Cosmopolitanism and Character in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature

这项研究和图书项目结合了文学研究和思想史的方法，是对当前跨国研究框架下非裔美国人文学重新概念化的贡献。与最近将这一领域限制在美国历史特定时期的努力形成鲜明对比的是，该项目论证了非裔美国人文学中世界性想象力的长期存在。它通过考察非洲裔美国作家在漫长的十九世纪(至今仍有共鸣)中通过品格谈判他们关于全球归属感的概念的方式来做到这一点，品格是十九世纪的一个关键的道德和政治术语，仍然是文学分析的中心范畴。这个项目的论点是，通过性格的视角研究非裔美国人的世界主义，为了解非裔美国人文学和思想史的长期连续性提供了重要的新见解。该项目首先考察了一个讽刺的非裔美国人的传统，即利用人物和漫画来揭露美国独立战争时期国家世界主义的局限性(第一章)。该项目认为，考虑到海地革命的激进世界主义及其宪法对人类客观化的禁令，非裔美国作家处于独特的地位，以解决Deidre Lynch认为是人物的物质性的结构性问题，从而为现实主义文学人物的发展铺平道路(第二章)。奴隶作为财产和人的所谓双重性，与作为货币的字符的词源起源相结合，使非裔美国人形式的商业世界主义具有自由(与奴隶)贸易的强调思想(第三章)。作为人和(书面或印刷的)信件的双重人格对于非裔美国人处理文人共和国的文学世界主义、谈判印刷和公共领域潜在的令人担忧的关系至关重要(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地位，通过解构19世纪的种族主义科学及其所谓的人物特征，唤起了一个超越种族的未来世界社会(第五章)。前言和结束语(人物之死？)这本书的项目研究了第一次世界大战后世界主义和性格的同时衰落，在它们最近批判性复兴的背景下，讨论了它们的概念和文学史如何丰富了当前非裔美国人研究中关于跨民族主义和身份认同的辩论。

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.