Xenocitizens: Illiberal Ontologies in Nineteenth-Century America

By Catriona McPherson

In Xenocitizens, Jason Berger returns to the antebellum United States in order to challenge a scholarly tradition based on liberal–humanist perspectives. Through the concept of the xenocitizen, a synthesis of the terms “xeno,” which connotes alien or stranger, and “citizen,” which signals a naturalized subject of a state, Berger uncovers realities and possibilities that have been foreclosed by dominant paradigms. Innovatively re-orienting our thinking about traditional nineteenth-century figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau as well as formative writers such as William Wells Brown, Martin R. Delany, Margaret Fuller, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Xenocitizens glimpses how antebellum thinkers formulated, in response to varying forms of oppression and crisis, startlingly unique ontological and social models as well as unfamiliar ways to exist and to leverage change. In doing so, Berger offers us a different nineteenth century—pushing our imaginative and critical thinking toward new terrain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Jun 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9780823287765

Catriona McPherson

Born and raised in Edinburgh, Catriona McPherson left Edinburgh University with a PhD in Linguistics and worked in academia, as well as banking and public libraries, before taking up full-time writing in 2001. For the last ten years she has lived in Northern California with a black cat and a scientist. In 2020 she has been shortlisted for a third Mary Higgins Clark Award, for Strangers at the Gate, and won a Left Coast Crime 2020 Lefty Award for the Best Humorous Mystery for Scot and Soda.

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XENOCITIZENS

Copyright © 2020 Fordham University Press

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Chapter 1, Emerson’s Operative Mood, previously appeared as Emerson’s Operative Mood: Religious Sentiment and Violence in the Early Works in the Winter 2015 issue of Studies in Romanticism and appears here by courtesy of the Trustees of Boston University.

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First edition

For my parents,

Deborah and James Berger,

&

my sister and brother,

Carey Brunetti and Michael Berger,

with love and gratitude

For Sarah Ehlers and Jonah Berger,

who make home a living possibility

CONTENTS

Introduction: Xenocitizens

Part I ILLIBERAL ONTOLOGIES

1. Emerson’s Operative Mood

2. Agitating Margaret Fuller

Part II ILLIBERAL ECOLOGIES

3. Thoreau’s Militant Vegetables

4. Unadjusted Emancipations

Epilogue: Care, There and Now

Notes

Index

XENOCITIZENS

INTRODUCTION

Xenocitizens

[T]here is no such thing as an innocent reading.

—LOUIS ALTHUSSER, Reading Capital

Xenocitizen might seem a peculiar term, especially in our current moment. Amid an era when neoliberal policies obliterate longstanding civic realities and a large portion of the U.S. population feeds on ever-new xenophobic and racist offerings, why appeal to the notion of citizen at all?

Instead of seeking civic origins or considering the afterlives of citizenship in the wake of neoliberalism, Xenocitizens: Illiberal Ontologies in Nineteenth-Century America attempts to move toward a positive abandonment.¹ Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman suggest that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s term for disrepair is, in fact, "abandonment. According to Berlant and Edelman, [a]bandonment is when, in the scene of looking backward, one discovers that the end of sociality has come already and that there is nothing left to fear or constrain."² In our moment, sociality under the sign of liberalism has seemingly come to end—or, at the very least, is in dire crisis. Xenocitizens enters what is a wide field of responses to our present economic and existential precarity by challenging a shaken but still standing scholarly tradition based upon liberal-humanist perspectives. Through the concept of xenocitizen, a synthesis of the terms xeno, which connotes alien and/or stranger, and citizen, which signals a naturalized subject of a state, this book returns to the nineteenth century in an effort to uncover realities and, indeed, possibilities, that have been foreclosed by dominant paradigms that continue to shape our views about justice, tolerance, belief, and various demarcations of insides and outsides, including the separation of public and private spheres. Examining how crises in the antebellum years pushed writers to formulate alternative ontological and social models for thinking about personhood and sociality, I glimpse other citizenships—other modes of political ontology and, with hope, collectivity that arose during the throes of the mid-nineteenth century. Today, the old liberal-national model of citizen is not only problematic but also tactically anachronistic.³ And yet, standard liberal assumptions that undergird the fading realities of humanist and democratic traditions often linger within emerging scholarly models that seek to move past them. The problems of our era, and our past, for that matter, demand that scholars push their imaginative and critical thinking toward new terrain.

