| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Race, Slavery, and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. By Arthur Riss. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. viii, 238 pp. $80.00, ISBN 978-0-521-85674-4.)

More polemic than cultural history, Arthur Riss's Race, Slavery, and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature is nonetheless a book with which scholars concerned with the materiality and rights of personhood will want to engage. The author contends that philosophical concepts of personhood—the cornerstone of liberalism's appeal to freedom and human rights—are always anachronistic fictions that historians and literary critics read back into situations when the human was anything but a foregone conclusion. Instead, for Riss, personhood is more aptly described as an open-ended construct, and nothing better documents that debated ground of humanity than proslavery renditions of biblical and biological "evidence," which held that the "Negro" constituted a separate species of humanity. Drawing on that context, Riss seeks to complicate the history of racial essentialism so that this ideology, thoroughly suspect in our day, echoes with "progressive" meaning in the antebellum era (p. 81).

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