From the rise of the novel to the outpouring of lyric self-expression, claims about literature’s promotion of a distinctly modern identity known as “the individual” have settled into truths. The three books under review here turn to biopolitics in an effort to describe how aesthetic and other texts help define and shape entities far larger than the individual: citizenry, mass, public, population. The archives they invoke are not recognizably literary in nature, ranging from an infamous photograph of a Vietnam War atrocity to the stories of refugee scientists building bombs for the US military and from studies of bacteriology to a discontinued sci-fi television series. Nor do their Library of Congress call numbers fit the recognizable classifications used to shelve American literature in college libraries. Only two novels, Paul Beatty’s White Boy Shuffle (1996) and Bruce Sterling’s Distraction (1998), receive sustained examination across these monographs, though plenty of other cultural...
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Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species
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June 1, 2019
Book Review|
June 01 2019
Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species
The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages. By Mimi Thi Nguyen
Neocitizenship: Political Culture after Democracy
Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species
. By Ahuja, Neel. Durham, NC
: Duke Univ. Press
. 2016
. xix, 262 pp. Cloth, $89.95; paper, $24.95; e-book, $14.49.The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages
. By Nguyen, Mimi Thi. Durham, NC
: Duke Univ. Press
. 2012
. xvi, 276 pp. Cloth, $99.95; paper, $25.95; e-book, $13.49.Neocitizenship: Political Culture after Democracy
. By Cherniavsky, Eva. New York
: New York Univ. Press
. 2017
. x, 215 pp. Paper, $30.00; e-book, $24.00.
Russ Castronovo
Russ Castronovo
Russ Castronovo is Tom Paine Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His most recent book is Propaganda 1776: Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communications in Early America (Oxford Univ. Press, 2014). He is completing a book about security, surveillance, and American literature.
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American Literature (2019) 91 (2): 435–437.
Citation
Russ Castronovo; Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species
The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages. By Mimi Thi Nguyen
Neocitizenship: Political Culture after Democracy. American Literature 1 June 2019; 91 (2): 435–437. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-7529275
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