Abstract
This essay looks at a variety of antebellum cultural productions and, utilizing Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the grotesque body, identifies the ubiquitous use of the tropes of carnival as a principal discourse in the construction of bourgeois subjectivity and the staging of its “low Others.” The essay examines the visual arts, popular literature, minstrelsy, and the freak show, demonstrating that as the grotesque body of the social and racial low Other is rejected and excluded socially, it returns constantly and repeatedly in narrative form. Appearing as it does across the broad spread of antebellum cultural domains, the grotesque body emerges as an object not only of disgust but also of deep and profound desire.
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