Analyzes how literary representations of suicide have reinforced antiblackness in the modern world. Death Rights presents an antiracist critique of British romanticism by deconstructing one of its organizing tropes--the suicidal creative "genius." Putting texts by Olaudah Equiano, Mary Shelley, John Keats, and others into critical conversation with African American literature, black studies, and feminist theory, Deanna P. Koretsky argues that romanticism is part and parcel of the legal and philosophical discourses underwriting liberal modernity's antiblack foundations. Read in this context, the trope of romantic suicide serves a distinct political function, indexing the limits of liberal subjectivity and (re)inscribing the rights and freedoms promised by liberalism as the exclusive province of white men. The first book-length study of suicide in British romanticism, Death Rights also points to the enduring legacy of romantic ideals in the academy and contemporary culture more broadly. Koretsky challenges scholars working in historically Eurocentric fields to rethink their identification with epistemes rooted in antiblackness. And, through discussions of recent cultural touchstones such as Kurt Cobain's resurgence in hip-hop and Victor LaValle's comic book sequel to Frankenstein, Koretsky provides all readers with a trenchant analysis of how eighteenth-century ideas about suicide continue to routinize antiblackness in the modern world. Deanna P. Koretsky is Assistant Professor of English at Spelman College.
Author(s): Deanna P. Koretsky
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Year: 2021
Language: English
Tags: Black studies, British Romanticism
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The Argument
Contexts
Methods
Chapters
Chapter 1 Liberty and Death
John Locke, Property, and Self-Destruction
The Dying Negro and the Politics of Freedom
The Suicide Note and the Poetics of Personhood
Life After (Social) Death
Chapter 2 Chained to Life and Misery
Foundations: Mary Wollstonecraft, Suicide, and the Critique of Sensibility
Racial Sensibility and the Bounds of “Woman” in Mary Robinson and Claire de Duras
Flickering Whiteness in Felicia Hemans’s Suicide Poems
Revising Racial Sensibility in The Story of Mattie J. Jackson
Chapter 3 Writ in Water
(Im)possible Life: Blackness and Romanticism
Equiano’s Black Ecology
Black Optimism and Equiano’s Poetic Turn
Keats’s Posthumous Life
Chapter 4 In Sympathy
Frankenstein and the Suicide Debates
The Social Function of Sympathy
Friendly Antipathies
Blackness and the End(s) of Liberalism
Chapter 5 Marvelous Boys
The Mythic Structure of Romantic Suicide
Conclusion: Black Lives and Dead White Guys
Notes
Bibliography
Index