American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability

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In this book, American literature scholar Russ Castronovo investigates the concept of security through its origins in American culture, focusing on how security provides an organizing principle for collective life in ways that both enhance freedom and limit it. Drawing on examples from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the author seeks to show how fear and anxiety appear in American history as both the cause and effect of thinking about security. Through novels, tracts, pamphlets, and newspapers, including the first African American newspaper, Freedom's Journal, the book examines how concerns about security inform the development of ideas about the frontier, racial interiority, sublime landscapes, and related concepts. Part I, "Contradictions and Contours, " presents a series of axioms about security and insecurity, as well as specific historical moments that exemplify how those propositions have been put into practice. Part II, "Information, Aesthetics, Population, " presents examples of fear and racial terror in a broad archive of American fiction, journalism, and print culture. Working at the intersection of literary studies and political theory, the author examines the emotions and contradictions that flow from security as a foundational guarantee of the state"--