Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Musiol, Hanna

Titel

"Objects of emancipation": The political dreams of modernism

Erscheinungsjahr

2012

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Worldwide Political Science Abstracts

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In the first part of the twentieth century three interconnected modernist trends, primitivism, consumerism, and nationalism, imagined the inclusion of new persons in the national polity through their engagement with what I call "objects of emancipation." In such modernist imaginings, "quasi (legal) persons," to use Bruno Latour's idea, could become New Women, New Negroes, or New (and "civilized") Americans through their intimacy with empowering objects such as consumer products, keepsakes, cultural artifacts, commodified natural resources, and even waste. Such person-thing fabrications were central, in my view, to modernist politics and aesthetics, and I argue that literary genres often considered to be nonmodernist (including the bildungsroman and the documentary) were particularly important vessels for debates about things and persons. Specifically, my work explores how Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928), Fannie Hurst's Back Street (1931), John Joseph Mathews' Talking to the Moon (1945), and James Agee and Walker Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) challenged the promise of personification-through-objects using generic conventions associated with both progress and material culture. I argue, however, that rather than simply attacking objectification as a negative, dehumanizing process, Hurst, Mathews, Larsen, and Agee and Evans examined how race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, as well as class, placed limits on the liberatory reifications of persons. They also recognized the multiple possibilities that different forms of reification could offer. Far from glorifying progress or naively recording the material world, then, their modernist bildungsromans and documentaries participated in the complicated reconceptualization of human and object rights that took place from the late 1920s through the late 1940s. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by addressing your request to ProQuest, 789 E. Eisenhower Parkway, P.O. Box 1346, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346. Telephone 1-800-521-3042; e-mail: disspub@umi.com