Description
Book SynopsisCultural and literary study of the 1781 massacre on the slaveship Zong for the insurance money and the aftereffects of the event on the development of modernity
Trade Review“
Specters of the Atlantic is quite possibly the most provocative scholarly work I have read in a decade. I really cannot praise this book enough.”—Mary Poovey, author of
A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society“A fantastically stimulating read,
Specters of the Atlantic will be an extremely significant book. Its core strength is that it deals in such detail and in such an imaginative way with the primary texts associated with the case of the
Zong. Nobody has read those texts in such a careful and stimulating way before, and nobody has used the case to construct such an ambitious historical schema.”—Peter Hulme, author of
Remnants of Conquest: The Island Caribs and Their Visitors, 1877–1998“This work is a compelling study of the roles of slavery and abolition in the origins of finance capital in the British Atlantic empire. The work is an interdisciplinary tour de force, with superb scholarship on slavery, modernity, the Enlightenment, postmodernism and contemporary literary theory. It is one of the finest comparative studies of the philosophy of history and liberation struggles that I have read.” -- Charles C. Verharen * Interventions *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Part One: “Now Being”: Slavery, Speculation, and the Measure of our Time
1. Liverpool, a Capital of the Long Twentieth Century 3
2. “Subject $”; or, the “Type” of the Modern 35
3. “Madam Death! Madam Death!”:Credit, Insurance, and the Atlantic Cycle of Capital Accumulation 80
4.”
Signum Rememorativum, Demonstrativum, Prognostikon”: Modernity and the Truth Event 113
5.”Please decide”: The Singular and the Speculative 141
Part Two: Specters of the Atlantic: Slavery and the Witness
6. Frontispiece: Testimony, Rights, and the State of Exception 173
7. The View from the Window: Sympathy, Melancholy, and the Problem of “Humanity” 195
8. The Fact of History: On Cosmopolitan Interestedness 213
9. The Imaginary Resentment of the Dead: A Theory of Melancholy Sentiment 242
10. “To Tumble into It, and Gasp for Breath as We Go Down”: The Idea of Suffering and the Case of Liberal Cosmopolitanism 265
11. This/Such, for Instance: The Witness against “History” 297
Part Three: “The Sea is History”
12. “The Sea is History”: On Temporal Accumulation 309
Notes 335
Index 377
