The suicidal state : race suicide, biopower, and the sexuality of population / Madoka Kishi.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kishi, Madoka, author.

Series:

Oxford scholarship online.

Oxford scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--19th century--History and criticism.

American literature.

American literature--20th century--History and criticism.

Race in literature.

Population in literature.

Sex in literature.

Suicide in literature.

Biopolitics in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (260 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2024.

Summary:

The Suicidal State theorises a biopolitics of suicide by mapping the entwinement between the Progressive Era discourse of "race suicide" and period representations of literary suicide. Like the present-day white nationalist discourse of "replacement theory", race suicide frames white Americans' low birth rate as a sign of their imminent extinction caused by over fertile immigrants. Casting willful nonreproduction as racial self-killing, race suicide played a fundamental role in the transformation of racial and sexual taxonomies, consolidating the US biopolitical state. This text examines the ways in which the suicidal undoing of the self reconfigures agency, subjectivity, and intimacies with its attempt to elude biopower's discipline of the individual and its management of the population.

Contents:

Cover

Half Title

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Contents

Introduction

The Race That Kills Itself

Animating the Social Body

Immigration Restrictions and the Biologization of the Social Body

The Sexuality of Population

Suicide, a Biopolitical Scandal

Literary Counter-Conduct

1 Sacrificial Ecstasy: The Bostonians, Neurasthenia, and the "Obscure Hurt"

"Poodle Henry James"

The Neurasthenic Race

The Wounded Body Social

"The Ecstasy of the Martyr"

Still Waiting, Princess Casamassima

2 Flirting with Death: The Awakening's Liberal Erotic Economy and the Consuming Desire of New Women

Squandering Family Property

The Alien Hands of Liberalism

Free Erotic Economy of Creoles

Parthenogenesis of the New Women

Consummating the Consuming Desire

3 The Spectral Lineage: Jack London, Teutonism, and Interspecies Kinship

Wolf vs. Bear

London's Northland Teutonism

Kinship in Alaska

Unnatural Nuptials in The Call of the Wild

"If the Writer Is a Sorcerer"

4 Gertrude Stein's Melting Pot: Jewishness and the Excretory Pleasure of The Making of Americans

The Pot-au-Feu of New Immigrants

Recovering the Absented Presence of Jewishness

Denaturalizing Procreative Familialism

Mr. Pottie and the Fantasy of Anal Pregnancy

Populational Imagination of "Each One Is One"

Coda: Hindsight 20/20, or Asiatic Im-Personality

Notes

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Coda

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource and publisher information; title from PDF title page (viewed on August 19, 2024).

ISBN:

0-19-769010-6

0-19-769008-4

OCLC:

1443489320