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.
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- 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, séances, 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
- Afterword
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
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