Antebellum Posthuman

Antebellum Posthuman PDF Author: Cristin Ellis
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823278468
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
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.

Antebellum Posthuman

Antebellum Posthuman PDF Author: Cristin Ellis
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823278468
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 207

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

The Modernist Corpse

The Modernist Corpse PDF Author: Erin E. Edwards
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452957290
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
An unconventional take on the corpse challenges traditional conceptions of who—and what—counts as human, while offering bold insights into the modernist project Too often regarded as the macabre endpoint of life, the corpse is rarely discussed and largely kept out of the public eye. In The Modernist Corpse, Erin E. Edwards unearths the critically important but previously buried life of the corpse, which occupies a unique place between biology and technology, the living and the dead. Exploring the posthumous as the posthuman, Edwards argues that the corpse is central to understanding relations between the human and its “others,” including the animal, the machine, and the thing. From photographs of lynchings to documentation of World War I casualties, the corpse is also central to the modernist project. Edwards turns critical attention to the corpse through innovative, posthumanist readings of canonical thinkers such as William Faulkner, Jean Toomer, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein, offering new insights into the intersections among race, gender, technical media, and matter presumed to be dead. Edwards’s expansive approach to modernism includes diverse materials such as Hollywood film, experimental photography, autopsy discourses, and the comic strip Krazy Kat, producing a provocatively broad understanding of the modernist corpse and its various “lives.” The Modernist Corpse both establishes important new directions for modernist inquiry and overturns common thought about the relationship between living and dead matter.

Black Well-Being

Black Well-Being PDF Author: Andrea Stone
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813072433
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Canadian Association for American Studies Robert K. Martin Book Prize Analyzing slave narratives, emigration polemics, a murder trial, and black-authored fiction, Andrea Stone highlights the central role physical and mental health and well-being played in antebellum black literary constructions of selfhood. At a time when political and medical theorists emphasized black well-being in their arguments for or against slavery, African American men and women developed their own theories about what it means to be healthy and well in contexts of injury, illness, sexual abuse, disease, and disability. Such portrayals of the healthy black self in early black print culture created a nineteenth-century politics of well-being that spanned continents. Even in conditions of painful labor, severely limited resources, and physical and mental brutality, these writers counter stereotypes and circumstances by representing and claiming the totality of bodily existence.  Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance

Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance PDF Author: P. Outka
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230614493
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Drawing on theories of sublimity, trauma, and ecocriticism, this book examines how the often sharp division between European American and African American experiences of the natural world developed in American culture and history, and how those natural experiences, in turn, shaped the construction of race.

Narratology Beyond the Human

Narratology Beyond the Human PDF Author: David Herman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019085040X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
To what extent, and in what manner, do storytelling practices accommodate nonhuman subjects and their modalities of experience, and how can contemporary narrative study shed light on interspecies interactions and entanglements? In Narratology beyond the Human, David Herman addresses these questions through a cross-disciplinary approach to post-Darwinian narratives concerned with animals and human-animal relationships. Herman considers the enabling and constraining effects of different narrative media, examining a range of fictional and nonfictional texts disseminated in print, comics and graphic novels, and film. In focusing on techniques such as the use of animal narrators, alternation between human and nonhuman perspectives, the embedding of stories within stories, and others, the book explores how specific strategies for portraying nonhuman agents both emerge from and contribute to broader attitudes toward animal life. Herman argues that existing frameworks for narrative inquiry must be modified to take into account how stories are interwoven with cultural ontologies, or understandings of what sorts of beings populate the world and how they relate to humans. Showing how questions of narrative bear on ideas of species difference and assumptions about animal minds, Narratology beyond the Human underscores our inextricable interconnectedness with other forms of creatural life and suggests that stories can be used to resituate imaginaries of human action in a more-than-human world.

The Complete Writings of Henry James on Art and Drama

The Complete Writings of Henry James on Art and Drama PDF Author: Henry James
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781316504420
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A complete, fully annotated collection of Henry James's essays and reviews on British, American and French art and drama.

