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motivation for publishing
12019-07-12T12:48:07+00:00Joelle Thomas0feb3b2b7a8befeee2c7d2d710d303ed9677214112Cohen page 14plain2022-08-09T14:40:36+00:00Joelle Thomas0feb3b2b7a8befeee2c7d2d710d303ed96772141My other motivation for publishing this letter here, to return to my earlier observation about editing as an act of political interpretation, is that it will also appear at the Walt Whitman Archive among Whitman’s other correspondence, incoming and outgoing. That edition is a major undertaking, since we have an unusually large surviving corpus of documents from Whitman’s career—thousands of letters, postcards, and the like. And as a consequence of the scale of that project, difficult letters like this one are seldom treated with the editorial depth called for by their politically and personally sensitive nature. They employ the same metadata the other letters have; the same interface; the same omniscient-voiced, not-always-helpful annotations. I am grateful to have the opportunity to publish this letter in a context in which modes of reading themselves are the critical subject, and in which the old conception of literacy as reading-plus-writing-equals-intelligence is challenged. That conjunction offers a context in which the complexity of Johnson’s acts of reading Whitman and of authoring this letter can be appreciated even as the racism which informs both acts is highlighted. And perhaps, too, the very outlandishness of the letter’s trope might make it possible to talk about its blend of racism, trauma, and love without evoking the binaries of either nostalgic piety or condemnatory erasure.
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12019-07-11T16:28:05+00:00Joelle Thomas0feb3b2b7a8befeee2c7d2d710d303ed96772141Commentary: Essay and PodcastJoelle Thomas13Cohen 1plain1102021-01-15T17:36:15+00:00Joelle Thomas0feb3b2b7a8befeee2c7d2d710d303ed96772141