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On Sympathetic Grounds: Race, Gender, and Affective Geographies in Nineteenth-Century North America
Contributor(s): Greyser, Naomi (Author)
ISBN: 0190460989     ISBN-13: 9780190460983
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
OUR PRICE:   $99.75  
Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats
Published: November 2017
Qty:
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | American - Regional
- Literary Criticism | Modern - 19th Century
- History | United States - 21st Century
Dewey: 810.935
LCCN: 2017010320
Physical Information: 0.9" H x 6.1" W x 9.3" (1.15 lbs) 274 pages
Themes:
- Chronological Period - 19th Century
- Chronological Period - 21st Century
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
With its filigreed, formidable representations of tears and suffering, sentimentalism has remained a divisive genre and category of analysis. On Sympathetic Grounds offers a new interpretation of the sentimental by mapping its grounds in North America. During sweeping transformations of
territory, land stewardship, personhood, and citizenship in the nineteenth century, sentimentalists evoked sympathy to express a desire for a place that was both territorial and emotional--what Naomi Greyser calls an affective geography. Greyser traces the intricacies attending Americans'
sentimental sense that bodies could merge and mutually occupy the same space at the same time. Affective geographies complicate normative, linear assumptions about intimacy and distance, and consequently compel a reconsideration of geopolitics, geophysics and the distribution of resources and care.

Mapping feelings in and also about space, On Sympathetic Grounds focuses on the experiences and perspectives of those whose bodies, labor and sovereignty have been occupied to ground others' lives and world-making projects. Bringing literary and rhetorical studies together with critical race and
gender theory, cultural geography, American studies, affect studies and the new materialism, this book lays out sentimentalism's usefulness to settler colonialism and the maintenance of racialized labor. The book also carefully charts sentimentalism's value as a means of resisting geographic
displacement and both physical and metaphysical dispossession.

Philosophers and rhetoricians regard grounds as necessary conditions for argumentation; Greyser treats grounds as also geopolitical, geoaffective, and geophysical. Sympathy has enriched conditions for living at the same time that it has mercilessly enlisted some bodies and lives as the grounds for
others' wellbeing. Ultimately, On Sympathetic Grounds uncovers a moving, non-linear cartography of sympathy's vital place in shaping North America.