An incisive critique that examines the origins of contemporary American ideas about surveillance, terrorism, and white supremacy
For more than three centuries, Americans have pursued strategies of security that routinely make them feel vulnerable, unsafe, and insecure. American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability probes this paradox by examining American attachments to the terror of the sublime, the fear of uncertainty, and the anxieties produced by unending racial threat.
Challenging conventional approaches that leave questions of security to policy experts, Russ Castronovo turns to literature, philosophy, and political theory to show how security provides an organizing principle for collective life in ways that both enhance freedom and limit it. His incisive critique ranges from frontier violence and white racial anxiety to insurgent Black print culture and other forms of early American terror, uncovering the hidden logic of insecurity that structures modern approaches to national defense, counterterrorism, cybersecurity, surveillance, and privacy. Drawing on examples from fiction, journalism, tracts, and pamphlets, Castronovo uncovers the deep affective attachments that Americans have had since the founding to the sources of fear and insecurity that make them feel unsafe.
Timely and urgent, American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability sheds critical light on how and why the fundamental political desire for security promotes unease alongside assurance and fixates on risk and danger while clamoring for safety.
"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"--
"[Castronovo] has written several books in which he examines political issues through the lens of literature, philosophy, and history. In the present volume he uses similar rigor to probe the complex problems associated with national security . . . [Castronovo's] application of disparate literary sources, among whom he numbers Kant, Burke, Locke, and Schiller, as well as Gothic novelists and other writers of fiction (Melville, Fenimore Cooper, etc.), is only one of the innovations in the book's approach."
