Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom

Russ Castronovo's book explores the contradictions between America's founding principles of freedom and the reality of slavery in mid-nineteenth-century representations. He argues that narratives of nationhood are inconsistent, ambivalent, and ironic, and presents a genealogy that recovers those members of the national family whose status challenges the body politic and its history.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 296 pages
Publication date: 29 April 2022
Publisher: University of California Press

In his book, Russ Castronovo delves into the profound contradictions between the founding principles of freedom and the reality of slavery in America during the mid-nineteenth century. He argues that the narratives of nationhood portrayed in this period are fragmented, ambivalent, and often ironic. Castronovo explores a wide range of mid-nineteenth-century artifacts, including slave autobiographies, classic American fiction, monumental architecture, myths of the Revolution, proslavery writing, and landscape painting, to examine competing expressions of national memory.

He develops a new cultural studies approach that incorporates what Toni Morrison refers to as the Africanist presence in American literature. Through a genealogy that challenges the dominant narratives of the nation, Castronovo seeks to reclaim the voices of those who have been marginalized or forgotten, such as the orphans in Melville's Moby-Dick, the rebellious slaves in the works of Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown, the citizens afflicted with amnesia in Lincoln's speeches, and the dispossessed sons in slave narratives. These dissenting voices, often overlooked in traditional accounts, provoke insurrectionary plots and counter-memories that challenge the prevailing narratives of uncontested descent and national identity.

Castronovo's book is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates the University of California Press's commitment to seeking out and nurturing the brightest minds and giving them a platform to express their ideas. By reissuing a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible to a broader audience, ensuring that the insights and perspectives of these scholars are not lost to time.

Weight: 454g
Dimension: 234 x 156 x 18 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780520307131