Necro Citizenship

Necro Citizenship PDF Author: Russ Castronovo
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822380145
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
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.

Necro Citizenship

Necro Citizenship PDF Author: Russ Castronovo
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822380145
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Necro Citizenship

Necro Citizenship PDF Author: Russ Castronovo
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822327721
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
DIVArgues that the category of death was a central part of the concept of citizenship in the nineteenth-century U.S., and that the particular form of that construction functioned to naturalize white males as ideal citizens./div

The Practice of Citizenship

The Practice of Citizenship PDF Author: Derrick R. Spires
Publisher:
ISBN: 081225080X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
The Practice of Citizenship traces the parallel development of early black print culture and legal and cultural understandings of U.S. citizenship. Considering a variety of texts by both canonical and lesser-known authors, Derrick R. Spires demonstrates how black writers articulated an expansive, practice-based theory of citizenship.

Transnational Encounters

Transnational Encounters PDF Author: Alejandro L. Madrid
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199876118
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
Through the study of a large variety of musical practices from the U.S.-Mexico border, Transnational Encounters seeks to provide a new perspective on the complex character of this geographic area. By focusing not only on norte?a, banda or conjunto musics (the most stereotypical musical traditions among Hispanics in the area) but also engaging a number of musical practices that have often been neglected in the study of this border's history and culture (indigenous musics, African American musical traditions, pop musics), the authors provide a glance into the diversity of ethnic groups that have encountered each other throughout the area's history. Against common misconceptions about the U.S.-Mexico border as a predominant Mexican area, this book argues that it is diversity and not homogeneity which characterizes it. From a wide variety of disciplinary and multidisciplinary enunciations, these essays explore the transnational connections that inform these musical cultures while keeping an eye on their powerful local significance, in an attempt to redefine notions like "border," "nation," "migration," "diaspora," etc. Looking at music and its performative power through the looking glass of cultural criticism allows this book to contribute to larger intellectual concerns and help redefine the field of U.S.-Mexico border studies beyond the North/South and American/Mexican dichotomies. Furthermore, the essays in this book problematize some of the widespread misconceptions about U.S.-Mexico border history and culture in the current debate about immigration.

Citizenship, Law and Literature

Citizenship, Law and Literature PDF Author: Caroline Koegler
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110749831
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
This edited volume is the first to focus on how concepts of citizenship diversify and stimulate the long-standing field of law and literature, and vice versa. Building on existing research in law and literature as well as literature and citizenship studies, the collection approaches the triangular relationship between citizenship, law and literature from a variety of disciplinary, conceptual and political perspectives, with particular emphasis on the performative aspect inherent in any type of social expression and cultural artefact. The sixteen chapters in this volume present literature as carrying multifarious, at times opposing energies and impulses in relation to citizenship. These range from providing discursive arenas for consolidating, challenging and re-negotiating citizenship to directly interfering with or inspiring processes of law-making and governance. The volume opens up new possibilities for the scholarly understanding of citizenship along two axes: Citizenship-as-Literature: Enacting Citizenship and Citizenship-in-Literature: Conceptualising Citizenship.

The Power of the Story

The Power of the Story PDF Author: Vincent Joos
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1800737572
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
A cross-disciplinary volume that combines and puts into dialogue perspectives on disasters, this book includes contributions from anthropology, history, cultural studies, sociology, and literary studies. Offering a rich and diverse set of arguments and analyses on the ever-relevant theme of catastrophe in the circum-Caribbean, it will encourage debate and collaboration between scholars working on disasters from a range of disciplinary perspectives.

Disability, the Body, and Radical Intellectuals in the Literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction

Disability, the Body, and Radical Intellectuals in the Literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction PDF Author: Sarah E. Chinn
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009442694
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
The book is a study of the ways that white radicals deployed the physical and literary image of amputation during the Civil War and Reconstruction to argue for full Black citizenship and against a national reconciliation that reimposed white supremacy. It gives readers a new way to think about the Civil War and Reconstruction.

History, Abolition, and the Ever-Present Now in Antebellum American Writing

History, Abolition, and the Ever-Present Now in Antebellum American Writing PDF Author: Jeffrey Insko
Publisher: Oxford Studies in American Lit
ISBN: 0198825641
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
History, Abolition, and the Ever-Present Now in Antebellum American Writing examines the meaning and possibilities of the present and its relationship to history and historicity in a number of literary texts; specifically, the writings of several figures in antebellum US literary historysome, but not all of whom, associated with the period's romantic movement. Focusing on nineteenth-century writers who were impatient for social change, like those advocating for the immediate emancipation of slaves, as opposed to those planning for a gradual end to slavery, the book recovers some of the political force of romanticism. Through close readings of texts by Washington Irving, John Neal, Catharine Sedgwick, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Herman Melville, the book argues that these writers practiced forms of literary historiography that treat the past as neither a reflection of present interests nor as an irretrievably distant 'other', but as a complex and open-ended interaction between the two. In place of a fixed and linear past, these writers imagine history as an experience rooted in a fluid, dynamic, and ever-changing present. The political, philosophical, and aesthetic disposition Insko calls 'romantic presentism' insists upon the present as the fundamental sphere of human action and experience-and hence of ethics and democratic possibility.

Bridging Cultures

Bridging Cultures PDF Author: Harriett D. Romo
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1623499763
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 439

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Book Description
Borderlands: they stretch across national boundaries, and they create a unique space that extends beyond the international boundary. They extend north and south of what we think of as the actual “border,” encompassing even the urban areas of San Antonio, Texas, and Monterrey, Nueva León, Mexico, affirming shared identities and a sense of belonging far away from the geographical boundary. In Bridging Cultures: Reflections on the Heritage Identity of the Texas-Mexico Borderlands, editors Harriett Romo and William Dupont focus specifically on the lower reaches of the Rio Grande/Río Bravo as it exits the mountains and meanders across a coastal plain. Bringing together perspectives of architects, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, educators, political scientists, geographers, and creative writers who span and encompass the border, its four sections explore the historical and cultural background of the region; the built environment of the transnational border region and how border towns came to look as they do; shared systems of ideas, beliefs, values, knowledge, norms of behavior, and customs—the way of life we think of as Borderlands culture; and how border security, trade and militarization, and media depictions impact the inhabitants of the Borderlands. Romo and Dupont present the complexity of the Texas-Mexico Borderlands culture and historical heritage, exploring the tangible and intangible aspects of border culture, the meaning and legacy of the Borderlands, its influence on relationships and connections, and how to manage change in a region evolving dramatically over the past five centuries and into the future.

Transcendental Resistance

Transcendental Resistance PDF Author: Johannes Voelz
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 1584659483
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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Book Description
A timely and engrossing critique of the New Americanists