Epilogue

This brief epilogue ruminates on the theme of care. Building on the previous chapters’ examinations of xenocitizens, it offers a timely call for new forms of political orientation.

Agitating Margaret Fuller

This chapter offers a competing portrait of Margaret Fuller’s brand of political citizenship. By examining Fuller’s earlier work, especially her writings about music, a new version of her political and social views becomes visible. The affective and formal elements of Fuller’s thought—where various sounds, tones, and pulsations explicitly and/or implicitly mediated her thinking about material reality—reveal a complex dialectic between the personal and the social. Going much further than merely revising the common historical narrative that sees Fuller moving from romantic to radical modes of thinking after her departure for Europe in 1846, the chapter portrays how Fuller develops a model of nineteenth-century political personhood that literary scholars and historians alike have yet to fully address.

Emerson’s Operative Mood

This chapter reexamines Ralph Waldo Emerson’s early thinking about the relation of the individual to universal Reason, revealing that Emerson’s writing is philosophically consistent in its insistence that the human self is “operative” in form and function. Shifting our conceptual perspective from a traditional Matthiessenian notion of an “optative mood” to something of a Badiouian “operative mood” opens up new ways to consider how, across the early works, the Emersonian self is shaped by interactions with an impersonal Other as well as the ways these interactions influence the self’s relation to historical landscapes. Intervening in scholarship on Emersonian personhood by scholars such as Sharon Cameron, Branka Arsić, and Donald Pease, this chapter offers an original version of Emerson’s political vision, one that finds in his theory of “religious sentiment” a model for the self that may reframe all of Emerson’s corpus.

Thoreau’s Militant Vegetables

This chapter takes as its starting point contemporary new materialist approaches to Henry David Thoreau’s writing, especially the work of scholars such as Branka Arsić and Jane Bennett. Complicating the Deleuzian- and neo-Spinozan-influenced forms of democratic vitalism attributed to Thoreau, this chapter traces a competing mode of materialism in Thoreau’s thought, one that is inherently dialectical and, by all standards, illiberal. Building loosely on the speculative ecological work of scholars such as Monique Allewaert and Michael Marder, it argues that Thoreau’s vision of nature in his early works is allied with his subsequent radical political pronouncements in the mid- and late-1850s. The chapter traces the structural aspects of Thoreau’s unique dialectical approach toward materiality and historical reality, examining the types of political ontologies and actants that emerge within these dynamic material relations as well as their specific stakes for antebellum society.

Introduction

The introduction’s first section argues that, amid neoliberal realities, liberalism’s paradigms are in crisis. Positing the concept of “xenocitizen” as a historical way to begin moving past delimiting liberal fantasies, it suggests that contemporary scholarship requires a mode of “actuality without positivism.” The second section uses a hemispheric consideration of Simón de Bolívar’s writing to establish the asymmetrical landscape of nineteenth-century liberalism. Building on these contexts, the last two sections turn directly to the concepts of xenocitizen and ontology: setting the terms of engagement and the conceptual terrain for the chapters that follow.

Unadjusted Emancipations

This chapter adds a consideration of the economic horizon to contemporary scholarship that examines the radical and, at times, emancipatory “entanglements” between slaves/ex-slaves and the environment. The chapter’s three sections present a developing arc of “unadjusted emancipations,” tracing various ways that slaves and ex-slaves negotiated and leveraged the antebellum era’s systemic production of bad debts in order to distort or circumvent standard formations of emancipatory logic. The first examines Stowe’s Dred; A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856) in light of ecological-economic hermeneutics. In its reading of Dred, the interface between humans and ecology spied by scholars who study the parahuman closes with an unsettling interface between personhood and developing models of capital. The second looks at the ways Brown’s novel Clotel; or, the President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853) and his appended “Narrative of the Life and Escape of William Wells Brown” manipulate the era’s production of bad debts in order to craft points of divergence from standard channels of emancipation. The third considers how the titular character of Martin Delany’s Blake; or, The Huts of America (1859-62) and his “secret” move throughout the South’s plantations in ways that radically compound. Reading the modality of secret as a blurred Moten-esque push toward a fugitive sociality of bad debt, the chapter examines how the novel presents innovative forms of resistant collectivity.