Nicholas Rinehart - Dartmouth College

Nicholas Rinehart

Dartmouth College, Society of Fellows, Post-Doc

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I am currently a Postdoctoral Fellow and lecturer in the the Dartmouth Society of Fellows. I received my Ph.D. in English, with a secondary field in African and African American Studies, at Harvard University in 2019. I study primarily African American literature and Black writing in the Americas, especially as they intersect with the comparative history of Atlantic slavery. My research has appeared in Callaloo, Journal of Social History, Journal of American Studies, and MELUS, with additional essays in the Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography (Oxford UP) and the Cambridge Companion to Richard Wright. My public writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Transition: Magazine of Africa and the Diaspora, ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, Public Books, and LARB. I'm also an editor, with Wai Chee Dimock et al., of American Literature in the World: An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler (Columbia UP, 2017).

For more information, visit ntrinehart.com.
Address: 12 Quincy Street
Barker Center
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA 02138

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Refereed Articles by Nicholas Rinehart

Lateral Reading Lyric Testimony; or, the Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in the Americas

American Quarterly, vol. 73, no. 3, 2021, pp. 639-670.

Canon, tradition, and origin anchor developmental accounts of Black literary history, describing ... more Canon, tradition, and origin anchor developmental accounts of Black literary history, describing the forward movement from a singular beginning in terms of birth, maturation, and inheritance. This model delimits a specialized field of study, but also obscures texts, practices, and archives that do not cohere with it. In the study of slave testimony, specifically, the canonization of Anglo-American poets like Phillis Wheatley and Jupiter Hammon has eclipsed the reception and translation of other enslaved poets across the Americas. This essay proposes a method of lateral reading to remedy this lopsided historiography. First, it tracks how conceptions of “American Negro Poetry” shifted throughout the twentieth century, from initially describing a multilingual, hemispheric network of Black writers to ultimately signifying an Anglophone, nationally bounded African American canon. Second, it considers the temporalities of lyric, which move outward rather than forward in time, to suggest how we might read enslaved poets without expecting that their works reflect the “experience” of enslavement. And third, it demonstrates how a cohort of enslaved Afro-Cuban poets together established and elaborated a “writing community” through lyric form, overlapping social networks, and shared participation in an urban periodical culture. Taken together, these insights enable us to glimpse a wider, hemispheric corpus of enslaved poetics in the Americas.

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Vernacular Soliloquy, Theatrical Gesture, and Embodied Consciousness in the Marrow of Tradition

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, vol. 43, no. 2, 2018, pp. 1-28.

Charles Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition (1901) is overwhelmingly understood as an historical novel... more Charles Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition (1901) is overwhelmingly understood as an historical novel. Critics have again and again focused on its journalistic historicity; its ambivalent racial politics; its attitudes towards assimilation, separatism, vengeance, and resistance; and Chesnutt’s alleged biographical identification with various characters. This generalized preoccupation with the explicitly political or historical contours of the novel frequently precludes closer scrutiny of Chesnutt’s formal literary strategies. This paper shirks that tendency by considering The Marrow of Tradition not just as an historical novel, but also as a novel of consciousness. Viewing the novel from the perspective of its representation of consciousness both reframes its historiographical bearing and opens up new ways to understand Chesnutt’s fiction and nineteenth-century African American literature more broadly. It argues that the location of black consciousness in the novel is the soliloquy, and demonstrates that the soliloquy should be understood as a form of “embodied consciousness”: a narrative mode endowed with the expressivity of theatrical gesture. It further examines these performative gestures in relation to additional patterns in the novel: first, the destructive circulation of written, material texts; and second, recurring images of corporeality and physical breakdown wherein one’s capacity for speech is endangered. As they are invulnerable to such formal compromise and breakdown, Chesnutt’s soliloquies together produce a counter-archive of vernacular memory and reveal how dramatic form functions in the novel more broadly.

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Native Sons; or, How "Bigger" Was Born Again

Journal of American Studies, vol. 52, no. 1, 2018, pp. 164-92., 2018

This article reconsiders Richard Wright's Native Son by comparing divergences between the publish... more This article reconsiders Richard Wright's Native Son by comparing divergences between the published novel and an earlier typeset manuscript. It argues that such revisions render protagonist Bigger Thomas an icon of global class conflict rather than a national figure of racial tension. By revealing the continuities among critical essays that bookend the writing of Native Son, this essay also reveals how the novel's restructuring further elaborates Wright's globalism – highlighting his desire to produce work that transcended both national and racial categories. Finally, it considers Native Son as a work of “world literature” and a model for global minoritarian discourse. By examining “translations” of the novel into postcolonial contexts, it argues that the global afterlife of Native Son is no departure from the localized vision of the novel, but rather the recapitulation of its explicit globalism. This article thereby challenges critical convention dividing Wright's career cleanly into two phases: his American period and later self-exile. It emphasizes rather that Wright's worldliness should be traced back through his revision of Native Son and earlier critical essays – ultimately finding his globalism not a late-stage development, but actually the single theme that unifies his oeuvre.

