On Sympathetic Grounds: Race, Gender, and Affective Geographies in Nineteenth-Century North America
Naomi Greyser
Abstract
On Sympathetic Grounds lays out sympathy’s vital place in shaping North America. The book puts forward a critical method for thinking about sentimentalism as a genre, mode, and political and affective outlook people have used to cultivate a sense of intimacy across distance—that is, an affective geography. Chapters intersperse theoretical reflections on the affective production of space with analyses of valleys that become vales of tears, heart-rending oratory, and weeping rock formations, as well as emplotments of narrative and continent in works by Harriet E. Wilson, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins ... More
On Sympathetic Grounds lays out sympathy’s vital place in shaping North America. The book puts forward a critical method for thinking about sentimentalism as a genre, mode, and political and affective outlook people have used to cultivate a sense of intimacy across distance—that is, an affective geography. Chapters intersperse theoretical reflections on the affective production of space with analyses of valleys that become vales of tears, heart-rending oratory, and weeping rock formations, as well as emplotments of narrative and continent in works by Harriet E. Wilson, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others. Philosophers and rhetoricians regard grounds as necessary conditions for argumentation. This book takes grounds to be geopolitical, geoaffective, and geophysical, mapping them as alternately shaky, unsettling, and stabilizing. Circulating across bodies and surfaces, sympathy has enriched conditions for living at the same time that it has mercilessly enlisted some bodies and lives as the grounds for others’ well-being.
Keywords:
sympathy,
affect,
geopolitics,
biopolitics,
geoaffect,
new materialism,
intersectionality,
settler colonialism,
sentimental,
racial blackness
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2017 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780190460983 |
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2017 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190460983.001.0001 |