Animalia Americana : : Animal Representations and Biopolitical Subjectivity / / Colleen Boggs.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Columbia University Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Boggs, Colleen,
• MitwirkendeR: Bates, Katharine Lee,; Bush, Barbara,; Dickinson, Emily,; Douglass, Frederick,; Ghraib, Abu,; Poe, Edgar Allan,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Columbia University Press, , [2013]; ©2013
• Year of Publication: 2013
• Language: English
• Series: Critical Perspectives on Animals: Theory, Culture, Science and Law
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (312 p.) :; ‹B›7 illus.‹/B›

Colleen Glenney Boggs puts animal representation at the center of the making of the liberal American subject. Concentrating on the formative and disruptive presence of animals in the writings of Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson, Boggs argues that animals are critical to the ways in which Americans enact their humanity and regulate subjects in the biopolitical state. 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 generates a space of indeterminacy in which animal representations intervene to define and challenge the parameters of subjectivity. The renegotiation of the species line produces a tension that is never fully regulated. Therefore, as both figures of radical alterity and the embodiment of biopolitics, animals are simultaneously exceptional and exemplary to the biopolitical state. An original contribution to animal studies, American studies, critical race theory, and posthumanist inquiry, Boggs thrillingly reinterprets a long and highly contentious human-animal history.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- ILLUSTRATIONS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- INTRODUCTION -- 1. AMERICAN BESTIALITY -- 2. BESTIALITY REVISITED -- 3. ANIMALS AND THE LETTER OF THE LAW -- 4. ANIMALS, AFFECT, AND THE FORMATION OF LIBERAL SUBJECTIVITY -- 5. RETHINKING LIBERAL SUBJECTIVITY -- EPILOGUE -- NOTES -- Bibliography -- Index