Download or read book The Moment of Racial Sight written by Irene Tucker and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Moment of Racial Sight overturns the most familiar form of racial analysis in contemporary culture: the idea that race is constructed, that it operates by attaching visible marks of difference to arbitrary meanings and associations. Searching for the history of the constructed racial sign, Irene Tucker argues that if people instantly perceive racial differences despite knowing better, then the underlying function of race is to produce this immediate knowledge. Racial perception, then, is not just a mark of acculturation, but a part of how people know one another. Tucker begins her investigation in the Enlightenment, at the moment when skin first came to be used as the primary mark of racial difference. Through Kant and his writing on the relation of philosophy and medicine, she describes how racialized skin was created as a mechanism to enable us to perceive the likeness of individuals in a moment. From there, Tucker tells the story of instantaneous racial seeing across centuries—from the fictive bodies described but not seen in Wilkie Collins’s realism to the medium of common public opinion in John Stuart Mill, from the invention of the notion of a constructed racial sign in Darwin’s late work to the institutionalizing of racial sight on display in the HBO series The Wire. Rich with perceptive readings of unexpected texts, this ambitious book is an important intervention in the study of race.
Download or read book Why Race Still Matters written by Alana Lentin and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-04-22 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Why are you making this about race?' This question is repeated daily in public and in the media. Calling someone racist in these times of mounting white supremacy seems to be a worse insult than racism itself. In our supposedly post-racial society, surely it’s time to stop talking about race? This powerful refutation is a call to notice not just when and how race still matters but when, how and why it is said not to matter. Race critical scholar Alana Lentin argues that society is in urgent need of developing the skills of racial literacy, by jettisoning the idea that race is something and unveiling what race does as a key technology of modern rule, hidden in plain sight. Weaving together international examples, she eviscerates misconceptions such as reverse racism and the newfound acceptability of 'race realism', bursts the 'I’m not racist, but' justification, complicates the common criticisms of identity politics and warns against using concerns about antisemitism as a proxy for antiracism. Dominant voices in society suggest we are talking too much about race. Lentin shows why we actually need to talk about it more and how in doing so we can act to make it matter less.
Download or read book The Science of Character written by S. Pearl Brilmyer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Science of Character makes a bold new claim for the power of the literary by showing how Victorian novelists used fiction to theorize how character forms. In 1843, the Victorian philosopher John Stuart Mill called for the establishment of a new science, “the science of the formation of character.” Although Mill’s proposal failed as scientific practice, S. Pearl Brilmyer maintains that it found its true home in realist fiction of the period, which employed the literary figure of character to investigate the nature of embodied experience. Bringing to life Mill’s unrealized dream of a science of character, novelists such as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner turned to narrative to explore how traits and behaviors in organisms emerge and develop, and how aesthetic features—shapes, colors, and gestures—come to take on cultural meaning through certain categories, such as race and sex. Engaged with materialist science and philosophy, these authors transformed character from the liberal notion of the inner truth of an individual into a materially determined figuration produced through shifts in the boundaries between the body’s inside and outside. In their hands, Brilmyer argues, literature became a science, not in the sense that its claims were falsifiable or even systematically articulated, but in its commitment to uncovering, through a fictional staging of realistic events, the laws governing physical and affective life. The Science of Character redraws late Victorian literary history to show how women and feminist novelists pushed realism to its aesthetic and philosophical limits in the crucial span between 1870 and 1920.
Download or read book A Probable State written by Irene Tucker and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2000-11-15 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why has the realist novel been persistently understood as promoting liberalism? Can this tendency be reconciled with an equally familiar tendency to see the novel as a national form? In A Probable State, Irene Tucker builds a revisionary argument about liberalism and the realist novel by shifting the focus from the rise of both in the eighteenth century to their breakdown at the end of the nineteenth. Through a series of intricate and absorbing readings, Tucker relates the decline of realism and the eroding logic of liberalism to the question of Jewish characters and writers and to shifting ideas of community and nation. Whereas previous critics have explored the relationship between liberalism and the novel by studying the novel's liberal characters, Tucker argues that the liberal subject is represented not merely within the novel, but in the experience of the novel's form as well. With special attention to George Eliot, Henry James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and S. Y. Abramovitch, Tucker shows how we can understand liberalism and the novel as modes of recognizing and negotiating with history.
