1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910821127003321

Autore

Castronovo Russ <1965->

Titolo

Necro citizenship : death, eroticism, and the public sphere in the nineteenth-century United States / / Russ Castronovo

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Durham, : Duke University Press, 2001

ISBN

1-283-06173-2

9786613061737

0-8223-8014-5

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (369 p.)

Collana

New Americanists

Disciplina

306.9/0973

306.90973

Soggetti

Death - Political aspects - United States - History

Citizenship - United States - History

Democracy - United States - History

Passivity (Psychology) - United States - History

Apathy - United States - History

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. [311]-336) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Introduction: Democracy's graveyard: Ideology and Eternity / Bodies Politic / A Brief Note on (and against) Interdisciplinarity -- 1 Political Necrophilia. Freedom and the longing for dead citizenship. Thinking Against Freedom / Reading the Social Contract: The Fine Print / Give Me Liberty and Death / Killing Off Free Citizens, or The Logic of Political Necrophilia / Strategies of Antifreedom / Blacks and Jews -- 2 "The Slavery of Man to Himself": White male sexuality, self-reliance, and bondage. The Black Man / Self-Abuse or Self-Reliance? / Straight National Politics: Emerson, Sylvester Graham, and Republicanism / "I Recommended Castration": Managing Sexual Slaves / The Social Origins of the Solitary Vice / Taking Political Pleasure in White Men / Postscript -- 3 "That Half-Living Corpse": Female mediums, seĢances, and the occult public sphere. Fusing the Unconscious to National Pathology: Hawthorne and Habermas / Mesmerized Citizens and Spiritualist Politics / Ahistorical Performances of Utopia: Brook Farm and Blithedale / The Trance: Women's Privacy as the Performance of Citizenship / A



Brief History of Girlhood / Veiled Labor / Zenobia's Corpse / Epitaph -- 4 The "Black Arts" of Citizenship: Africanist origins of white interiority. What about the Materiality of the Body? / Black Origins of the White Unconscious / Was Lincoln a Spiritualist? Emancipation and Clairvoyance / Ghostwriting / Douglass and the Antislavery Unconscious / Incidents in the (After)life of a Slave Girl / Histories of the Not There / Saying "Nothing" about History -- 5 De-Naturalizing Citizenship: Geographies Other Than the National / The Fourteenth Amendment and the Reduction of Subjectivity / "A French Grammar" and the Remainders of Diaspora / Privacy, Concubines, and Iola Leroy / Violence, Privacy, and the Supreme Court / Frances Harper and the Problem of Dual Citizenship / The Promise of the Counterpublic and the Return of Hierarchy / Miscegenation without Sex.

Sommario/riassunto

Argues 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.