It follows that xenocitizens are, by necessity, illiberal. By employing the term illiberal, I intend to harness the negative Latinate prefix not but in a manner that connotes varying forms of non-identity with dominant modes of liberalism rather than a definitive opposition to them, even though such opposition is at times present. The concept of liberalism, and its manifold contexts, has rightly received much critical attention in recent years. While I will outline some of the major trends in this criticism, examining the vexed portrayals of both liberalism and neoliberalism, I want to begin for now with Lisa Lowe’s suggestion that liberal humanism is a formalism that translates the world through an economy of affirmation and forgetting within a regime of desiring freedom. In Lowe’s terms, Liberal forms of political economy, culture, government, and history propose a narrative of freedom overcoming enslavement that at once denies colonial slavery, erases the seizure of lands from native peoples, displaces migrations and connections across continents, and internalizes these processes in a national struggle of history and consciousness.⁴ In the context of the United States, Gregg Crane locates such formal foreclosures within a constituent paradox at the center of American liberal democracy. For him, the early definition of certain races (ethnos) as outside the parameters of citizen reveals starkly how the juxtaposition of identity-neutral norms of political and social coexistence and identitarian practice is a hallmark of American higher law constitutionalism.⁵

Since Aristotle, the concept of citizen has been buoyed by ideals about political civic participation (politikos) predicated upon various notions of membership.⁶ Historical reality, however, offers a different lesson: how expansive inclusion via shifting defined categories screens a myriad of systemic exclusions. As scholars in Indigenous studies, black studies, and feminist and queer studies have argued, such exclusions conveniently constitute the foundation for modes of extraction and appropriation, including what Jasbir Puar calls debilitation.⁷ Liberal democracy’s outcasts often become, in this sense, forcibly in-cast (Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, section 9 of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Dred Scott v. Sandford …).

Instead of working along the familiar axis of inclusion/exclusion, Xenocitizens moves outward and alongside: pursuing examples where, in response to historical conditions, writers struggled to forge alternative conceptualizations of self and sociality. Consequently, in my formulation, the term citizen might be crossed out, designating a placeholder for alternate or para (beside) constructions. Citing the types of foreclosures Lowe and Crane pinpoint, Frederick Douglass, in an 1853 speech, laments how U.S. laws rendered free blacks less-than-citizens. In his terms: Aliens are we in our native land.⁸ From the start, liberal democracy’s promises were predicated upon necessary constituent failures. Aliens are—and it is this book’s wager that future pathways out of our current political-economic predicament might come from starting here—where we have been all along.

Xenocitizens and its notion of the illiberal seeks to be a fellow traveler with various contemporary attempts to critique or move past foundational elements of the liberal tradition, especially those elements operating within and beneath neoliberal policies. At the same time, it might partially ally with more recent post-Trump attempts to radically reorient aspects of liberalism itself. For example, Charles W. Mills’s Black Rights / White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (2017) sets out from the premise that contemporary scholars such as Domenico Losurdo are correct to argue that, despite its association with emancipations, liberalism has been a longstanding and active catalyst for various regimes of racial and economic oppression. Offering racial liberalism as a new rubric for a wide-ranging critique of liberalism’s racial foreclosures, Mills attempts to recognize these exclusions as theoretically central, admit their shaping of liberalism’s array of rights and freedoms, and then confront the critics’ case for discrediting liberalism all together with the defense’s arguments for how it can nonetheless be reclaimed and redeemed.⁹ In Mills’s view, this critique might allow us to "pluralize liberalism into liberalisms, in essence producing a self-consciously anti-racist liberalism and thereby correct[ing] the (anti-universalist, anti-egalitarian) distortions in mainstream white liberalism."¹⁰ Working along a similar trajectory, Chantal Mouffe’s For a Left Populism (2018) suggests that the 2008 economic crisis highlighted neoliberal contradictions and engendered the populist moment, where both the right and the left have begun to produce new anti-hegemonic movements.¹¹ Advocating for the construction of a populist transversal mode, Mouffe asserts that a qualified left perspective is necessary for addressing the challenges of the present.¹² Left populism, Mouffe argues, wants to recover democracy to deepen and extend it. A left populist strategy aims at federating the democratic demands into a collective will to construct a ‘we,’ a ‘people’ confronting a common adversary: the oligarchy. Mouffe hopes a new political alignment—calling for a chain of equivalence among the demands of the workers, the immigrants and the precarious middle class, as well as other democratic demands, such as those of the LGBT community—might radicalize democracy.¹³