Download or read book Sight Lines written by Arthur Sze and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2019-06-18 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2019 National Book Award “The sight lines in Sze’s 10th collection are just that―imagistic lines strung together by jump-cuts, creating a filmic collage that itself seems to be a portrait of simultaneity.” ―The New York Times From the current phenomenon of drawing calligraphy with water in public parks in China to Thomas Jefferson laying out dinosaur bones on the White House floor, from the last sighting of the axolotl to a man who stops building plutonium triggers, Sight Lines moves through space and time and brings the disparate and divergent into stunning and meaningful focus. In this new work, Arthur Sze employs a wide range of voices—from lichen on a ceiling to a man behind on his rent—and his mythic imagination continually evokes how humans are endangering the planet; yet, balancing rigor with passion, he seizes the significant and luminous and transforms these moments into riveting and enduring poetry. “These new poems are stronger yet and by confronting time head on, may best stand its tests.” ―Lit Hub “The wonders and realities of the world as seen through travel, nature walks, and daily routine bring life to the poems in Sight Lines.” ―Library Journal
Download or read book The Masses Are Revolting written by Zachary Samalin and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Masses Are Revolting reconstructs a pivotal era in the history of affect and emotion, delving into an archive of nineteenth-century disgust to show how this negative emotional response came to play an outsized, volatile part in the emergence of modern British society. Attending to the emotion's socially productive role, Zachary Samalin highlights concrete scenes of Victorian disgust, from sewer tunnels and courtrooms to operating tables and alleyways. Samalin focuses on a diverse set of nineteenth-century writers and thinkers—including Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, and Charlotte Brontë—whose works reflect on the shifting, unstable meaning of disgust across the period. Samalin elaborates this cultural history of Victorian disgust in specific domains of British society, ranging from the construction of London's sewer system, the birth of modern obscenity law, and the development of the conventions of literary realism to the emergence of urban sociology, the rise of new scientific theories of instinct, and the techniques of colonial administration developed during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. By bringing to light disgust's role as a public passion, The Masses Are Revolting reveals significant new connections among these apparently disconnected forms of social control, knowledge production, and infrastructural development.
Download or read book Blood Novels written by Julia H. Chang and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2022-08-31 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late nineteenth century, Spain’s most prominent writers – Juan Valera, Leopoldo Alas, and Benito Pérez Galdós – made blood a crucial feature of their fiction. Blood Novels examines the cultural and literary significance of blood, unsettling the dominant assumption of the period that blood no longer played a decisive role in social hierarchies. By examining fictional works through the rubric of "blood novels," Julia H. Chang identifies a shared fascination with blood that probes the limits of realism through blood’s dual nature of matter and metaphor. Situating the literature within broader cultural and theoretical debates, Blood Novels attends to the aesthetic contours of material blood and in particular how bleeding is inflected by gender, caste, and race. Critically engaging with feminist theory, theories of race and whiteness, literary criticism, and medical literature, this innovative study makes a case for treating blood as a critical analytic tool that not only sheds new light on Spanish realism but, more broadly, challenges our understanding of gendered and racialized embodiment in Spain.
