From the eighteenth-century abolitionist motto “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” to the Civil Rights-era declaration “I AM a Man,” antiracism has engaged in a struggle for the recognition of black humanity. It has done so, however, even as the very definition of the human has been called into question by the biological sciences. While this conflict between liberal humanism and biological materialism animates debates in posthumanism and critical race studies today, Antebellum Posthuman argues that it first emerged as a key question in the antebellum era. In a moment in which the authority of science was increasingly invoked to defend slavery and other racist policies, abolitionist arguments underwent a profound shift, producing a new, materialist strain of antislavery. Engaging the works of Douglass, Thoreau, and Whitman, and Dickinson, Cristin Ellis identifies and traces the emergence of an antislavery materialism in mid-nineteenth century American literature, placing race at the center of the history of posthumanist thought. Turning to contemporary debates now unfolding between posthumanist and critical race theorists, Ellis demonstrates how this antebellum posthumanism highlights the difficulty of reconciling materialist ontologies of the human with the project of social justice.
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Introduction. Beyond Recognition: The Problem of Antebellum Embodiment 1. Animal: Racial Science and the Problem of Human Equality 2. Vegetable: Evolution and the Problem of Human Agency 3. Cosmos: Bioelectricity and the Problem of Human Meaning 4. Posthumanism and the Problem of Social Justice (Race and Materiality in the Twenty-first Century) Coda. After Romantic Posthumanism Notes Works Cited Index
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Antebellum Posthuman is a thought-provoking and timely contribution to the recent explosion of work on the desirability of moving beyond the 'human' as analytic framework or political horizon. Ellis’s consideration of Douglass, Thoreau, and Whitman uncovers posthumanism’s Romantic unconscious, challenging the contemporary faith in political progressiveness of the posthuman turn. Arguing for a renewed engagement with matter, Antebellum Posthuman persuasively models a close critical attentiveness that does not assume in advance what the outcome of that engagement will be.
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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780823278459
Publisert
2018-01-02
Utgiver
Vendor
Fordham University Press
Høyde
229 mm
Bredde
152 mm
Aldersnivå
P, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Antall sider
300

Forfatter

Biographical note

Cristin Ellis is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Mississippi.