Antebellum Posthuman

Abstract

I n t r o d u c t i o nBeyond Recognition: The Prob lem of Antebellum Embodiment "Am I not a man and a brother?" the eighteenth-century abolitionist motto demands. This question is meant to be rhetorical-to indict a blindness to one's fellow human so obscene that today, as Hortense Spillers notes, it "might be denied, point blank, as a possibility for anyone, except that we know it happened." 1 Indeed, Anglo-American abolitionists regularly diagnosed slavery as the product of a monumental failure-or deliberate refusal-to recognize the humanity of enslaved persons, and their rhe toric survives today in the commonplace assertion that slavery and racism are practices that operate by dehumanization. But while, as the famous abolitionist motto suggests, the "question" of Black humanity was undeniably on the line in the debate over slavery, this focus on recognition overlooks the full scope of the strug gle that was pitched on the battleground of the Black body in the antebellum United States. 2 In this book, I argue that the ideological strug gle over slavery in antebellum Amer i ca was one that contested not just the constituency of humanity (who qualifies?) but also the meaning of "the human" as such. That is, I suggest that to understand the true stakes of the fight for recognitionand of the ferocity with which that recognition was denied-we must be France, and Haiti by underwriting popu lar appeals to mankind's universal right to freedom. As Michel Foucault argues, however, in this same late eighteenth-century moment a very dif fer ent conception of human being was also beginning to take shape and transform this Western episteme of "Man." 3 As Foucault explains, thanks to a host of newly emerging fields of knowledge dedicated to the empirical study of human life (fields such as natu ral history, biology, ethnology, demography, po liti cal economy, public health, and statistics), "Western man was gradually learning what it meant to be a living species in a living world, to have a body, conditions of existence, probabilities of life, and individual and collective welfare." 4 In contrast to the humanisms that preceded it, then, this new empirical episteme proposed to define human being by physical traits-identifying human thought and action with embodied pro cesses rather than by freedom from such material forces. In the wake of this epistemic shift, Foucault writes, "the human being begins to exist within his organism, inside the shell of his head." 5 The late eigh teenth century thus marks the onset of a new volatility in the Western conception of the human. Just as democratic revolutions began to enshrine the princi ples of liberal humanism, promising to extend rational subjecthood to all man-(and possibly woman-) kind, the burgeoning of empirical discourse was proliferating a new episteme that threw humanity's rational freedom into question.Of course, the rough timeline I have just sketched indicates that this epistemic upheaval would have been already well under way by the midnineteenth century, the period o...