Overview

In The Brink of Freedom David Kazanjian revises nineteenth-century conceptions of freedom by examining the ways black settler colonists in Liberia and Mayan rebels in Yucatan imagined how to live freely. Focusing on colonial and early national Liberia and the Caste War of Yucatan, Kazanjian interprets letters from black settlers in apposition to letters and literature from Mayan rebels and their Creole antagonists. He reads these overlooked, multilingual archives not for their descriptive content, but for how they unsettle and recast liberal forms of freedom within global systems of racial capitalism. By juxtaposing two unheralded and seemingly unrelated Atlantic histories, Kazanjian finds remarkably fresh, nuanced, and worldly conceptions of freedom thriving amidst the archived everyday. The Brink of Freedom's speculative, quotidian globalities ultimately ask us to improvise radical ways of living in the world.

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9780822361701

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With exhilarating virtuosity, The Brink of Freedom weaves two nineteenth-century case studies (the letters of African American settlers in Liberia, on the one hand, and the writings of Mayan rebels during the Caste War in the Yucutan, on the other) into a groundbreaking new model of contrapuntal scholarship. David Kazanjian s deft readings demonstrate that these supposedly minor archives halting, fragmented, quotidian carry remarkable philosophical heft, as improvised (though no less profound) reflections on the very meaning of freedom. --Brent Hayes Edwards, author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism

Author Information

David Kazanjian is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America.

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