Performing Placeslessness: Early American Drama and the Liminal State, 1775-1859

In Performing Placeslessness, I argue that the lack of a consistent attachment to place--the geopathology that manifests in the problem of placelessness---contributed to the incoherence of American identity from the Revolutionary War through the mid-nineteenth century. In making this argument, I bridge the critical gap between Martin Brueckner\u27s description of the geographic revolution (late-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth century) and Una Chaudhuri\u27s Staging Place, in which she characterizes place as a problem in modern realist drama. Examining dramatic publications and performances from 1775-1859, I treat drama as a key site of negotiating problematic conceptions of space and place in America. This period was characterized by a number of spatial disruptions: political geographies were redrawn, frontiers were no sooner defined than pushed further west, and colonial outposts became populous cities through the process of urbanization. Place was paramount on the early American stage both because the theatre reflected the displacement at the heart of early American life (and thus achieved a level of anxiety-provoking mimesis) and because the stage was inherently dislocated in its phenomenology. While all theatre takes us somewhere else, the early American theatre was distinctive in its capacity to comprise both a mimetic and phenomenological placelessness.;Displacement wasn\u27t merely an obstacle to the formation of a sense of nation (though this was indeed the case). The displacement experienced by early Americans was at once a central and disavowed component of identity formation. The same early Americans who experienced their own anxieties of placelessness came to define themselves in opposition to displaced others. Native Americans were pushed further from the eastern seaboard, and slaves, by their very presence in the nation, contradicted the symbol-making process described by Brueckner. That is, for whites to locate their place of entitlement in the colonies, they needed to disenfranchise those enslaved blacks and Native Americans who could be found within colonial borders. We see the erasure of those who didn\u27t count within the nation most clearly in the dramatic performances of George Aiken\u27s Uncle Tom\u27s Cabin (1852) and Dion Boucicault\u27s The Octoroon (1859), as these plays resituated the South, its slaves, and lingering Native Americans as foreign to Northern theatregoers. Thus non-white bodies were effectively disenfranchised and displaced, both literally and figuratively, during stage performances that many associated with the fight for abolition. At the same time, I argue that the dramatic mode enabled the comparatively marginalized---women playwrights like Mercy Otis Warren and Charlottes Barnes, or a mixed-race former slave like William Wells Brown---to re-orient and resist their own displacement through the spatial orientations of drama

Amurocrangonyx, a New Genus of Subterranean Amphipod (Crangonyctidae) from the Russian Far East, with a Redescription of the Poorly Known Crangonyx Arsenjevi and Comments on Biogeographic Relationships

Amurocrangonyx n. gen. is described on the basis of recently collected specimens of Crangonyx arsenjevi (Derzhavin, 1927), a very poorly known subterranean amphipod crustacean originally described from springs in the Khor River basin of the Ussury River drainage in the Russian Far East. The species is redescribed from specimens obtained from the type-locality, Orekhovy spring, and a neotype is designated. A careful examination of the newly acquired material, although closely similar morphologically to Crangonyx, suggests that it represents a new genus in Crangonyctidae. However, determination of the precise phylogeographic relationship of Amurocrangonyx to Crangonyx or to other crangonyctoid genera in East Asia is unclear and must await molecular analyses

Morphological variation in Gammarus minus Say (Amphiopoda, Gammeridae), with emphasis on subterranean forms

Gammarus minus Say is a common amphipod species in springs and caves of limestone areas of the eastern and middle-eastern United States. Samples of populations from the central Appalachians were examined closely and morphological variation between spring and cave populations was analyzed. This species occurs in three morphological forms: a spring form, an intermediate cave form and an extreme cave form. The latter form was termed variety tenuipes by some earlier workers but has no nomenclatural validity. In contrast to the spring form, the cave forms show a reduction in eye structure, a change in pigmentation of the integument and a proportionate increase in the length of some of the appendages. It is concluded that G. minus is an extremely vagile and highly variable species that can occupy a variety of habitats, ranging from surface springs to small or large cave systems in certain karst areas

New Species of Amphipod Crustaceans in the Genera Tegano and Melita (Hadzioidea : Melitidae) From Subterranean Groundwaters in Guam, Palau, and the Philippines