One must be nimble enough to forge alliances with such liberalisms while, at the same time, forcefully unsettling the codification of new middles that replicate aspects of previous liberal terrains or developing neoliberal formations. Xenocitizens hopes to build on, and perhaps productively break from, more recent studies of the eighteenth- and especially nineteenth-century United States that follow, in spirit, the welcome reformist impulses seen in Mills and Mouffe.¹⁴ As my chapters demonstrate in various ways, if we are to radically alter liberalism, we must do so by at least passing through the emerging critical discourses offered by, for example, Afro-pessimism, contemporary Marxism, and some of the posthumanist work being done under the rubric of new materialism. Just as Cary Wolfe aptly describes posthumanism as coming both before and after humanism, illiberal xenocitizenship might designate alternative formations or distortions of liberal realities both before these dominant orientations consolidated in the later nineteenth century as well as after they were transformed within twentieth-century neoliberal efforts that have paradoxically pushed liberalism to the brink.¹⁵ Through examples of nineteenth-century xenocitizenship, I highlight the complex noise—slippages, foreclosed conceptualizations, and possibilities—surrounding contested terms and views amid a historical moment within its own specific crises. These examples might, in turn, provide a useful collective foothold for thinking innovatively about residual and emerging conceptions of sociality, including the traditional categories of individuality and collectivity, after our own era’s postnational and posthuman turns.

The four chapters within this book form a discontinuous trajectory: working from the more ubiquitous locus of the individual toward systemic concerns with sociality and large-scale economic and ecological formations. Part I, Illiberal Ontologies, reconsiders the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller in an effort to present a new understanding of how selves are formed and activated via impersonal outsides. The types of loaded personhood gleaned in these chapters have significantly different compositions and stakes than those found within received Romantic conceptions of the individual subject as well as the modes of impersonality employed by contemporary Deleuzian-inflected studies of new materiality. Part II, Illiberal Ecologies, takes up the work of writers such as Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Wells Brown, and Martin R. Delany, examining how political ontology and agency are transformed within complex material networks. Pivoting on Charles Darwin’s notion that what we now call ecology designates an economy of nature, these chapters depict how mid-century writers formulated, in response to varying forms of oppression and precarity, startlingly unique and unfamiliar material-economic models for existing and for leveraging change.¹⁶

Leveraging change is what Althusser has in mind, too, in the epigraph above. After stating that there is no such thing as an innocent reading, Althusser feels impelled to say what reading [he is] guilty of.¹⁷ This guilt, which stems from Althusser’s declared ideological and methodological interventions, does not, however, require absolution. Instead, his reading takes the responsibility for its crime as a ‘justified crime’ and defends it by proving its necessity.¹⁸ I want to invoke the dialectical verve Althusser imagines but flip the scenario inside out: to call attention to how reified liberal schematics and their systemic foreclosures undergird standard contemporary scholarship in the humanities, including this scholarship’s trend toward fashionable essays that roll out arguments through various thematic and/or aesthetic gestures or via short mainstream thinkpieces. Against these trends, Bruno Bosteels builds on the work of Jodi Dean and, even more explicitly, Álvaro García Linera to embrace what he terms the actuality of communism. This move to make Marxism the untranscendable horizon of our time, which means, in Dean’s terms, to view this "horizon [as] Real not just in the sense of impossible—we can never reach it—but also in the sense of the actual format, condition, and shape of our setting," has significant methodological and political ramifications.¹⁹ To quote Bosteels at length:

Far from remaining a utopian principle, communism would thus be what allows for the historical inscription of politics in a concrete situation. It is what operates in the space in-between the local and the universal, the singular and the eternal, the interested individual and the disinterested subject of a cause greater than him or herself. In this sense, communism actually would be able to avoid the pitfalls of speculative leftism thanks to the triangulation of history, politics, and subjectivity enabled by the Idea.²⁰

Scholarship following this trajectory would move toward a place somewhere between what Bosteels elsewhere calls a true polemic and a genealogical work of counter-memory.²¹

In the remainder of this introduction, and in the book as a whole, I want to take seriously the injunctions that lie at the core of Bosteels’s work. The next two sections of this introduction turn directly to the concepts of xenocitizen and ontology: setting the terms of engagement and conceptual terrain for the chapters that follow. I argue that in our historical moment what we need in the fields of American Studies and American literary studies is a critical account of actuality without positivism: an approach that, by resisting longstanding liberal humanist and positivist historical assumptions, illuminates both concrete realities and emergent formations. Such a perspective allows one to study the reality of partial or potential formations of xenocitizens in the antebellum United States. They are there, some in actual practices and spaces, others in theories or accounts of alternate political forms of being. Much like Marx’s pioneering and digging mole, a metonym for a broader movement of Revolution in his discussion of the historical distortions of the English working class, I suggest we should push back into the antebellum period with an eye or, in this case, any hand or claw we might find. Or simply follow Thoreau, who found his head to be an organ for burrowing.²²

