Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United StatesDuke University Press, 27 sep 2001 - 351 pagina's In Necro Citizenship Russ Castronovo argues that the meaning of citizenship in the United States during the nineteenth century was bound to—and even dependent on—death. Deploying an impressive range of literary and cultural texts, Castronovo interrogates an American public sphere that fetishized death as a crucial point of political identification. This morbid politics idealized disembodiment over embodiment, spiritual conditions over material ones, amnesia over history, and passivity over engagement. Moving from medical engravings, séances, and clairvoyant communication to Supreme Court decisions, popular literature, and physiological tracts, Necro Citizenship explores how rituals of inclusion and belonging have generated alienation and dispossession. Castronovo contends that citizenship does violence to bodies, especially those of blacks, women, and workers. “Necro ideology,” he argues, supplied citizens with the means to think about slavery, economic powerlessness, or social injustice as eternal questions, beyond the scope of politics or critique. By obsessing on sleepwalkers, drowned women, and other corpses, necro ideology fostered a collective demand for an abstract even antidemocratic sense of freedom. Examining issues involving the occult, white sexuality, ghosts, and suicide in conjunction with readings of Harriet Jacobs, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Frances Harper, Necro Citizenship successfully demonstrates why Patrick Henry's “give me liberty or give me death” has resonated so strongly in the American imagination. |
Inhoudsopgave
Preface | xi |
DEMOCRACYS GRAVEYARD | 1 |
Political Necrophilia FREEDOM AND THE LONGING FOR DEAD CITIZENSHIP | 25 |
The Slavery of Man to Himself WHITE MALE SEXUALITY SELFRELIANCE AND BONDAGE | 62 |
That HalfLiving Corpse FEMALE MEDIUMS SEANCES AND THE OCCULT PUBLIC SPHERE | 101 |
The Black Arts of Citizenship AFRICANIST ORIGINS OF WHITE INTERIORITY | 151 |
DeNaturalizing Citizenship | 204 |
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Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth ... Russ Castronovo Gedeeltelijke weergave - 2001 |
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Abolitionism abolitionist abstract African American animal magnetism antislavery Berlant black bodies Blithedale body politic bondage Boston bourgeois Brent Cambridge citizen clairvoyants context corporeal corpse Coverdale Coverdale's critical critique cultural death democracy democratic discourse disembodied Douglass edited emancipation embodiment Emerson enslaved erotic Essays Fourteenth Amendment Fox sisters Frances E. W. Frances E. W. Harper freedom gender Graham Harper Harriet Harriet Jacobs Harvard University Press Hawthorne's human hygienic ideal identity ideology Iola Leroy Iola's Isaac Post Jacobs Jacobs's Lauren Berlant Lectures liberal liberty Marx masturbation material Mattison medium mediumship memory mesmerism moral necro Necro Citizenship necrophilia necrophilic nineteenth-century novel occult Oxford University Press personhood persons political necrophilia Poyen Priscilla privilege public sphere race racial radical reform reprint séances self-reliance sexual Slave Girl slave narrative slaveholding slavery socially dead soul specific Spirit Rapping spiritual spiritualist Sylvester Graham tion trance white male women York Zenobia zenship