Assistant Professor of English at University of North Georgia
About
Stephanie Rountree is Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Georgia. As a scholar-teacher of American literature and media, gender studies, and southern studies, Dr. Rountree's work has been featured in a range of peer-reviewed publications, academic conferences, invited talks, and media interviews. She is co-editor of Small-Screen Souths: Region, Identity, and the Cultural Politics of Television (LSU Press, 2017) and of the in-progress collection New Media and the U.S. South. She is currently at work on a monograph, titled American Anteliberalism: Corporeality, Capitalism, and Citizenship in U.S. Literature. In her monograph, Dr. Rountree explores post-Emancipation texts to reveal cultural intuition of what learning U.S. historians are just now beginning to call “Slavery’s Capitalism,” thereby evidencing literature’s early articulation of Black enslavement’s constitutive role in U.S. capitalism, while paying particular attention to its enduring influence on national public health policy into the 20th and 21st centuries.
Current Work:
Dr. Rountree's current book project investigates post-emancipation US literature for evidence of historic public policies that regulated civilians’ bodies. She centralizes the practice of racialized slavery through methodologies in critical race, gender, and nationalism studies to theorize an economic narrative framework interrogating US corporeal governance. Her current book project, tentatively titled American Anteliberalism: Corporeality, Capitalism, and Citizenship in US Literature, interrogates literary evidence of (neo)liberal bio-policies across race, gender, sexuality, and disability. She interrogates historic moments of state-sanctioned bodily oppression by engaging literary representations of such policies as authored by Charles Chesnutt, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, Edwidge Danticat, and Jesmyn Ward. Much of the latest scholarship on this subject evidences either capitalism’s inaugural dependence on slavery or the nation’s legacy of identity-based, (neo)liberal violence. This book project intervenes through a rubric Dr. Rountree terms "American anteliberalism," defined as the triangulation of capitalism, corporeality, and citizenship in technologies of US public health. Anteliberalism as a rubric fosters intersectional subversion of national biopower by leveraging narrative to link the logics of 20th- and 21st-century bio-mechanisms across divergent embodiments, ultimately demonstrating a common originary logic developed in racialized slavery. For example, in Chesnutt’s "A Deep Sleeper" (1893), Dr. Rountree employs anteliberalism to illustrate how the story ridicules reproductive "breeding" practices that police marriage among enslaved African-descendant laborers. She further traces this literary critique through Eudora Welty’s Losing Battles (1970), which evokes US history of first-cousin marriage prohibitions endeavoring the production of able-bodied citizens (1865-1922). Through a comparative literary and historical analysis, Welty’s and Chesnutt’s texts reveal cultural resistance against marriage regulations, one as old as racialized slavery yet as relevant as Obergefell v. Hodges (2015). Thus, anteliberalism offers a literary and historical methodology for interrogating US corporeal governance anew.
Research Area Keyword(s):
US literature and media (film, television, digital media), women's and gender studies, media, southern studies, critical race studies
