Antebellum Posthuman: Race and Materiality in the Mid-Nineteenth Century by Cristin Ellis

Abstract

 Reviews proves to be a liberating, democratic experience; for all of Jude’s frustrated sense of exclusion from the hallowed walls of Christminster, Hardy’s curious, motivated autodidacts can think with more creativity and agility than Angel Clare’s blinkered and modish brothers. Cordner concludes by noting the closeness of the education of the child Virginia Stephen to that of Austen or Browning at the beginning of the century. An outsider by gender, an insider by family and connection, Woolf explores in e Pargiters and e Years further narratives of frustrated longing for educational development. is can resonate even for those who successfully become insiders, such as Girton student Anna Macleod, who, in , achieves a room of her own that is of limited potential in an environment that is far from inspiring. D U S J. J Antebellum Posthuman: Race and Materiality in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. By C E. New York: Fordham University Press. .  pp. $. ISBN ––––. Cristin Ellis’s Antebellum Posthuman is an invigorating contribution to scholarship, which opens crucial lines of communication between contemporary posthumanism and nineteenth-century US and African American literary studies. In lively, accessible prose, Ellis uncovers a previously neglected strain of anti-slavery materialism in three nineteenth-century American authors: Frederick Douglass, Henry David oreau, and Walt Whitman, each of whom, she dely demonstrates, is a posthumanist ‘avant la lettre’ (p. ). Yet Ellis goes beyond simply demonstrating the existence of prior materialist ontologies. Emphasizing tensions arising between these authors’ well-known liberal, progressive commitments and the decidedly illiberal tendencies of the materialist turn their thinking took in response to the rise of biological race science, Ellis builds towards a reassessment of contemporary posthumanist thinking. She critiques the prevailing gross neglect of race by most twenty-first-century posthumanist theorists, and also offers constructive suggestions for more fruitful exchanges between social justice (specifically anti-racist work) and materialism. e book begins by reframing antebellum debates over the humanity of the enslaved . As the popularity of Josiah Wedgewood’s ‘Am I Not a Man and a Brother?’ anti-slavery medallion would suggest, from the eighteenth century to the present day the fight against slavery (then) and racism (now) has oen been misunderstood as a fight for recognition of enslaved and black people’s humanity. Recognition, Ellis argues, presumes a liberal, universal understanding of the human, or precisely the view that was ‘increasingly destabilized by the rise of biological discourse in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and by the new forms of racism that surged out of this empirical turn’ (p. ). Pushing past a recognition framework, here and throughout the book, Ellis notes a persistent slippage between empiricism and ethics when questions of the human being arise: ‘to refer the question of the MLR, .,   Black body’s humanity to science is to presume [. . .] that human being is ultimately defined by corporeal (material or empirically demonstrable) as opposed to moral features’ (p. ). Because debates about black humanity formed a crucial vector in biological science’s new investment in classifying ‘the human’ more broadly, Ellis turns to Douglass, oreau, and Whitman at key moments leading up to the Civil War when each fights fire with fire, responding to racial science by constructing anti-racist materialisms. ese central chapters are each exquisitely developed through detailed readings of major and minor texts, including Douglass’s address ‘e Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered’ and his only work of fiction, e Heroic Slave; oreau’s Journal, Wild Fruits, and e Dispersion of Seeds; and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. By reading each author in relation to the various materialist sciences of their time, and by keeping faith with, rather than glossing over, the productive friction emerging from frameworks for the human that are anti-racist (ethical) as well as materialist (empirical), Ellis offers fresh insights into these highly canonical authors. e book’s final chapter works conceptually, acknowledging that if race is the major occlusion that antebellum posthumanism reveals within contemporary posthumanism, a direct examination of the technologies of racialization has led certain black theorists (notably Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers) towards similar calls for rethinking the category of the human as imagined by liberal...