Posthumanism in digital culture

Posthumanism in digital culture PDF Author: Callum T.F. McMillan
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
ISBN: 1800431090
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
This book explores the theories of transhumanism and posthumanism, two philosophies that deal with radically changing bodies, minds, and even the nature of humanity itself.

The Hermaphrodite

The Hermaphrodite PDF Author: Julia Ward Howe
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803204270
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Written in the 1840s and published here for the first time, Julia Ward Howe's novel about a hermaphrodite is unlike anything of its time--or, in truth, of our own. Narrated by Laurence, who is raised and lives as a man, is loved by men and women alike, and can respond to neither, this unconventional story explores the understanding "that fervent hearts must borrow the disguise of art, if they would win the right to express, in any outward form, the internal fire that consumes them." Laurence describes his repudiation by his family, his involvement with an attractive widow, his subsequent wanderings and eventual attachment to a sixteen-year-old boy, his own tutelage by a Roman nobleman and his sisters, and his ultimate reunion with his early love. His is a story unique in nineteenth-century American letters, at once a remarkable reflection of a largely hidden inner life and a richly imagined tale of coming of age at odds with one's culture. Howe wrote "The Hermaphrodite" when her own marriage was challenged by her husband's affection for another man--and when prevailing notions regarding a woman's appropriate role in patriarchal structures threatened Howe's intellectual and emotional survival. The novel allowed Howe, and will now allow her readers, to occupy a speculative realm otherwise inaccessible in her historical moment.

Toward a Stranger and More Posthuman Social Studies

Toward a Stranger and More Posthuman Social Studies PDF Author: Bretton A. Varga
Publisher: Teachers College Press
ISBN: 080776826X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
"This collection of essays explores posthuman approaches to social studies education, challenging the field to think differently about the precarious status of the world. Authors examine how educators and scholars can foster more ethical ways of teaching, learning, and researching by cultivating a greater sense of attunement to the more-than-human"--

The Dark Posthuman

The Dark Posthuman PDF Author: Stephanie Polsky
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1685710700
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
The Dark Posthuman: Dehumanization, Technology, and the Atlantic World explores how liberal humanism first enlivened, racialized, and gendered global cartographies, and how memory, ancestry, expression, and other aspects of social identity founded in its theories and practices made for the advent of the category of the posthuman through the dimensions of cultural, geographic, political, social, and scientific classification. The posthuman is very much the product of world-building narratives that have their beginnings in the commercial franchise and are fundamentally rooted in science, governance, and economics around the hegemonic appropriation of environments and commodification of bodies that initially fuelled white settler life worlds and continue to be operational in the way we conceive of these worlds as continuous ontological formations. The want has always been for ownership of any of these dimensions of being without regard to condition, to not remain stranded as the subsidiary of another's being, to another's claim to humanity, and finally, to escape the suffocating confines of an instrumental ontology that suggests a subcategory of humanity without rights onto itself. The Dark Posthuman distinguishes the posthuman's place within both the liberal and neoliberal imaginary and reveals how its appearance first entrenched itself through the avarice of English settler colonialism, and subsequently, through the paranoia of American slavery. This same figure of the posthuman played a crucial role in the functional adaptation of Cold War behavioural cybernetics, and thereafter, in the fetishization of technology within the era of global financialization. The shadowing of this arrangement during and beyond the long duration of humanity's domination of this world becomes the structural web work of this book. Stephanie Polsky is an interdisciplinary writer and academic working in the areas of Media Studies and Visual Culture. Her work explores the confluence of power around race and gender as technologies of governance. She has lectured widely in media and cultural studies, critical theory, and visual culture at a number of prestigious institutions including Goldsmiths University, Regent's University London, University of Greenwich, and Winchester School of Art. Most recently she has worked at California College of the Arts in Critical Studies and Diversity Studies. She holds a PhD in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London and an MA in Media Studies from the University of Sussex. Her books include The End of the Future: Governing Consequence in the Age of Digital Sovereignty (Academica Press, 2019), Ignoble Displacement: Dispossessed Capital in Neo-Dickensian London (Zero Books, 2015), and Walter Benjamin's Transit: A Destructive Tour of Modernity (Academica Press, 2009).