Necro Citizenship

Castronovo, Russ

doi:10.1515/9780822380146

Cited by 1 publication

(3 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…during the famine of 1845-6" in Ireland. 91 Of course, Douglass's comparison here works on many fronts at once: there is po liti cal strategy in linking slavery to injustices in Eu rope so as to align American abolitionism with a transnational revolutionary movement, and there may also be financial interest in it, since Douglass raised significant funds for his newspaper abroad. 92 However, this comparison between the slaves' "melancholy" songs and the sounds of people literally starving also lends the slave's "grief and sorrow" all the existential urgency-all the physiological desperation-of the Irishman's dying complaint.…”

Section: Abolitionist Animalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…by obeying that eternal and only just CONSTITUTION which He, and not any Jefferson or Adams, has written in your being." 91 In these earlier essays, moral redemption is within every one's reach: their own quaking resolve is the only obstacle standing between them and moral perfection. But by the John Brown essays, the moral "constitution" Thoreau invokes has taken on a fleshy materiality and embodied diversity that makes it operate very differently, so that now moral reform may be beyond my power: "It is not every man who can be a freeman, even."…”

Section: Weird John Brown: the Revolutionary As Racial Anomalymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As Russ Castronovo observes, this reciprocal exchange yields a singularly deathly episteme: between the human citizen whose body is effaced by the purifying fires of liberal universalism and, by contrast, the dehumanized noncitizen who is sentenced "to excessive and lethal embodiment," this modern liberal-raciological order proves singularly hostile to embodied life. 91 Stepping outside the deadly either/or of a disaffectedly abstract liberal personhood on one side and a dehumanized materiality on the other, Douglass, Thoreau, and Whitman demonstrate that empiricism's entry into antebellum po liti cal reasoning in fact afforded a wider range of embodied discourses than these two alternatives allow. Insisting upon the materiality of all humans, these authors frame a tentative and experimental but provocative counterdiscourse that resists biological racism and points beyond liberal humanism's conception of the human.…”

Section: Infinity At Auction: Interracial Sympathy In Whitman's Democ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Antebellum Posthuman

Ellis¹

2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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...

show abstract

Section: Abolitionist Animalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Weird John Brown: the Revolutionary As Racial Anomalymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Infinity At Auction: Interracial Sympathy In Whitman's Democ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation