In Xenocitizens, Jason Berger returns to the antebellum United States in order to challenge a scholarly tradition based on liberal-humanist perspectives. Through the concept of xenocitizen, a synthesis of the terms and “xeno, and ” which connotes alien or stranger, and and “citizen, and ” which signals a naturalized subject of a state, Berger uncovers realities and possibilities that have been foreclosed by dominant paradigms. Innovatively reorienting our thinking about traditional nineteenth-century figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau as well as formative writers such as William Wells Brown, Martin R. Delany, Margaret Fuller, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Xenocitizens glimpses how antebellum thinkers formulated, in response to varying forms of oppression and crisis, startlingly unique ontological and social models as well as unfamiliar ways to exist and to leverage change. In doing so, Berger offers us a different nineteenth century–pushing our imaginative and critical thinking toward new terrain.

Xenocitizens: Illiberal Ontologies in Nineteenth-Century America PDF

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