rdf-syntax-grammar
mods:
  schema location: http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
  title info:
    title: Antebellum posthuman
    sub title: race and materiality in the mid-nineteenth century
  name:
    name part: Ellis, Cristin
    name part: 1978-
    role:
      role term: creator
    role:
      role term: author.
  type of resource: text
  genre: bibliography
  origin info:
    place:
      place term: nyu
    date issued: 2018
    issuance: monographic
  language:
    language term: eng
  physical description:
    form: print
    extent: 232 pages ; 24 cm.
  abstract: 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.
  table of contents: Contents; Introduction. Beyond Recognition: The Problem of Antebellum Embodiment; 1. Douglass's Animals: Racial Science and the Problem of Human Equality; 2. Thoreau's Seeds: Evolution and the Problem of Human Agency; 3. Whitman's Cosmic Body: Bioelectricity and the Problem of Human Meaning; 4. Posthumanism and the Problem of Social Justice: Race and Materiality in the Twenty-First Century; Coda. After Romantic Posthumanism; Acknowledgments; Notes; Works Cited.
  note: Cristin Ellis.
  note: Includes bibliographical references (pages 207-222) and index.
  subject:
    geographic code: n-us---
  subject:
    topic: Antislavery movements
    geographic: United States
    topic: History
    temporal: 19th century
  subject:
    topic: Humanism
    temporal: 19th century
  subject:
    topic: Social justice
  subject:
    topic: Humanity
  subject:
    topic: Racism
    geographic: United States
    topic: History
  subject:
    topic: Materialism
    geographic: United States
  classification: E449 .E482 2018
  classification: 970.980
  identifier: 9780823278442
  identifier: 0823278441
  identifier: 082327845X
  identifier: 9780823278459
  record info:
    record content source: DLC
    record creation date: 180110
    record change date: 20180430075506.0
    record identifier: in00003986273