Research Catalog
On lingering and being last : race and sovereignty in the New World
- Title
- On lingering and being last : race and sovereignty in the New World / Jonathan Elmer.
- Author
- Elmer, Jonathan, 1961-
- Publication
- New York : Fordham University Press, 2008.
- Supplementary Content
Items in the Library & Off-site
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2 Items
| Status | Format | Access | Call Number | Item Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Available - Can be used on site. Please visit New York Public Library - Schomburg Center to submit a request in person. | Text | Use in library | Sc E 19-967 | Schomburg Center - Research & Reference |
Available - Can be used on site. Please visit New York Public Library - Schwarzman Building to submit a request in person. | Text | Use in library | JFE 09-1976 | Schwarzman Building - Main Reading Room 315 |
Details
- Description
- viii, 260 pages : illustrations; 24 cm
- Summary
- The author argues that the logic of sovereignty that emerged in early modern Europe and that limits our thinking today must be understood as a fundamentally racialized logic, first visible in the New World. The modern concept of sovereignty is based on a trope of personification, the conjunction of individual and collective identities. In Grotius, Hobbes, and others, a fiction of sovereign autonomy enabled states to be personified as individuals, as bodies politic, even as individual humans could be imagined as miniature states. The contradictions of this logic were fully revealed only in the New World, as writers ranging from Aphra Behn to Thomas Jefferson and Herman Melville demonstrate.The racialized sovereign figures examined in this book--the slave king Oroonoko, the last chief Logan, and their avatars--are always at once a person and a people. They embody the connection between the individual and the collectivity, and thereby reveal that the volatile work of sovereign personification takes place in a new world constituted both by concepts of equality, homogeneity, and symmetry--by an ideal of liberal individualism--and by the realities of racial domination and ideology in the era of colonial expansion. The conjunction of the individual, race, and New World territorialization, the author argues, is key to understanding the deepest strata in the political imagination of Atlantic modernity.
- Subject
- Genre/Form
- Criticism, interpretation, etc.
- Bibliography (note)
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 219-248) and index.
- Contents
- On lingering and being last : Aphra Behn and the deterritorialized sovereign -- The future perfect king : Olaudah Equiano and the poetics of experience -- Was Billy black? Herman Melville and the captive king -- Jefferson's convulsions : archiving Logan -- Sovereignty, race, and melancholy in the transatlantic romantic novel -- Treaties, trauma, trees : the dream of Hadwin.
- Call Number
- JFE 09-1976
- ISBN
- 9780823229406
- 0823229408
- 0823229416
- 9780823229413
- LCCN
- 2009291785
- OCLC
- 227930868
- Author
- Elmer, Jonathan, 1961- author.
- Title
- On lingering and being last : race and sovereignty in the New World / Jonathan Elmer.
- Imprint
- New York : Fordham University Press, 2008.
- Edition
- 1st ed.
- Type of Content
- text
- Type of Medium
- unmediated
- Type of Carrier
- volume
- Bibliography
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 219-248) and index.
- Connect to:
- Research Call Number
- Sc E 19-967JFE 09-1976