The Logic of Slavery: Debt, Technology, and Pain in American Literature

ISBN-13: 9781107025073 / Angielski / Twarda / 2012 / 264 str.

Tim Armstrong

Opis

In American history and throughout the Western world, the subjugation perpetuated by slavery has created a unique culture of slavery. That culture exists as a metaphorical, artistic, and literary tradition attached to the enslaved human beings whose lives are owed to another, who are used as instruments by another, and who must endure suffering in silence. Tim Armstrong explores the metaphorical legacy of slavery in American culture by investigating debt, technology, and pain in African-American literature and a range of other writings and artworks. Armstrong's careful analysis reveals how notions of the slave as a debtor lie hidden in our accounts of the commodified self and how writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison grapple with the pervasive view that slaves are akin to machines. Finally, Armstrong examines how conceptions of the slave as a container of suppressed pain are reflected in disciplines as diverse as art, sculpture, music, and psychology."

Recenzje

'The book is an extraordinarily erudite, intellectually sophisticated, and beautifully written contribution to the wider project - which must necessarily be multifaceted - of disinterring slavery's continuing impact on contemporary American culture.' Anita Rupprecht, Cultural Critique

Spis treści

Illustrations; Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. Slavery, insurance, and sacrifice: the embodiment of capital; 2. Debt, self-redemption, and foreclosure; 3. Machines inside the machine: slavery and technology; 4. The hands of others: sculpture and pain; 5. The sonic veil; 6. Slavery in the mind: trauma and the weather; Notes; Index.