death, mourning, and American affinity
- Categories
- Book/Boek
- Creator
- Peterson, Christopher
- Publish Year
- 2007
- Shelfmark
- VS 3 2007
- Thesaurus
- etniciteit, relaties, slavernij, homoseksualiteit, seksualiteit, sterven, geweld, literatuur
- Description
- The refusal to recognize kinship relations among slaves, interracial couples, and same-sex partners is steeped in historical and cultural taboos. In this book Peterson explores the ways in which non-normative relationships bear the stigma of death that American culture vehemently denies.Probing Derrida’s notion of spectrality as well as Orlando Patterson’s concept of “social death,” Peterson examines how death, mourning, and violence condition all kinship relations. Through Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman, Peterson lays bare concepts of self-possession and dispossession, freedom and slavery. He reads Toni Morrison’s Beloved against theoretical and historical accounts of ethics, kinship, and violence in order to ask what it means to claim one’s kin as property. He concludes that socially dead “others” can be reanimated only if we avow the mortality and mourning that lie at the root of all kinship relations.