Download or read book The Reeducation of Race written by Sonali Thakkar and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-28 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: World War II produced a fundamental shift in modern racial discourse. In the postwar period, racism was situated for the first time at the center of international political life, and race's status as conceptual common sense and a justification for colonial rule was challenged with new intensity. In response to this crisis of race, the UN and UNESCO initiated a project of racial reeducation. This global antiracist campaign was framed by the persecution of Europe's Jews and anchored by UNESCO's epochal 1950 Statement on Race, which redefined the race concept and canonized the midcentury liberal antiracist consensus that continues to shape our present. In this book, Sonali Thakkar tells the story of how UNESCO's race project directly influenced anticolonial thought and made Jewish difference and the Holocaust enduring preoccupations for anticolonial and postcolonial writers. Drawing on UNESCO's rich archival resources and shifting between the scientific, social scientific, literary, and cultural, Thakkar offers new readings of a varied collection of texts from the postcolonial, Jewish, and Black diasporic traditions. Anticolonial thought and postcolonial literature critically recast liberal scientific antiracism, Thakkar argues, and the concepts central to this new moral economy were the medium for postcolonialism's engagement with Jewishness. By recovering these connections, she shows how the midcentury crisis of racial meaning shaped the kinds of solidarities between racialized subjects that are thinkable today.
Download or read book For Pleasure written by Rachel Jane Carroll and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2023-12-12 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that aesthetic pleasure plays a key role in both racial practices and struggles against racist domination For Pleasure proposes that experimental aesthetics shaped race in the twentieth-century United States by creating transformative scenes of pleasure. Rachel Jane Carroll explains how aesthetic pleasure is fundamental to the production and circulation of racial meaning in the United States through a study of experimental work by authors and artists of color. For Pleasure offers methods for reading experimental literature and art produced by racially minoritized authors and artists working in and around the US, including Isaac Julien, Nella Larsen, Yoko Ono, Jack Whitten, Byron Kim, Glenn Ligon, Zora Neale Hurston, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Cici Wu. Along the way, we learn what a racist joke has to do with the history of monochrome painting, if beauty has a part to play in social change, and whether whimsy should be taken seriously as a political affect. Carroll draws attention to key connections between aesthetic pleasure and experimentation through their shared capacity for world-building. Neither aesthetic pleasure nor experimental forms are liberatory in and of themselves; however, both can interrupt, defamiliarize, and rearrange our habits of aesthetic judgment.
Download or read book Antebellum Posthuman written by Cristin Ellis and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2018-01-02 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Corporate Romanticism written by Daniel M. Stout and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Corporate Romanticism offers an alternative history of the connections between modernity, individualism, and the novel. In early nineteenth-century England, two developments—the rise of corporate persons and the expanded scale of industrial action—undermined the basic assumption underpinning both liberalism and the law: that individual human persons can be meaningfully correlated with specific actions and particular effects. Reading works by Godwin, Austen, Hogg, Mary Shelley, and Dickens alongside a wide-ranging set of debates in nineteenth-century law and Romantic politics and aesthetics, Daniel Stout argues that the novel, a literary form long understood as a reflection of individualism’s ideological ascent, in fact registered the fragile fictionality of accountable individuals in a period defined by corporate actors and expansively entangled fields of action. Examining how liberalism, the law, and the novel all wrestled with the moral implications of a highly collectivized and densely packed modernity, Corporate Romanticism reconfigures our sense of the nineteenth century and its novels, arguing that we see in them not simply the apotheosis of laissez-fair individualism but the first chapter of a crucial and distinctly modern problem about how to fit the individualist and humanist terms of justice onto a world in which the most consequential agents are no longer persons.