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The Man That Was a Thing: Reconsidering Human Commodification in Slavery

Journal of Social History, vol. 50, no. 1, 2016, pp. 28-50., 2016

This essay examines a longstanding normative assumption in the historiography of slavery in the A... more This essay examines a longstanding normative assumption in the historiography of slavery in the Atlantic world: that enslaved Africans and their American-born descendants were bought and sold as “commodities,” thereby “dehumanizing” them and treating them as things rather than as persons. Such claims have, indeed, helped historians conceptualize how New World slavery contributed to the ongoing development of global finance capitalism—namely, that slaves represented capital as well as labor. But the recurring paradigm of the “dehumanized” or “commodified” slave, I argue, obscures more than it reveals. This article suggests that historians of slavery must reconsider the “commodification” of enslaved humanity. In so doing, it offers three interrelated arguments: first, that scholarship on slavery has not adequately or coherently defined the precise mechanisms by which enslaved people were supposedly “commodified”; second, that the normative position implied by the insistence that persons were treated as things further mystifies or clouds our collective historical vision of enslavement; and third, that we should abandon a strictly Marxian conception of the commodity—and its close relation to notions of “social death”—in favor of Igor Kopytoff’s theory of the commodity-as-process. It puts forth in closing a reconstituted conceptualization of the slave relation wherein enslaved people are understood as thoroughly human.

format_quoteLindsay's argument highlights the jarring nature of the slave trade, framing it as a market logic that commodified human lives, urging ethical considerations.format_quote

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"I Talk More of the French": Creole Folklore and the Federal Writers' Project

Callaloo, vol. 39, no. 2, 2016, pp. 439-56., 2016

This essay tackles a question that has preoccupied Francophone postcolonial studies for several d... more This essay tackles a question that has preoccupied Francophone postcolonial studies for several decades—namely, what is believed almost unanimously to be the absence of a Francophone equivalent to the slave narrative in English. My paper challenges this assumption by reconciling the legacies of slavery in both the Anglophone and Francophone “arenas” to examine their overlap in the French Creole culture of Louisiana. It focuses on the “other” slave narratives—the ex-slave interviews collected by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s, specifically those from Louisiana, as well as Texas and Arkansas, that were translated from French or Creole, include French or Creole words or passages, or recount the history of French slavery in the United States. These previously unacknowledged texts reveal how the histories of American and French colonial slaveries converged to produce an “unwritten” Francophone slave narrative tradition.

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Book Chapters by Nicholas Rinehart

Radio, Dynamo, Loom, Gun: Du Bois's Theatrical Plantation Machine

solicited for Looking Forward into the Past: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Revolutionary Uses of History, edited by Phillip Luke Sinitiere and Stephen G. Hall (volume at proposal stage)

Richard Wright's Globalism

The Cambridge Companion to Richard Wright. Ed. Glenda Carpio. Cambridge UP, 2019, pp. 164-184.

This essay takes a long view of Wright’s work, arguing that his racial consciousness always exten... more This essay takes a long view of Wright’s work, arguing that his racial consciousness always extended beyond national boundaries and was forged from a globalist perspective. This outlook is not, as some critics have maintained, a late-stage development in Wright’s career, but rather the predominant theme that unites his oeuvre with a single continuous thread. Wright’s work—including his fiction, essays, journalism, poetry, letters, and unpublished pieces spanning from the beginning of his career in the mid-1930s to his deathbed writings of 1960—crystallizes his globalist imagination even as it shifts registers: from an anti-fascist political solidarity framed by Marxist internationalism, to an affective kinship among formerly colonized peoples expressed through existentialist proto-postcolonialism, and finally to a transcendent poetics in search of universal humanism.

format_quoteWright's later writings reflect an affective engagement, uncovering emotional ties across oppressed groups globally, transcending ideological boundaries.format_quote

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Magazine Articles (online) by Nicholas Rinehart

Shadow Acts: On Tavia Nyong'o's "Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life" and Stephen Best's "None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life"

Los Angeles Review of Books, June 29, 2020.

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Zora Neale Hurston in the Making

Public Books, June 12, 2018.

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Magazine Articles (print) by Nicholas Rinehart

Sandoval Redux

ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America 17.2 (2018): 30-32.

This piece considers the appearance of Jesuit missionary Alonso de Sandoval (1577-1652) in Afro-C... more This piece considers the appearance of Jesuit missionary Alonso de Sandoval (1577-1652) in Afro-Colombian author Manuel Zapata Olivella's 1983 novel, "Changó, el gran putas," translated into English in 2010 by Jonathan Tittler as "Changó, the Biggest Badass." By way of Zapata Olivella, it examines Sandoval's treatise "De instauranda Aethiopum salute," which ventriloquizes and refracts the voices of enslaved Afro-Cartagenans. The postmodern surrealist novel revisits and transforms these encounters in the early modern theological text, thereby rendering Sandoval's representations of joyous redemption into duplicity, fugitivity, and resistance.