On Lingering and Being Last
Race and Sovereignty in the New World
This book can be opened with
What are we talking about when we talk about sovereignty? Is it about formal legitimacy or practical authority? Does it require the ability to control the flow of people or goods across a border; is it primarily a principle of international recognition; or does its essence lie in the power to regulate the lives of a state’s citizens? Political theorists, historians, scholars of international relations, lawyers, anthropologists, literary critics—all approach the dilemmas of sovereign power with a mixture of urgency and frustration.
In On Lingering and Being Last, Jonathan Elmer argues that the logic of sovereignty that emerged in early modern Europe and that limits our thinking today must be understood as a fundamentally racialized logic, first visible in the New World. The modern concept of sovereignty is based on a trope of personification, the conjunction of individual and collective identities. In Grotius, Hobbes, and others, a fiction of sovereign autonomy enabled states to be personified as individuals, as bodies politic, even as individual humans could be imagined as miniature states. The contradictions of this logic were fully revealed only in the New World, as writers ranging from Aphra Behn to Thomas Jefferson and Herman Melville demonstrate.
The racialized sovereign figures examined in On Lingering and Being Last—the slave king Oroonoko, the last chief Logan, and their avatars—are always at once a person and a people. They embody the connection between the individual and the collectivity, and thereby reveal that the volatile work of sovereign personification takes place in a new world constituted both by concepts of equality, homogeneity, and symmetry—by an ideal of liberal individualism—and by the realities of racial domination and ideology in the era of colonial expansion. The conjunction of the individual, race, and New World territorialization, Elmer argues, is key to understanding the deepest strata in the political imagination of Atlantic modernity.
This is an ambitious and often challenging book, which, for suppleness and originality of its argument and the subtlety of its readings of the texts, will repay careful reading.
In this brilliant study Jonathan Elmer explores recent accounts of the notion of sovereignty to demonstrate how those histories and critiques of sovereignty rightly identify the personification of national states as a conceptual error. Yet, by contrast with historians and political theorists who want to point to the error to eliminate it, Elmer demonstrates how the similarity between state and individual is more actively asserted in literature than in non-imaginative political discourses and how important literature is for dramatizing the implications of the confusion of states and persons. He has a gift for showing how both the democratic state and the liberal democratic subject are caught between the same contradictory forces--a conscience that they would use to bind themselves and a consciousness that continually generates exceptions. This is a remarkably supple and insightful book that should be of interest to political scientists, historians, and literary scholars alike-not least because it suggests how much political work literature may do in capturing key conceptual debates.
From the trenchant account of personification and sovereignty with which it begins to the majestic exposition of the "extraordinarily durable topos of the solitary tree" at its close, Jonathan Elmer's On Lingering and Being Last is a startling and compelling work. Drawing theoretical energy from Deleuze, Agamben Badiou, and others, Elmer marks a fresh route through several focalizing writers-Behn, Equiano, Melville, Jefferson, C.B. Brown-demonstrating that certain recurring figures-"royal slaves, captive kings, last chiefs"-encode and express the quandary of New World sovereignty, both its ideological snarls and its practical urgencies. Elmer's commingling of theoretical complexity, exegetical perspicacity, and historical insight is unique: this is a singular, important meditation on Early American territoriality."
OR
"From the trenchant account of personification and sovereignty with which
it begins to the majestic exposition of the "extraordinarily durable topos
of the solitary tree" at its close, Jonathan Elmer's On Lingering and
Being Last is a startling and compelling work. Drawing theoretical energy
from Deleuze, Agamben Badiou, and others, Elmer marks a fresh route
through several focalizing writers-Behn, Equiano, Melville, Jefferson, C.B. Brown . . .Elmer's commingling of theoretical complexity, exegetical> perspicacity, and historical insight is unique: this is a singular,
important meditation on Early American territorality."OR
"From the trenchant account of personification and sovereignty with which it begins to the majestic exposition of the "extraordinarily durable topos of the solitary tree" at its close, Jonathan Elmer's On Lingering and Being Last is a startling and compelling work. Drawing theoretical energy from Deleuze, Agamben Badiou, and others, Elmer marks a fresh route through several focalizing writers-Behn, Equiano, Melville, Jefferson, C.B. Brown-demonstrating that certain recurring figures-"royal slaves, captive kings, last chiefs"-encode and express the quandary of New World sovereignty, both its ideological snarls and its practical urgencies. This is a singular, important meditation on Early American territoriality.
In this revealing thematic study of race and sovereignty in the New
World, Elmer employs crucial theorists of power—Schmidtt, Agamben,
Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari—to construct a new paradigm for reading
the racial tropes pervading early American literature. The captive
king and noble savage, the last of one's lineage, the
deterritorialized ship of state and emblematic tree: through Elmer's
deft analyses we see how these exemplars and exceptions underscore our
literature's obsession with Indians, slaves, and isolatoes, and embody
powerful logics of authority and ambiguity.
Royal slaves, captive kings, and last chiefs—this stunning account
of racialized sovereignty in the New World gives us an American literature
unlike anything we have seen: steeped in melancholy, haunted by the 'Logan effect,' at once ancient and modern.
On Lingering and Being Last is a brilliant meditation on a crucial
nexus of terms that both define and trouble modernity as figured in
literature, philosophy, and politics from the eighteenth century
forward—namely, race, sovereignty, and the paradoxical links and
fissures between the autonomous individual and collective forms of
social belonging. At every turn, Elmer offers compelling, original, and
searchingly attentive readings of New World texts, yielding a richness
of insight that makes for an immensely pleasurable foray into
theoretically sophisticated and difficult terrain.
Smart, topical, well-researched, and highly original.
Working from a genuinely transatlantic perspective, On Lingering and Being Last tracks the urgent yet elusive concept of sovereignty across a broad range of texts and moments. The result is a series of scrupulously researched and elegantly articulated expositions of gothic humanitarianism, melancholic nationalism and the ideological vicissitudes of the ethnic sublime. Theoretically nuanced and intellectually generous, Elmer's readings operate with uncanny ease on the uncertain border between the literary and the political. We will be engaging with its provocative and illuminating formulations for years to come." CHECK BEFORE CHANGING
OR
"Working from a genuinely transatlantic perspective, On Lingering and Being
Last tracks the urgent yet elusive concept of sovereignty across a broad
range of texts and moments. The result is a series of scrupulously
researched and elegantly articulated expositions of gothic
humanitarianism, melancholic nationalism and the ideological vicissitudes
of the ethnic sublime."