Description
Book SynopsisFocuses on US citizens' democratic impulse: their ability to imagine and to work with others to create democratic publics while taking divergent views into account. This book contends that citizens of the early US were encouraged to locate this social impulse not in associations with others but in the turbulent interiors of their own bodies.
Trade Review“
Interior States rethinks the relation of identity and democracy in a dazzling exercise of literary criticism, social history, and political theory. Christopher Castiglia shows how the federal practice of democracy, in combination with developing institutions, did not squash so much as misplace democracy, relocating its performance from the sociality of exchange between citizens into the personal, bodily interior. Our nervous management of our own discordant identities sidetracks us from a richer, more inventively dissensual democratic practice. Castiglia explores a rich, interdisciplinary nineteenth-century archive that imagines alternative democracies and challenges readers to unfetter their imaginations in the service of more pleasurable, ‘post-interior’ democratic association.”—
Dana D. Nelson, co-editor of
Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics“This book combines scope and depth in a way that will remind readers of some of the classics—F. O. Matthiessen, Leo Marx, Ann Douglas, Jane Tompkins. In a book propelled by wonderful writing, Christopher Castiglia illuminates the extent to which the self-declared greatest democracy of world history has struggled to be democratic institutionally. His call for a ‘post-interior humanism’ gains real urgency from an account of a centuries-old impasse in American life that readers will remember long after they have finished the book.”—
Christopher Newfield, author of
The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in AmericaTable of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction. Interiority and the Problem of Misplaced Democracy 1
1. "Matters of Internal Concern": Federal Affect and the Melancholy Citizen 17
2. Bad Associations: Sociality, Interiority, Institutionalism 60
3. Abolition's Racial Interiors and White Civic Depth 101
4. Ardent Spirits: Intemperate Sociality and the Inner Life of Capital 136
5. Anxiety, Desire, and the Nervous State 168
6. Between Consciousness and Revolution: Romanticism and Racial Interiority 216
7. "I Want My Happiness!": Alienated Affections, Queer Sociality, and the Marvelous Interiors of the American Romance 256
Epilogue. Humanism without Humans: The Possibilities of Post-Interior Democracy 294
Notes 305
References 351
Index 363
