Modes and Moves of Protest
Crowds and Mobs in Nathan Hill's <i>The Nix</i>
Abstract
The role of mass protest has been recurrently central yet controversial in the American culture. Central because American history presents a constellation of significant collective protest movements, very different among them but generally symptomatic of a contrast between the people and the state: from the 1775 Boston Massacre and the 1787 Shays’s Rebellion, to the 1863 Draft Riots, but also considering the 1917 Houston Riot or anti-Vietnam war pacifist protests. Controversial, since despite—or because of—its historical persistence, American mass protest has generated a media bias which labelled mobs and crowds as a disruptive popular expression, thus constructing an opposition—practical and rhetorical—between popular subversive tensions, and the so-called middle class “conservative” and self-preserving struggle.
During the 20th century, this scenario was significantly influenced by 1968. “The sixties [we]re not fictional”, Stephen King claims in Hearts of Atlantis (1999), in fact “they actually happened”, and had a strong impact on the American culture of protest to the point that their legacy has spread into the post 9/11 era manifestations of dissent. Yet, in the light of this evolution, I believe the very perception of protesting crowds has transformed, producing a narrative in which collectivity functions both as “perpetrator” and “victim”, unlike in the traditional dichotomy. Hence, my purpose is to demonstrate the emergence of this new and historically peculiar connotation of crowds and mobs in America as a result of recent reinterpretations of the history and practice of protest in the 1960s, namely re-thinking the tropes of protest movements of those years, and relocating them in contemporary forms of protest. For this reason, I will concentrate on Nathan Hill’s recent novel, The Nix (2016), and focus on the constant dialogue it establishes between the 1968 modes of protest and the Occupy movement.
Keywords
mobs; crowds; American literature; The Nix; Nathan Hill; mass protest; dissent
References
Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Ball, James. Post-Truth. How Bullshit Conquered the World. London:
Biteback Publishing, 2017.
Borch, Christian. “Body to Body: On the Political Anatomy of Crowds.”
Sociological Theory, 27: 3 (Sept. 2009), 271-290.
Bouton, Terry. Taming Democracy. “The People,” the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Brill, Lesley. “Terrorism, Crowds and Power, and the Dogs of War.” Anthropological Quarterly, 76: 1 (Winter 2003), 87-94.
Canetti, Elias. Crowds and Power. New York: Continuum, 1962.
Engels, Jeremy. Enemyship. Democracy and Counter-Revolution in the Early Republic. East Lansing: Michigan State University, 2010.
Esteve, Mary. The Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd in American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Formisano, Ronald P. For the People. American Populist movements from the Revolution to the 1850s. Chapel Hill: the University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
Hardt, Michael, and Negri, Antonio. Empire. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 2000.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “My Kinsman, Major Molineaux.” The Snow-Image and Other Twice-Told Tales. Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1853. http://www.hawthorneinsalem.org/mirror_eldritch/mm.html. Accessed on October 28, 2018.
Hill, Nathan. The Nix. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.
King, Stephen. Hearts in Atlantis. New York: Scribner, 1999.
Le Bon, Gustave. The Crowd. A Study of the Popular Mind. New York: Dover Publications, 2002 (1895).
McClelland, J. S. The Crowd and the Mob. From Plato to Canetti. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989.
Mouffe, Chantal. “Democracy, Power, and the Political”. Democracy and Difference, edited by Seyla Benhabib, Princeton University Press, 1996.
Müller, Jan-Werner, What is Populism? Philadelphia: Unversity of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
Nelson, Dana D. Commons Democracy. Reading the Politics of Participation in the Early United States. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016.
Pease, Donald E. The New American Exceptionalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Man of the Crowd.” http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/poe/manofcro.html. Accessed on November 01, 2018.
Reynolds, Larry J. Devils and Rebels. The Making of Hawthorne's Damned Politics. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2008.
Rolfe, Mark. The Reinvention of Populist Rhetoric in the Digital Age. New York: Palgrave & MacMillan, 2016.
Smith, Barbara C. “Food Rioters and the American Revolution.” The William and Mary Quarterly, 51: 1 (Jan. 1994), 2: 38.
Westley, W. A. “The Nature and Control of Hostile Crowds.” The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, 23: 1 (Feb. 1957), 33-41.
Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.
“G. D’Annunzio” University at Chieti-Pescara Italy
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5672-5869
Nicola Paladin teaches Anglo-American literature at the University “G. D’Annunzio” Chieti-Pescara. He holds a Ph.D from “Sapienza” University of Rome and was a visiting scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include Early and 19th century American literature and War studies. He has published essays on Thomas Paine, Hugh H. Brackenridge, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville among others. He is currently working on a book on the multilayered imaginary of the American Revolution in 19th century US literature.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The Copyright Holder of the submitted text is the Author. The Reader is granted the rights to use the material available in the RIAS websites and pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative CommonsAttribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0). Any commercial use requires separate written agreement with the Author and a proper credit line indicating the source of the original publication in RIAS.
- License
The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY 4.0 license.
- Author’s Warranties
The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.
If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution - By the same conditions 4.0 International".
ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).
- User Rights
Under the Creative Commons Attribution license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
- Co-Authorship
If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.
I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.