Three new species of Tegano are described, two from caves on Panglao Island, Bohol, Philippines, and one from a cave on Peleliu Island, Palau. Sriha vagabunda from Sri Lanka is reassigned to the genus Tegano based primarily on the high degree of similarity between Sriha vagabunda and species of Tegano and the fact that these species exhibit a great deal of variation in the reduction of the mandibular palp. A new species of Melita with characters intermediate between those defining the genera Abludomelita, Melita, and Paraniphargus is described from a spring on Guam. The characters of the new species and studies by previous authors suggest that Abludomelita may not be as distinct from Melita as previously believed. The troglomorphic genus Paraniphargus from the Andaman Islands and Java is reevaluated and synonymized with Melita

Brief Note Report of an Amphipod Species New to Ohio: Gammarus Minus Say (Amphipoda: Gammaridae)

Author Institution: Department of Biological Sciences, University of Cincinnati; Aquatic Biology Section, United States Environmental Protection Agency; Department of Biological Sciences, Old Dominion Universit

Bogidiella indica, A New Species of Subterranean Amphipod Crustacean (Bogidiellidae) from Wells in Southeastern India, with Remarks on the Biogeographic Importance of Recently Discovered Bogidiellids on the Indian Subcontinent

Bogidiella indica, new species, is described from three water wells in southeastern India, including a bore-well on the campus of Acharya Nagarjuna University in Nagarjunanagar, a water well in Guntur town, and an agricultural well in the Godavari and Krishna Basin, all in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India. The new species is assigned to the genus Bogidiella Hertzog and to a newly designated species group within the genus. Despite the near circum-global distribution of the family Bogidiellidae, only a single, partially intact specimen of a bogidiellid had been collected from the Indian subcontinent prior to the discovery of specimens from the well in Nagarjunanagar. Including the new taxon described in this paper, the family Bogidiellidae contains 35 genera and 106 species. Although B. indica is closely similar to other species presently assigned to the genus Bogidiella, it is easily distinguished by a proportionately shorter and relatively heavily spinose pereopod 5. The sexes are generally similar except that the male bears a large, distally modified apical spine on the inner ramus of uropod 1. The location of the well sites within 45 to 50 km of the eastern coast of India strongly suggest that they lie in an area that was submerged under shallow marine water within the last 1 million years

Annotated Checklist of the Amphipoda of Arkansas with Emphasis upon Groundwater Habitats

Based on recent collections and review of the literature, 20 species of freshwater amphipod crustaceans are listed from the state of Arkansas. Included are species from the families Allocrangonyctidae, Crangonyctidae, Gammaridae and Hyalellidae and the genera Allocrangonyx, Bactrurus, Crangonyx, Stygobromus, Gammarus, and Hyalella. Ten of the species are restricted to subterranean groundwaters, 2 are closely associated with groundwater but also occur in surface waters, and 8 are known primarily from surface waters. Two of the species are in the process of being described in the literature, whereas 2 remain only provisionally recognized to date. On the basis of this new list, some revisions to the current rarity rankings are recommended

Morphological Differences Among Eyeless Amphipods in the Genus Stygobromus Dwelling in Different Subterranean Habitats

The amphipod genus Stygobromus occurs in a variety of subterranean habitats in North America, including caves, phreatic (groundwater) lakes, and superficial subterranean habitats (seeps and epikarst). The habitats share the absence of light but differ in other features, such as pore size of the habitat, available food, and degree of seasonality. Measurements of body size, antennal size, and antennal segment number of type specimens were compared for 56 species occurring in the eastern United States. Except for differences in body size, differences among species in the four different habitats were not significant. Body size was related to relative pore size of the habitat, e.g., epikarst, with the smallest spaces, had the smallest species. However, in all habitats, there was one very large species (\u3e 15mm); these enigmatic species apparently occupy a distinct ecological niche, perhaps being more predatory. Differences in relative antennal size showed no significant differences among habitats, and differences in number of antennal segments were marginally significant (P = 0.06) among habitat types and not in the predicted pattern. Differences among habitats in seasonality and available food seemed to be a minor part of the selective environment; absence of light seemed to be a major part of the selective environment

Increasing Access to Natural Areas: Connecting Physical and Social Dimensions

Report of the 2015 Berkley Workshop Held at the Asticou Inn, Northeast Harbor, Maine - July 201