In" Interior States" Christopher Castiglia focuses on U.S.
citizens' democratic impulse: their ability to work with others to
imagine genuinely democratic publics while taking divergent views
into account. Castiglia contends that citizens of the early United
States were encouraged to locate this social impulse not in
associations with others but in the turbulent and conflicted
interiors of their own bodies. He describes how the human
interior--with its battles between appetite and restraint, desire
and deferral--became a displacement of the divided sociality of
nineteenth-century America's public sphere and contributed to the
vanishing of that sphere in the twentieth century and the
twenty-first. Drawing insightful connections between political
structures, social relations, and cultural forms, he explains that
as the interior came to reflect the ideological conflicts of the
social world, citizens were encouraged to (mis)understand vigilant
self-scrutiny and self-management as effective democratic action.
In the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth, as
discourses of interiority gained prominence, so did powerful
counter-narratives. Castiglia reveals the flamboyant pages of
antebellum popular fiction to be an archive of unruly democratic
aspirations. Through close readings of works by Maria Monk and
George Lippard, Walt Whitman and Timothy Shay Arthur, Hannah
Webster Foster and Hannah Crafts, and Nathaniel Hawthorne and
Herman Melville, Castiglia highlights a refusal to be reformed or
self-contained. In antebellum authors' representations of
nervousness, desire, appetite, fantasy, and imagination, he finds
democratic strivings that refused to disappear. Taking inspiration
from those writers and turning to the present, Castiglia advocates
a humanism-without-humans that, denied the adjudicative power of
interiority, promises to release democracy from its inner life and
to return it to the public sphere where U.S. citizens may yet
create unprecedented possibilities for social action.
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