in what Elizabeth DeLoughrey refers to as "Islandism" (the construction of anticipated Pacific colonialism through the representation of the Pacific islands as isolated and contained spaces) as well as the mixing of Orientalisms when articulating difference and similarities between East Asians and Pacific Islanders. Poe's world of South Pacific and Asian pirates on the decks of ships headed to the Arctic and Antarctica—all narratives of abstract struggles over global capital and encroaching global ends with of-color foreigners—functions as a collective harbinger of modern changes in labor and economy that threaten American racial nationalism, even as the financial health of the United States is shown to increasingly depend on the developing East Asia–Pacific shipping network. This Asian and South Pacific cosmopolitan influence, seen through portrayed cunning threats and commodities, articulates an emasculating and corrupting influence of Orientalism.

Island Fantasies and Archipelagic Resistance in Poe's South Sea Fictions

Caleb Doan, Louisiana State University

Poe's islands are alluring and deadly. In "The Poetic Principle," Poe defines poetry through man's "thirst unquenchable" for immortality, and he finds apt metaphors for the poetic drive in "the desire of the moth for the star" and "the suggestive odour … from far-distant undiscovered islands, over dim oceans, illimitable and unexplored." Because Poe's poetics fixate on the fatal pull to outer edges, his South Sea stories simultaneously illustrate his poetic principles and, consciously or not, critique his nation's extraterritorial ambitions.

Beginning with "MS. Found in a Bottle" and then focusing on Pym, this paper explores the collapsed prospects of Poe's island adventurers. In "MS. Found in a Bottle" (1831), the narrator sails from the "island of Java, on a [commercial] voyage to the Archipelago of the Sunda islands," and he ultimately drowns in an Antarctic vortex. Arthur Gordon Pym, with pre-trip "visions of … some … desolate rock, in an ocean unapproachable and unknown," joins an attempt to establish a colonial enterprise on the island of Tsalal and barely escapes death. Pym explicitly reveals what "MS." hints at through coded symbolism: islands present doomed prospects, because the island represents a fantasy—a colonial construct destined to fail. In Pym, crewmembers of the Jane Guy view Tsalal as an island with resources and "savages" ripe for exploitation. But the "jet black" Tsalalians violently resist Euro-Americans, preventing them from gaining control. By connecting Tsalalian opposition to the potential grand-scale revolution of American slaves, Pym sketches an archipelagic relationship between communities of color commonly threatened by global imperialism. Identifying the colonial pull of the island and the anti-imperial push of the archipelago, Poe's South Seas fiction offers a prescient understanding of imperialism's global and race-based project and signals that the system—grounded on Poe's poetics—will inevitably fall.

Plotting Poe's Islands of the Mind

Sonya Isaak, University of Heidelberg

This paper examines Poe's use of the trope of the island in both the literal and figurative sense. While works like "The Island of the Fay" or "The Gold...