How the Earth Feels: Geological Fantasy in the Nineteenth-Century United States (ANIMA: Critical Race Studies Otherwise)
by Dana Luciano
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"By the start of the nineteenth century, the impact of the geological sciences and advancements in the field had radically expanded people's perception of the Earth's age. In How the Earth Feels, Dana Luciano maps the emergence of a "geological fantasy," in which increased knowledge of planetary life was used to racialize Native peoples as fossils and curiosities. Further, the geological fantasy served to cement the notion that the Earth had been preparing for the presence of humans, and show more that humans were in fact the ultimate expression of the Earth's teleological development in a both scientific and spiritual sense. Counterposing a range of texts-from early European and US geological texts to Indigenous accounts of earthquakes to African American men's anti-slavery writing featuring geological tropes-Luciano reveals the workings of the geological fantasy as it operated across the racial and biopolitical discourses of the nineteenth-century United States. Luciano offers a rich and historically nuanced account of how imagined relations with the non-human world have long served as a means of avoiding engagement with the dynamics of racial and colonial power"-- show lessTags
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Dana Luciano is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University. She is the author of Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America. (available from NYU Press). Ivy G. Wilson is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Program in American Studies at Northwestern University. His most recent book is show more Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Politics in the Antebellum U.S. show less
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- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, Literature Studies and Criticism
- DDC/MDS
- 810.936 — Literature & rhetoric American literature in English American literature in English History and criticism of American literature Themes and subjects The physical world and nature
- LCC
- PS217 .G56 .L835 — Language and Literature American literature American literature By period 19th century
- BISAC
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- English
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