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

在种族资本主义的遗产和环境暴力的交叉点上，推动了美国的殖民增长，这是白人的建设，这是建立在种植园的剥削消费和暴力驱逐的存在，它铸造为可替代的和一次性的。通过这种方式，白色植根于严格的人类本体论。我的项目调查了美国19世纪的一些作家如何想象这种白人至上主义的“人类”概念的替代品。我专注于人类与非人类的关系，抵制提取和种族化的要求，通过最近的干预，在生态批评和关键的种族理论，以及作家的工作，如梅尔维尔，切斯纳特，爱丽丝邓巴纳尔逊和图默。我认为，在这一时期的文学作品中，有许多形式的“剩余生命”，它们挫败了白人蹂躏小说核心的人性和种族的相互建构的分类法。它的核心方法论，就像穆尼奥斯的“剩余物解释学”一样，试图浏览美国帝国档案中的短暂记忆，寻找“剩下的是什么？”还剩下什么在它的文本和物质废墟中，同时仍然投资于器官生命的残余模式，这些模式徘徊在“人类”所依赖的规范的时间和空间界限之外。

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.