Xenocitizens: Illiberal Ontologies in Nineteenth-Century America

by Jason Berger

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823287758
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	06/02/2020
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jason Berger is Associate Professor of English at the Universityof Houston. He is the author of Antebellum at Sea: Maritime Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century America (2012).

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

Editorial Reviews

Jason Berger’s Xenocitizens displays both a burning concern about the present and a patient curiosity about the past. As a way of thinking through—and beyond—our own political disaster, this book lingers with the political imagination of nineteenth-century American literature, explicating its fantasies of personhood and belonging. At his best, Berger refuses caricatures of liberalism and returns the nineteenth century's ways of being to us in all their rich, beguiling, subversive weirdness. Writings from another time in history enable thinking anew, not as a familiar national tradition but as something else, disorienting and strange.—Caleb Smith, Yale University, author of The Prison and the American Imagination and The Oracle and the Curse.

Just as Thoreau imagined his head to be “an organ for burrowing,” and Marx allied with the “old mole” subverting the earth as it bores toward revolution, so too does Jason Berger dig through the nineteenth-century U.S. for clues to how we might live illiberally, into better futures. Berger’s “critical account of actuality without positivism” is a bracing gust of fresh air in these too often stale times. If the idea of a xenocitizen—an alien who belongs in and to a polity—sounds like an oxymoron to you, then you are ready to read this book and renew the art of living together.—David Kazanjian, Universityof Pennsylvania

From the Publisher

Jason Berger’s Xenocitizens displays both a burning concern about the present and a patient curiosity about the past. As a way of thinking through—and beyond—our own political disaster, this book lingers with the political imagination of nineteenth-century American literature, explicating its fantasies of personhood and belonging. At his best, Berger refuses caricatures of liberalism and returns the nineteenth century's ways of being to us in all their rich, beguiling, subversive weirdness. Writings from another time in history enable thinking anew, not as a familiar national tradition but as something else, disorienting and strange.

Caleb Smith

Just as Thoreau imagined his head to be “an organ for burrowing,” and Marx allied with the “old mole” subverting the earth as it bores toward revolution, so too does Jason Berger dig through the nineteenth-century U.S. for clues to how we might live illiberally, into better futures. Berger’s “critical account of actuality without positivism” is a bracing gust of fresh air in these too often stale times. If the idea of a xenocitizen—an alien who belongs in and to a polity—sounds like an oxymoron to you, then you are ready to read this book and renew the art of living together.

David Kazanjian