Description
Book SynopsisIn 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 abo
Trade Review
“Liberty and death? Citizenship and necrophilia? The conjunction ‘and’ is shocking and is meant to shock. Russ Castronovo sees American political life as the burial ground of many corpses, literal as well as metaphoric. With ruthless determination he digs these up, examines their tell-tale remains, and, in the process, offers a trenchant critique of some consequences of American democracy.”—Wai Chee Dimock, author of Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction: Democray’s Graveyard
1. Political Necrophilia
Freedom and the Longing for Dead Citizenship
2. “The Slavery of Man to Himself”
White Male Sexuality, Self-Reliance, and Bondage
3. “That Half-Living Corpse”
Female Mediums, Séances, and the Occult Public Sphere
4. The “Black Arts” of Citizenship
Africanist Origins of White Interiority
5. De-Naturalizing Citizenship
Afterword
Notes
Works Cited
Index
