The Body Politic: Foundings, Citizenship, and Difference in the American Political Imagination

by Holland,Catherine A.

• ISBN13: 9780415928816
• ISBN10: 0415928818
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2001-04-24
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

InThe Body Politic, Catherine Holland advances an original thesis that challenges the dominant schools of thought concerning the liberal tradition in the United States. Organized around two founding moments--the American Revolution and ratification of the Constitution and the period of Reconstruction following the American Civil War--The Body Politics identifies a recurring, symbolic figure at the heart of American dilemmas of citizenship and nation, namely the human body. Holland reinterprets the meaning of the struggle for citizenship, and doesn't simply include issues of gender and race, but demonstrates how anxieties and concerns about the shifting meaning of the body is crucial to understanding pivotal moments in the founding and refounding of American citizenship. Holland reexamines both literature and events, from the writings of Thomas Jefferson to the adultery trial of Henry Ward Beecher, to demonstrate how embodiment and disembodiment shaped the imagination of the nation and ofcitizenship throughout American political history.

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction: The Body Politic	xiii
I. Foundings and the Problem of the Past	1	(92)
Notes on the State of America: Jeffersonian Democracy and the Production of a National Past	19	(38)
Becoming Unnatural: The Federalist's Techniques of Government	57	(36)
II. Reconstruction and Its Aftermath: The Relocation of the Past	93	(76)
Sexual Reconstruction: Gender, Political Friendship, and the New Techniques of Citizenship	109	(30)
In the Beginning Was a Crime: Lynching, Rape, and the Reconstruction of the Political Imagination	139	(30)
Postscript: Restating New Possibilities	169	(20)
Index	189