Xenocitizens
Illiberal Ontologies in Nineteenth-Century America

Jason Berger (Author)

9780823287673

Paperback / softback, published 2 June 2020

304 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.472 kg

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.

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