On Sympathetic Grounds

With its filigreed, formidable representations of tears and suffering, sentimentalism has remained a divisive genre and category of analysis. On Sympathetic Grounds offers a new interpretation of the sentimental by mapping its grounds in North America. During sweeping transformations of territory, land stewardship, personhood, and citizenship in the nineteenth century, sentimentalists evoked sympathy to express a desire for a place that was both territorialand emotional—what Naomi Greyser calls an "affective geography." Greyser traces the intricacies attending Americans sentimental sense that bodies could merge and mutually occupy the same space at the same time. Affective geographies complicate normative, linear assumptions about intimacy and distance, andconsequently compel a reconsideration of geopolitics, geophysics and the distribution of resources and care. Mapping feelings in and also about space, On Sympathetic Grounds focuses on the experiences and perspectives of those whose bodies, labor, space and sovereignty have been occupied to ground others' lives and world-making projects. Bringing literary and rhetorical studies together with critical race and gender theory, cultural geography, American studies, affect studies and the new materialism, this book lays out sentimentalism's usefulness to settler colonialism and themaintenance of racialized labour. The book also carefully charts sentimentalisms value as a means of resisting geographic displacement and both physical and metaphysical dispossession. Philosophers and rhetoricians regard grounds as necessary conditions for argumentation; Greyser treats grounds as geopolitical, geoaffective, and geophysical. Sympathy has enriched conditions for living at the same time that it has mercilessly enlisted some bodies and lives as the grounds for others' wellbeing. Ultimately, On Sympathetic Grounds uncovers a capacious, non-linear cartography of sympathy's vital place in shaping North America.

Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty., On Sympathetic Grounds interprets nineteenth-century literary sentimentalism as the means of creating an 'affective geography' that draws the reader into its formal boundaries to create sympathy. Such imaginative maps are deeply political in their efforts to persuade readers, but they can be used for very different political ends. The real strength of this book lies in its representation of how peoples of color, “There are many things to admire about On Sympathetic Grounds, not least of all is Greyser's sensitivity to both rhetorical nuance and lived experience. The detail with which Greyser tells her stories- about white, sentimental constructions of Indian Removal and the 'Trail of Tears', for example-render those readings both mesmerizing and commonsensical. I mean this latter in the most positive way: many times I found myself thinking, 'Of course, how could I have not seen that before?' That is the mark of a powerful argument…I'm very glad I had the opportunity to read this smart, thought-provoking, and ground-breaking (no pun intended) book.” — Elizabeth Barnes, College of William and Mary, Greyser maps a new route through the debate over the political and moral efficacy of the sentimental mode. Through erudite analysis and personal reflection, she shows us the value in the pursuit of reciprocity, even when it fails. A vital study, On Sympathetic Grounds challenges accounts of sentimentalism as a white womans genre taken up by people of color, uncovering mutual appropriations and revisionary projects.

Naomi Greyser is Associate Professor of Rhetoric, English and Gender Studies at the University of Iowa, where she is also executive director of POROI, Iowas Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry