"Multiplied without Number": Lynching, Statistics, and Visualization in Ida B. Wells, Mark Twain, and W. E. B. Du Bois Benjamin J. Murphy Quantification has long played a vexed role in efforts to record and resist racial violence. Building from Ida B. Wells's antilynching crusade, this essay examines the risks and power of calculating life and death at the close of the nineteenth century. For her part, Wells pushed mere counting past itself to a profound mode of ethical accounting. Two of her contemporaries, Mark Twain and W. E. B. Du Bois, sustained a similarly supraquantitative thrust; each attempted to harness the antilynching potential of numbers by enlisting data visualization. Twain falls short in a telling fashion, as his unpublished satire "The United States of Lyncherdom" (written in 1901) exacerbates the dehumanizing tendencies of quantification. Du Bois, however, pursues a more generative experiment, creating statistical graphics in 1900 that indict and outstrip the causal circuit that yoked scientific numbering to lynching and racial violence more broadly. This latter achievement resonates with scholarly efforts to access Black life from within a desolately tabulated archive of loss and erasure. Specifically, as triangulated with Wells and Twain, Du Bois's graphics proffer a counterintuitive means to register life as a future-oriented, aggregate abstraction that is neither wholly conditioned by, nor separate from, a past whose violent legacies endure.

As She Lay Dying: Locating the Gothic in Kaui Hart Hemmings's The Descendants Amber P. Hodge This essay seeks to expand the scope of both US southern and Pacific Islander American studies by examining The Descendants (2007) in conversation with William Faulkner's southern gothic mainstay As I Lay Dying (1930). The essay positions Hemmings's novel in a gothic framework to reveal connections across regional gothics in the United States and expose colonial legacies. The enduring trauma of British imperialism is well-documented, but American colonialism, particularly in Hawai'i, is rarely addressed in the continental United States, making a gothic "recontextualization" especially necessary. Both Hemmings and Faulkner interrogate the pressures the dead-both recent and ancestral-place on the living by deploying gothic tonality to illuminate social problems. In aligning gothic forms, this essay examines the literary representations of twenty-first-century plantation inheritances from the southernmost US state, Hawai'i, and the southeastern United States. Ultimately, I argue that vestiges of the wrongs borne of their plantation origins, in both the southeastern United States and Hawai'i, manifest across gothic forms in distress surrounding land and legacy as well as in an emphasis on futurity-all grounded in the maternal.

Colonial Relations in Miniature: Affective Networks, Race, and the Portrait in Victor Séjour's "Le Mulâtre" Madeline Zehnder This essay attends to the presence of a small portrait carried by an enslaved character, Georges, in Victor Séjour's 1837 sketch "Le Mulâtre" ("The Mulatto"). While most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction deploys miniature portraits to mediate social ties and signal emotional connection, in "Le Mulâtre" the carrying of a miniature departs from this trope, marking alienation, not affiliation. Reading Séjour's text against popular depictions and material histories of ivory portrait miniatures, I demonstrate that these familiar objects of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century life function not merely as emblems of intimacy, as past scholars have argued, but rather as tools of what Elizabeth Maddock Dillon calls "intimate distance"-a social configuration that depends on asserting closeness with geographically distributed white populations while disavowing intimacy with physically present Black and Indigenous peoples. Although the portrait is said to depict Georges's father, who readers know is also the man's white enslaver, the object remains hidden from view in a bag until the final moments of the sketch, which concludes with the father's beheading and the son's suicide. I argue that by emplotting the miniature in a moment of bloodshed rather than of sentiment, Séjour registers the affective and material violence that undergirds white colonial definitions of the family, and invites broader critical comparison of the ways that both sentimental and colonial structures depend on racialized distributions of affections. In the concluding portion of this essay, I turn to the "little buckskin pouch" containing Alfred's miniature and consider how its resemblance to Afro-Atlantic folk charms recasts the racialized binaries traditionally advanced by miniature portraits. Viewed as part of a charm, the portrait underscores that whiteness is a ritualized notion dependent on material signifiers.

Science Fiction and Utopia in the Anthropocene Gerry Canavan This article takes up science-fictional visions of the future against the "deep time" of the Anthropocene in order to explore the possibilities for utopia that remain in an era that only seems capable of producing necrofuturological dread. The piece surveys a wide range of contemporary literature and film; the key prose authors discussed are Octavia E. Butler, Margaret Atwood, Ernest Callenbach, and Kim Stanley Robinson. These texts are used to identify patterns of thought that have become habitual in the cultural moment of the Anthropocene, and they are explored as critiques of, alternatives to, and lines of flight away from its more pessimistic ideological formations.