Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom

by Russ Castronovo

Russ Castronovo underscores the inherent contradictions between America's founding principles of freedom and the reality of slavery in a book that probes mid-nineteenth-century representations of the founding fathers. He finds that rather than being coherent and consensual, narratives of nationhood are inconsistent, ambivalent, and ironic. He examines competing expressions of national memory in a wide range of mid-nineteenth-century slave autobiography, classic American fiction, monumental architecture, myths of the Revolution, proslavery writing, and landscape painting.

Castronovo theorizes a new American cultural studies which takes into consideration what Toni Morrison calls the "Africanist presence" that permeates American literature. He presents a genealogy that recovers those members of the national family whose status challenges the body politic and its history. The forgotten orphans in Melville's Moby-Dick and Israel Potter , the rebellious slaves in the work of Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown, the citizens afflicted with amnesia in Lincoln's speeches, and the dispossessed sons in slave narratives all provide dissenting voices that provoke insurrectionary plots and counter-memories. Viewed here as a miscegenation of stories, the narrative of "America" resists being told of an intelligible story of uncontested descent. National identity rests not on rituals of consensus but on repressed legacies of parricide and rebellion.

287 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Russell "Russ" Castronovo is Tom Paine Professor of English and Dorothy Draheim Professor of American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is also director of the university's Center for the Humanities.