Download or read book The Unintended written by Monica Huerta and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2023-06-06 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Through close attention to the centrality of involuntarity in pivotal nineteenth-century American court cases that created new property relations with photographs, this book offers a historically situated theory of photography in terms of expression and an archivally-supported theory of whiteness as an aesthetics of racial capitalism"--
Download or read book The Equality of Flesh written by Brent Dawson and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-15 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Equality of Flesh traces a new genealogy of equality before its formalization under liberalism. While modern ideas of equality are defined through an inner human nature, Brent Dawson argues that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries conceptualized equality as an ambivalent and profoundly bodily condition. Everyone was made from the same lowly matter and, as a result, shared the same set of vulnerabilities, needs, and passions. Responding to the political upheavals of colonialism and the intellectual turmoil of new natural philosophies, leading figures of the English Renaissance, including Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare, anxiously imagined that bodily commonality might undermine differences of religion, race, and class. As the period progressed, later authors developed the revolutionary possibilities of bodily equality even as new ideas of fixed racial inequality emerged. Some—like the utopian radical Gerrard Winstanley and the republican poet John Milton—challenged political absolutism through the idea of humans as base, embodied creatures. Others—like the heterodox philosopher Margaret Cavendish, the French theologian Isaac La Peyrère, and the libertine Cyrano de Bergerac—offered limited yet important interrogations of racial paradigms. This moment, Dawson shows, would pass, as bodily equality was marginalized in the liberal theories of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. In its place, during the Enlightenment pseudoscientific racism would come to anchor inequality in the body. Contending with the lasting implications of material equality for modernity, The Equality of Flesh shows how increasingly vehement notions of racial difference eclipsed a nascent sense of human commonality rooted in the basic stuff of life.
Download or read book Novel Institutions written by Mullen Mary L. Mullen and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-02 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the politics of nineteenth-century British realismOffers a new theory of institutions grounded in temporalityOutlines a transnational theory of British realism that emerges from interpreting Irish realist novelsReassesses the politics of realism and the politics of institutionsContains close-reading of realist novels as well as a new genealogy of British realismAdvances a new understanding of the relationship between realism and colonialismThis book examines anachronisms in realist writing from the colonial periphery to redefine British realism and rethink the politics of institutions. Paying unprecedented attention to nineteenth-century Irish novels, it demonstrates how institutions constrain social relationships in the present and limit our sense of political possibilities in the future. It argues that we cannot escape institutions, but we can refuse the narrow political future that they work to secure.
Download or read book A Brief Genealogy of Jewish Republicanism Parting Ways with Judith Butler written by Irene Tucker and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2016 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Christian conception of belief structures the most familiar understandings of modern secularism, articulated most famously by John Locke in his "Letter Concerning Toleration." Tucker reads Locke's "Letter"' alongside Jewish philosopher/rabbi Moses Mendelssohn's 1783 critique of Locke, Jerusalem: Or On Religious Power and Judaism, and the Jewish tradition of the minyan, making a case for the existence of an alternative history of publicness borrowing from Jewish conceptions of communal life and the proper relations of actions and ideas. In throwing light on a genealogy of Jewish practices aimed at the deliberate creation of collectives constituted by their grappling with contingent, historical time, Tucker argues for the existence of a Jewish tradition of republicanism, of democracy.
Download or read book Sight Unseen written by Martin A. Berger and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2005-11-03 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A compelling and challenging work."—Frances K. Pohl, author of Framing America "Berger is unafraid to tackle the major issues, and this book shows it."—Bruce Robertson, author of Marsden Hartley and Reckoning with Winslow Homer "Berger, writing on topics as diverse as landscape photography and early film, pushes into fascinating issues of gender, race, and class with sensitivity, insight, and largely jargon-free analysis. Having made a mark as a key Eakins scholar, he promises to achieve a similar feat in Sight Unseen, getting us to rethink traditional material in a new light."—John Wilmerding, Christopher Binyon Sarofim Professor of American Art, Princeton University
Download or read book Race and Vision in the Nineteenth Century United States written by Shirley Samuels and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-11-08 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century United States is a collection of twelve essays by cultural critics that exposes how fraught relations of identity and race appear through imaging technologies in architecture, scientific discourse, sculpture, photography, painting, music, theater, and, finally, the twenty-first century visual commentary of Kara Walker. Throughout these essays, the racial practices of the nineteenth century are juxtaposed with literary practices involving some of the most prominent writers about race and identity, such as Herman Melville and Harriet Beecher Stowe, as well as the technologies of performance including theater and music. Recent work in critical theories of vision, technology, and the production of ideas about racial discourse has emphasized the inextricability of photography with notions of race and American identity. The collected essays provide a vivid sense of how imagery about race appears in the formative period of the nineteenth-century United States.
