Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: white zombies, black Jacobins
- 1 White zombies in the state machinery
- 2 Set in authority: white rulers and white settlers
- 3 Soldiers and traitors: Rebecca West, the world wars and the state subject
- 4 White turkeys, white weddings: the state and the south
- 5 Modernist (pre)occupations: Haiti, primitivism and anti-colonial nationalism
- Afterword: myths, monsters, modernization, modernism
- Notes
- Index
Introduction: white zombies, black Jacobins
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: white zombies, black Jacobins
- 1 White zombies in the state machinery
- 2 Set in authority: white rulers and white settlers
- 3 Soldiers and traitors: Rebecca West, the world wars and the state subject
- 4 White turkeys, white weddings: the state and the south
- 5 Modernist (pre)occupations: Haiti, primitivism and anti-colonial nationalism
- Afterword: myths, monsters, modernization, modernism
- Notes
- Index
Summary
The human monster. An ancient notion whose frame of reference is law … the monster's field of appearance is a juridico-biological domain … what makes a human monster a monster is not just its exceptionality relative to the species form; it is the disturbance it brings to juridical regularities (whether it is a question of marriage laws, canons of baptism, or rules of inheritance).
Michel Foucault, “The Abnormals” (1969)Certainly we no longer know, except that it is primarily a craft, what art is. A South American poet of sorts spent an evening excitedly trying to prove to me that only that which breaks the basic rules is art. … But the apprentices to any craft first proudly acquire the tricks, then the deeper skills. This is only natural. But the young black who used to kneel in worship before the headlights on explorers' cars is now driving a taxi in Paris and New York. We had best not lag behind this black.
Jean Epstein, Bonjour cinéma (1926)Between roughly 1890 and 1945, elite Anglo-American and European intellectuals and artists described men of their status as being unable to maintain distinct personalities that could, because of their very distinctiveness, authoritatively affect social, economic and political life directly. The men in T. S. Eliot's crowd who flow over London Bridge to the financial district, each “fix[ing] his eyes before his feet,” are on their way to Max Weber's bureaucratic organization.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006