Xenocitizens

Cutting across various sites of the antebellum United States in order to present a new panoply of political experiences and alignments, Xenocitizens unsettles many of the ideological assumptions that have guided scholarship on the nineteenth century. The structural stakes of my chapters might be articulated, in part, using the terms that Étienne Balibar presents in Citizenship (2015), which traces the development of Western citizenship from the ancient politeia through modern variants of bourgeois civics. Balibar aims to rethink democratic citizenship by shifting our perspective on the traditional schism between constituent and constituted forms of power. According to Balibar, It is the antimony lodged at the heart of the relationship between citizenship and democracy that has been, in its successive forms, the motor for the transformation of the political institution.²³ This foundational contradiction is especially apparent in modern bourgeois revolutions and assertions of citizenship. After all, as he points out, bourgeois and citizen were originally synonymous, with burgher connoting a citizen of a free city.²⁴ In Balibar’s narrative, the advent of modern liberal democratic politics in the eighteenth century established equal rights as a new universal, and this concept was predicated on the pairings of opposites, such as man/citizen and liberty/equality. In terms of the latter pairing, Balibar writes that they are seen as two sides of the same ‘constituent power,’ despite the permanent tendency of bourgeois political ideologies (which we can generally group under the term ‘liberalism’) to confer epistemic, even ontological, priority onto the first term [liberty], making it a ‘natural right,’ to which the socialist tendency to privilege equality is a response. As a result of this central paradox, Balibar argues, the body politic is perpetually incomplete, with forms of domination requiring various modes of insurrection in order to demand and institute new rights. This brings Balibar to the concept of equaliberty and his primary intervention: the need to simultaneously [demand] equality and liberty, an assertion that is at the root of modern universal citizenship despite the hegemonic formations that have denied or displaced it.²⁵

Building on Balibar’s points, I use the term xenocitizen to designate modes of existence and agency that are shaped negatively by reified historical formations of political identity—which include modern notions of state citizenship as well as other interpellated forms of social being—and, at the same time, that are non-identical to and/or outside of these very boundaries and constructions. In Plebeian Power (2014), Álvaro García Linera notes how the concept of citizen has become welded to notions of the state, but that it is, on a foundational level, really about the constitution of the collective self. According to Linera, this is a process of intersubjectification that is fluid and dialectical, with citizenship constituting a "practice of citizenship, … [a] will to intervene in the matters that link [subjects] to their fellow citizens."²⁶ And this practice indelibly shapes both the "content and the form of political rights." Although states and empires, in Hardt and Negri’s terms, often control the rhetoric and structures that condition political realities, these realities are, at the zero level, constituted by the social relations among peoples and actants. Consequently, the practice of citizenship is at least potentially contingent and open. In a point that is essential to Xenocitizens, Linera states, [C]itizen-power belongs to a space that is both narrower and broader than the space of the state, though it encompasses it. Linera thus accounts for the existence of non-state forms of citizenship formation, or forms outside of state-circuits of political power.²⁷ In this light, citizenship might more aptly be thought of as a community in Jean-Luc Nancy’s formulation wherein, as Alyosha Goldstein notes, community is not a form of shared identity, ‘common being,’ or mutual understanding but a ‘being-in-common—with ‘being’ itself constituted in and as a relation.²⁸

Following Linera’s logic, the reduction of citizenship to state-sanctioned identity forecloses alternate sociopolitical realities and potentialities. George Ciccariello-Maher makes a similar point in his more recent push to decolonize dialectics. Working in the lineage of Frantz Fanon and Enrique Dussel, Ciccariello-Maher argues for an enrichment of anarchism [that] might result from loosening the formalist grip of ‘the state’ and embracing decolonization as a means of attacking the most powerful and essential hierarchy of our times—the ontological apartheid that renders some less human than others.²⁹ My effort is not to push for some new Jacobin institution, but, somewhat like Ciccariello-Maher, to promote new perspectives for resisting the historical powers of modernity. This effort begins by considering anew both the historical foreclosures of being that condition our present as well as alternate formations that have been forgotten or ignored.³⁰ Despite the fact that democracy has long been, in Timothy Mitchell’s terms, an engineering project … concerned with the manufacture of new political subjects and with subjecting people to new ways of being governed, there are, across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many examples of non-sanctioned and non-state formations of identity and community.³¹ According to Raúl Coronado, for instance, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Latin America, there were different visions for imagining communities that did not necessarily have to lead to nationalism, of conceptions of rights and subjectivity that [did] … not genuflect to our now dominant account of possessive individualism.³² In a different context, Monique Allewaert’s work on the eighteenth-century plantation zone has been influential in revealing innovatively such possibilities: depicting how looking at tropical ecologies offers ways to build stories about places and actors that archives documenting the citizen-subjects of print culture cannot. This includes, for Allewaert, a recalibration of ontological theorizations of resistance in the period.³³

