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Through mapping the entwinement between the turn-of-the-century nativist discourse, "race suicide," and the frequent representation of suicide in Progressive-Era literature,
The Suicidal State asks what kind of agency, subjectivity, and intimacies suicide could forge in its undoing of the selfhood. Prefiguring the twenty-first-century white nationalist discourse "replacement theory," race suicide imagined the white race's declining birthrate as a sign of its imminent extinction, sparking anti-immigrant sentiment and legislation. Suicidal figures in period literature, this book argues, symptomatically enact race suicide to short-circuit the imperatives of racial reproduction and self-preservation, instead gesturing toward new erotic relationalities and pleasures.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1. Sacrificial Ecstasy: The Bostonians, Neurasthenia, and the "Obscure Hurt"
- 2. Flirting with Death: The Awakening's Liberal Economy and the Consuming Desire of New Women
- 3. The Spectral Lineage: Jack London, Teutonism, and Interspecies Kinship
- 4. Gertrude Stein's Melting Pot: Jewishness and the Excretory Pleasure of The Making of Americans
- Coda: Hindsight 20/20, or Asiatic Im-personality
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Madoka Kishi is a Professional in Residence in English at Louisiana State University. She has translated Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's
Touching Feeling (Takanashi-shobo, 2022) and co-translated Judith Butler's
Parting Ways (Seido-sha, 2019) into Japanese. She has published essays in the
Journal of American Studies,
The Henry James Review, and the
Journal of Modern Literature and is currently co-translating Lauren Berlant's
Cruel Optimism for Kadensha (forthcoming, 2024).
Summary
The Suicidal State theorizes a biopolitics of suicide by mapping the entwinement between the Progressive-Era discourse of “race suicide” and period representations of literary suicide. Against the backdrop of the turn-of-the-century debates over immigration restrictions, “race suicide” suggests white Americans' low birth rate as foretelling an immanent extinction of the white race, prefiguring the contemporary white nationalist discourse, “replacement theory.” While race suicide personified the populational subject--the “race”--as a suicidal individual, Progressive-Era literature gave birth to a microgenre of literary suicides, including works by Henry James, Kate Chopin, Jack London, Gertrude Stein, and a series of Madame Butterfly texts.
The Suicidal State argues that suicides in these texts literalize the fear of race suicide as they thwart the biopolitical demands for self-preservation, survival, and reproduction, articulating queer deathways that betray the nation's reproductive imperative. Both in its figuration of race suicide and in literary suicides, self-inflected death is imagined as a uniquely agential act in its destruction of agency, offering a fertile space for the reconceptualization of biopower's subject formation as it traverses individual and social bodies. That is, the book argues that suicide poses a limit case for the biopolitical management over life. Suicide, as it was imagined at the turn of the century, refuses, nullifies, and parries its obligatory relation to both biopower's discipline of the individual and its management of the population, thereby forging new forms of subjectivity and ways of being in the world that sidestep the twin imperatives for preservation and procreation. In tracking these queer potentialities of suicide, The Suicidal State offers a new history of sex and race, of the relation between individual and collective, of the formation of a biopolitical state that Foucault calls a “racist State, a murderous State, and a suicidal State.”
Additional text
The Suicidal State shows us how the state came to long for the erotics of death in the Progressive Era: at the moment when self-murder became suicide and the body politic became the social body, race crossed with sex to deliver and imperil white reproduction. Kishi's arguments are a series of lapidary cuts that expose new desires that glitter with what they cut away, and each chapter presents a revelatory reading of a life canted toward collective death - New England neurasthenic, Creole flirt, totemic Teuton, and the excretory American. The final turn to ill-fated Butterfly lashes this era to our present, and Kishi's understanding here - brilliantly limpid and profoundly felt - demonstrates, in her words, 'how to live on in a suicidal state.'
