Animalia Americana: Animal Representations and Biopolitical Subjectivity
Colleen Boggs
Abstract
This book puts animal representation at the center of the making of the liberal American subject and argues that animals are critical to the ways in which Americans enact their humanity and regulate subjects in the biopolitical state. It concentrates on the formative and disruptive presence of animals in the writings of Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson. It argues that biopower, or a politics that extends its reach to life, thrives on the strategic ambivalence between who is considered human and what is judged as animal. It contends that biopower generates a space of ind ... More
This book puts animal representation at the center of the making of the liberal American subject and argues that animals are critical to the ways in which Americans enact their humanity and regulate subjects in the biopolitical state. It concentrates on the formative and disruptive presence of animals in the writings of Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson. It argues that biopower, or a politics that extends its reach to life, thrives on the strategic ambivalence between who is considered human and what is judged as animal. It contends that biopower generates a space of indeterminacy in which animal representations intervene to define and challenge the parameters of subjectivity and explains that the renegotiation of the species line produces a tension that is never fully regulated. It highlights how, as both figures of radical alterity and the embodiment of biopolitics, animals are simultaneously exceptional and exemplary to the biopolitical state.
Keywords:
animal representation,
biopolitics,
biopower,
humanity,
alterity,
critical race theory,
animals,
Frederick Douglass,
Edgar Allan Poe,
Emily Dickinson
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2013 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780231161237 |
| Published to Columbia Scholarship Online: November 2015 |
DOI:10.7312/columbia/9780231161237.001.0001 |
