Kindred Specters: Death, Mourning, and American AffinityU of Minnesota Press, 2007 - 188 pages The refusal to recognize kinship relations among slaves, interracial couples, and same-sex partners is steeped in historical and cultural taboos. In Kindred Specters, Christopher Peterson explores the ways in which non-normative relationships bear the stigma of death that American culture vehemently denies. Probing Derrida’s notion of spectrality as well as Orlando Patterson’s concept of “social death,” Peterson examines how death, mourning, and violence condition all kinship relations. Through Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman, Peterson lays bare concepts of self-possession and dispossession, freedom and slavery. He reads Toni Morrison’s Beloved against theoretical and historical accounts of ethics, kinship, and violence in order to ask what it means to claim one’s kin as property. Using William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! he considers the political and ethical implications of comparing bans on miscegenation and gay marriage. Tracing the connections between kinship and mourning in American literature and culture, Peterson demonstrates how racial, sexual, and gender minorities often resist their social death by adopting patterns of affinity that are strikingly similar to those that govern normative relationships. He concludes that socially dead “others” can be reanimated only if we avow the mortality and mourning that lie at the root of all kinship relations. Christopher Peterson is visiting assistant professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College. |
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Kindred Specters: Death, Mourning, and American Affinity Christopher Peterson No preview available - 2007 |
Kindred Specters: Death, Mourning, and American Affinity Christopher Peterson No preview available - 2007 |
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Absalom affirm alterity American analogy argues Aunt Peggy's becomes Beloved Beloved's blood body child claim commodity condition conjure Conjure Woman containment corporeal cultural death denies dialectic différance disavowal emerges ethics exchange-value exclusion father figure finally friendship gay marriage gays and lesbians gender ghost ghostly Goophered Hartman haunted heterosexual historical homosexuality imagine immortality implicated infanticide insofar interracial Jacques Derrida Judith Butler Julius Julius's kinship labor lesbians Levinas living logic Margaret Garner Mars Jeems's Marx master/slave material melancholia miscegenation Morrison mortality mourning necrophilia negation never normative novel one's ontological originary Oxford phantasmatic plantation political possession presence queer Quentin race racial and sexual racist refusal remains reproduction resistance same-sex marriage Sandy Sandy's self-presence sense Sethe Sethe's Shreve Simon Critchley slave master slavery socially dead specter spectral spectrophilia spirit suggests Sullivan Sutpen tion Toni Morrison University Press use-value violence Warner York