The Position of the Unthought and the Invention of Nineteenth Century Democratic Literature Open Access

Abstract

In animal rights discourses, utilitarian philosophy, and Posthuman Animal Studies (PAS), the analogy between contemporary animal cruelty and slavery during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is often used to illuminate the terrors of animal cruelty in our contemporary world. This dissertation claims that recourse to this analogy not only conceals the terrors of nineteenth century slavery and the legislative rhetoric that justified it, but it also prevents scholars (past and present) from adequately accounting for the status of both slaves and animals in the nineteenth century. Therefore, this dissertation returns to some of the founding political, legal, philosophical, and literary writings of the United States to unearth the formation of this analogy and to demonstrate how it mystifies and therefore renders the legislative and political positioning of the slave unthought. Bringing together writers from black studies, deconstruction, and American Studies, my dissertation argues that blackness and whiteness became metaphors for alterity and sovereignty in nineteenth century texts, such as Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, James Madison’s retelling of the Three Fifths Compromise in the Federalist Papers, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays and journals on slavery and race, and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. In the writings of these (and other) authors, the captive body is projected as incarnating a terrifying formlessness against which racial whiteness defines its sovereignty and political ontology. By demonstrating how whiteness was constructed out of assembling the captive body as the embodiment of blackness—a threatening formlessness—I argue that the ideology of democratic sovereignty in nineteenth century literature founds itself through negating the captive body. This dissertation is an exploration of how this negating logic impacts contemporary debates about the relationship between literature, democracy, sovereignty, and ontology in the nineteenth century. 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction 

Chapter One: The Primary Narrative: Spillers and Derrida

Chapter Two: The Non-Democratic Opening of Democracy 

Chapter Three: The Emersonian Double Evasion

Chapter Four: Blackness, Whiteness, and Terror in Melville’s Moby-Dick

Conclusion

Bibliography

About this Dissertation

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	Comparative Literature
Degree	Ph.D.
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	Literature, Comparative Metaphysics American Studies
Keyword	Sovereignty Animality Democracy Literature Slavery Whiteness Blackness Nineteenth Century Violence Political philosophy
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Geoffrey Bennington , Emory University
Committee Members	Calvin L. Warren, Emory University Elissa Marder, Emory University Munia Bhaumik, Emory University

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