Xenocitizens : illiberal ontologies in nineteenth-century America

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Xenocitizens : illiberal ontologies in nineteenth-century America

Jason Berger

Fordham University Press, 2020

  • : [pbk.]

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Includes index

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Description

In Xenocitizens, Jason Berger returns to the antebellum United States in order to challenge a scholarly tradition based on liberal-humanist perspectives. Through the concept of the xenocitizen, a synthesis of the terms "xeno," which connotes alien or stranger, and "citizen," which signals a naturalized subject of a state, Berger uncovers realities and possibilities that have been foreclosed by dominant paradigms. Innovatively re-orienting our thinking about traditional nineteenth-century figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau as well as formative writers such as William Wells Brown, Martin R. Delany, Margaret Fuller, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Xenocitizens glimpses how antebellum thinkers formulated, in response to varying forms of oppression and crisis, startlingly unique ontological and social models as well as unfamiliar ways to exist and to leverage change. In doing so, Berger offers us a different nineteenth century-pushing our imaginative and critical thinking toward new terrain.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Xenocitizens | 1 Part I: Illiberal Ontologies 1. Emerson's Operative Mood | 33 2. Agitating Margaret Fuller | 58 Part II: Illiberal Ecologies 3. Thoreau's Militant Vegetables | 101 4. Unadjusted Emancipations | 153 Epilogue: Care, There and Now | 201 Notes | 205 Index | 279

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