Animalia Americana : animal representations and biopolitical subjectivity / Colleen Glenney Boggs.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Boggs, Colleen Glenney.

Series:

Critical perspectives on animals.

Critical perspectives on animals: theory, culture, science, and law

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--History and criticism.

American literature.

Animals in literature.

Subjectivity in literature.

Human-animal relationships--United States.

Human-animal relationships.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (321 p.)

Place of Publication:

New York : Columbia University Press, c2013.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Colleen Glenney Boggs puts animal representation at the center of the making of the liberal American subject. Concentrating on the formative and disruptive presence of animals in the writings of Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson, Boggs argues that animals are critical to the ways in which Americans enact their humanity and regulate subjects in the biopolitical state. Biopower, or a politics that extends its reach to life, thrives on the strategic ambivalence between who is considered human and what is judged as animal. It generates a space of indeterminacy in which animal representations intervene to define and challenge the parameters of subjectivity. The renegotiation of the species line produces a tension that is never fully regulated. Therefore, as both figures of radical alterity and the embodiment of biopolitics, animals are simultaneously exceptional and exemplary to the biopolitical state. An original contribution to animal studies, American studies, critical race theory, and posthumanist inquiry, Boggs thrillingly reinterprets a long and highly contentious human-animal history.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

1. AMERICAN BESTIALITY / Ghraib, Abu

2. BESTIALITY REVISITED / Douglass, Frederick

3. ANIMALS AND THE LETTER OF THE LAW / Poe, Edgar Allan

4. ANIMALS, AFFECT, AND THE FORMATION OF LIBERAL SUBJECTIVITY / Dickinson, Emily

5. RETHINKING LIBERAL SUBJECTIVITY / Bates, Katharine Lee / Bush, Barbara

EPILOGUE

NOTES

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [253]-284) and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 08. Jul 2019)

ISBN:

9780231531948

023153194X

OCLC:

831121194