Antebellum Posthuman: Race and Materiality in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Abstract

In Antebellum Posthuman: Race and Materiality in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, University of Mississippi Professor of nineteenth-century literature Cristin Ellis troubles historical depictions of the relationship between materialism and racism in the mid nineteenth-century United States. Through an analysis of the anti-slavery writings of Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, Ellis argues that these writers used materialist conceptions of the human body to argue against slavery and white supremacy. In making this argument, Ellis seeks to undercut simplistic depictions of antebellum racial discourse as pitting liberal humanists against biological racists.

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