An Overrepresentation of the State?

Abstract

Book Review| July 01 2020 An Overrepresentation of the State? Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism, by Snaza, Nathan, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019, 232 pages, $99.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4780-0415-8, $25.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4780-0479-0 Nathan Douglas Nathan Douglas Nathan Douglas is a PhD candidate in Catalan and Spanish literatures and cultural studies at Indiana University Bloomington. His current project, The Novel Bodies Politic in Spain and Catalonia, outlines the politics of bodies in contemporary Catalan literature against the backdrop of Catalonia’s ongoing challenges to Spanish state sovereignty. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Cultural Politics (2020) 16 (2): 277–279. https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8233476 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Nathan Douglas; An Overrepresentation of the State?. Cultural Politics 1 July 2020; 16 (2): 277–279. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8233476 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsCultural Politics Search Advanced Search Nathan Snaza’s Animate Literacies is a long-overdue invitation to think not only about what literary texts mean but also about the dynamics of how, for whom, and why they mean. In this book, the words close reading take on multiple meanings as the author sidesteps debates of microscopic symbolic interpretation in favor of training attention on the sprawling “literacy situations . . . where intrahuman politics of race, class, gender, sexuality, and geography shape the conditions of emergence for [subjectifying] literacy events” (4). To this end, Snaza—director of the University of Richmond’s Bridge to Success Program—presents the compelling argument that we ought to “speak less of literate subjects . . . than of literacies . . . jacked into state apparatuses of control” (73). The goal of Animate Literacies, then, is made clear by the plural literacies of its title: to interrogate the ways in which modern states have... Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.