Residual Life: the wastes of whiteness and the limits of the human in American literature, 1830-1920

在种族资本主义和环境暴力的交汇处，推动了美国殖民增长的是白色的建设，这依赖于种植园的采掘消费和暴力驱逐被视为可替代和一次性的生物。通过这一点，白色植根于人类僵化的本体论。我的项目调查了美国漫长的十九世纪的一些作家是如何想象这种白人至上主义的“人”概念的替代方案的。我的重点是人与非人类的关系，通过最近对生态批评和批判性种族理论的干预，以及梅尔维尔、切斯纳特、爱丽丝·邓巴·纳尔逊和图默等作家的作品，抵制剥夺和种族主义的主张。我认为，那个时期的文学作品中充斥着许多形式的“残存生命”，这些形式挫败了白人肆虐小说的核心--人性和种族的共同构建的分类学。它的核心方法论，就像穆尼奥斯的“残留物解释学”一样，试图浏览一下美国帝国档案的昙花一现，寻找“还剩下什么？还剩下什么？”在它的文本和物质废墟中，同时仍然投资于残留的有机体生活模式，这些模式挥之不去，超出了“人类”所依赖的规范的时间和空间界限。

At the intersection of the entwined legacies of racial capitalism and environmental violence that fuelled America's colonial growth is the construction of whiteness, which rested on plantation's extractive consumption and violent ejection of the beings which it casts as fungible and disposable. Whiteness is, through this, rooted in a rigid ontology of the human. My project investigates how some writers of the American long nineteenth-century imagine alternatives to this white-supremacist conception of the 'human'. I focus on the human-nonhuman relation that resist the claims of extraction and racialisation through recent interventions in ecocritical and critical race theories, and the work of writers such as Melville, Chesnutt, Alice Dunbar Nelson and Toomer. I argue that there are many forms of 'residual life' teeming in the literature of the period which frustrate the mutually-constructed taxonomies of humanness and race at the heart of whiteness' ravaging fictions. Its core methodology, like Muñoz's 'hermeneutics of residue', attempts to skim the ephemera of the archive of American empire for 'what is left? what remains?' among its textual and material ruins, whilst remaining invested in the residual modes of organismic life that linger beyond the normative temporal and spatial bounds upon which the 'human' relies.