Cosmopolitanism and Character in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature

加入文学研究和思想史的方法，研究和图书项目是对当前在跨国研究框架内重新认识非裔美国人文学的贡献。与最近将该领域限制在美国历史上特定时期的努力不同，该项目主张非裔美国人文学中世界性想象的长期持续。它这样做，通过检查的方式，非洲裔美国作家，在整个漫长的19世纪，直到今天的共鸣，谈判的全球归属感的概念，通过字符，一个关键的道德和政治术语的19世纪，仍然是一个中心类别的文学分析。这是这个项目的论点，通过性格的透镜研究非洲裔美国人的世界主义提供了重要的新的见解，非洲裔美国人的文学和思想史的长期连续性。该项目首先研究了一个讽刺的非洲裔美国人的传统，使用字符和漫画，以揭露美国革命的国家世界主义的限制（第1章）。反思海地革命的激进世界主义及其对人类客体化的宪法禁令，非裔美国作家处于独特的地位，该项目认为，与Deidre Lynch确定为性格的物性的结构性问题达成协议，从而为现实主义文学人物的发展铺平道路（第2章）。奴隶作为财产和人的双重性格，加上货币的词源，使非裔美国人的商业世界主义形式具有自由贸易（相对于奴隶贸易）的抽象观念（第3章）。作为人和（书面或印刷的）信件的双重性格对于非裔美国人接近文学共和国的文学世界主义至关重要，谈判与印刷和公共领域的潜在关系（第4章）。非裔美国作家利用了人物在身体和文学符号之间的中间位置，他们通过解构19世纪的种族主义科学及其所谓的人物学，唤起了一个超越种族的未来世界主义社会（第5章）。 引言和结语（性格之死？）这本书的项目研究世界主义和性格的同时下降，第一次世界大战后，对他们最近的关键复苏的背景下，讨论他们的概念和文学史如何可以丰富当前的辩论跨国主义和身份在非裔美国人研究。

Joining the methods of literary studies and intellectual history, the research and book project is a contribution to the current re-conceptualization of African American literature in a transnational research framework. In contradistinction to recent efforts to limit the field to a specific period in US history, the project argues for the longue durée of a cosmopolitan imagination in African American literature. It does so by examining the ways in which African American writers, throughout a long nineteenth century that resonates until today, negotiated their notions of global belonging through character, a key moral and political term of the nineteenth century that remains a central category of literary analysis. It is the contention of this project that studying African American cosmopolitanism through the lens of character provides important new insights into the long-term continuities of African American literary and intellectual history. The project begins by examining a satirical African American tradition of using character and caricature to expose the limits of the national cosmopolitanism of the American Revolution (chapter 1). Reflecting on the radical cosmopolitanism of the Haitian Revolution and its constitutional ban on human objectification, African American writers were in unique positions, the project argues, to come to terms with the structural problem that Deidre Lynch has identified as the thingness of character, and thus to pave the way for the development of realist literary characters (chapter 2). The so-called double character of slaves as property and person, combined with the etymological origins of character as currency, enabled African American forms of commercial cosmopolitanism with an emphatic idea of free (vs. slave) trade (chapter 3). The double valence of character as person and (written or printed) letter was crucial for African American approaches to the literary cosmopolitanism of the Republic of Letters, negotiating potentially fraught relationships to print and the public sphere (chapter 4). The middle position of character between the body and the literary sign was exploited by African American writers who evoked a future cosmopolitan society beyond race by deconstructing the racist science of the nineteenth century and its so-called characterologies (chapter 5). Introduction and Epilogue (Death of Character?) of the book project examine the simultaneous decline of cosmopolitanism and character after World War I against the backdrop of their recent critical revival, discussing how their conceptual and literary history can enrich current debates of transnationalism and identity in African American Studies.