TY - GEN AU - Ellis,Cristin TI - Antebellum Posthuman : Race and Materiality in the Mid-Nineteenth Century PY - 2018///0102 CY - NY PB - Fordham University Press KW - History KW - Slavery KW - Antislavery KW - Racial Science KW - Biopolitics KW - Posthumanism KW - New Materialism KW - Nonhuman KW - Frederick Douglass KW - Henry David Thoreau KW - Walt Whitman KW - Liberalism KW - Ontology KW - Racism KW - Scientific racism KW - Spiritualism N1 - Open Access N2 - From the eighteenth-century abolitionist motto Am I Not a Man and a Brother? to the Civil Rights-era declaration I AM a Man, antiracism has engaged in a struggle for the recognition of the humanness of black humanity. It has done so, however, during an era in which the very definition of the human has been called into question by the rising prestige of the biological sciences whose materialist account of human being erodes the grounds of human exceptionalism...Antislavery materialism allowed these authors to respond to scientific racism in its own empirical terms. At the same time, however, it also attenuated their faith in the liberal humanist principles that they champion elsewhere in their work. This antebellum conflict between the liberal ideals of freedom and a materialist ontology of contingency not only presages current critical debates between new materialist and social justice theorists, but reveals an intrinsic tension between posthumanism’s embodied ontology and the UR - https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/20.500.12657/30665/1/644215.pdf UR - https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/20.500.12657/30665/1/644215.pdf UR - https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/20.500.12657/30665/1/644215.pdf UR - https://directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.500.12854/30162 ER -