| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States. By Russ Castronovo. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. xvi, 351 pp. Cloth, $54.95, ISBN 0-8223-2775-9. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-8223-2772-4.)

Necro Citizenship opens with the question, 'How does death structure political life?' Russ Castronovo locates the answer in the nineteenth century, though he acknowledges that death has underwritten formulations of citizenship in the United States at least since Patrick Henry issued his unhappy ultimatum of 'liberty or death.' By the nineteenth century, Anglo-Americans had produced a world of sentimentalized necrophilia, from elaborate mourning rituals and fetishized deathbed scenes to spiritualist séances in which mediums conjured up lost loved ones. In this strikingly original and provocative study, Castronovo links these multiple cultural forms with an analysis of the abstracting logic of citizenship that 'deadens embodied subjects' and kills off alternative modes of political engagement. 'Necro citizenship' names the conjoining of these cultural practices and political effects in order to delineate, not a phantom public sphere, but a public peopled by phantoms. . . .

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