If Balibar is correct that liberalism itself stands in for bourgeois political realities, then it is no wonder that, when one looks carefully at specific social and political experiences during the nineteenth century, events quite often exceed or outright complicate given ideological coordinates, even if these coordinates are in flux despite themselves.³⁴ The discontinuity within the era’s liberal discourses and policies often manifested, on one hand, in very real exclusions, expulsions, enslavements, and occupations, and, on the other hand, in new and often desperate militant uses of this charged historical horizon. In 1829, for example, the North Carolina judge Thomas Ruffin ruled that the wounding of a hired slave did not constitute a crime because the power of the master must be absolute … to render the submission of the slave perfect. Such logic has a long history in the West, rendering the slave, in Henri Wallon’s terms, an animated instrument.³⁵ And yet, abstracting a bit from Wallon’s language, if Heidegger’s famous notion of the broken tool illuminates the way a systemically normalized and ignored object or function appears only when it ceases to operate smoothly, then we might say that the antebellum United States’ liberal landscape was strewn with such tools—tools many chose to see, to hold in their hands, and, at times, to hurl and weaponize.³⁶ Of course, in returning to Ruffin’s rhetoric and following the lead of W. E. B. Du Bois, these animated instruments themselves fought back and resisted with localized rebellions of various kinds. They also collaborated directly and indirectly before and during the Civil War via what Du Bois calls a general strike of slaves.³⁷ Similar to how Du Bois reformulates standard optics for viewing a nationalized civil war by revealing the unacknowledged forms of collective black resistance working amid regimes of antiblackness (in the north and the south), through the concept of xenocitizen I hope to pull discussion of historical citizenship proper below or outside received debates and discourses. In fact, as I hope is clear by now, this book is not about citizenship at all—but about the tortured and fertile landscape upon which exclusionary communities have been built in its name.

When making such structural and, perhaps, utopian claims about other forms of citizenship, one must not lose sight of the way historical communities, especially those shaped by modern national and colonial conditions, are predicated upon violence. For example, building on the work of scholars such as Saidiya Hartman, Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández offers a compelling and uncompromising critique of citizenship as domination in the context of Mexico–United States relations, writing: Citizenship plays a crucial role in the perpetuation of violence precisely because national membership, rights, birthrights, and state and local practices were often determined situationally. Although acknowledging scholars, such as Akhil Gupta, who view citizenship in terms of split and multiple affinities, Guidotti-Hernández insists that racialized, sexualized, and gendered subjects often are not viewed as full members of their respective communities or as full citizens of nations … and are more likely to be targets of physical, psychological, or discursive violence. She thus analyzes the role of the nation-state (a legal and political entity) in forming national imaginaries … that perpetuate dominant narratives of national amnesia.³⁸

Especially when looking at the nineteenth-century United States, a period in which the term citizenship was itself a contested concept with such tremendous stakes, one must foreground the violences that Guidotti-Hernández illuminates. It is in this era, for example, when the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice Roger B. Taney asserted the line of division which the Constitution has drawn between the citizen race and … the African race.³⁹ Citing David Kazanjian’s work on Federalist-era monetary policy, Fred Moten explains how late eighteenth-century U.S. national financial structures had broader ideological goals pertaining to population control. Discussing James Madison’s writing about the institution of a new tariff, Moten suggests such measures were a national policy precisely because [they] promise[d] to transform … potentially plural and antagonistic ‘constituents’ into united subjects abstracted from their particularities and antagonisms and represented as formally equivalent units of national population—units [Madison] elsewhere calls ‘citizens’ who will engage in lively economic exchange. As both Kazanjian and Moten portray in different ways, such instantiations of abstract unity through economic citizenship allowed for the disguised separation of racial slavery, an institution whose appropriation of labor laid a foundation for the nation and whose anti-black ideological structures used blackness as a vanishing mediator for the construction and consolidation of sanctioned modern identities.⁴⁰

By following Linera and others who call for a retheorization of citizenship in terms of non-state formations, collectives, and inter- or para-subjective constructions, I do not at all intend to diminish the staggering importance of studies such as Guidotti-Hernández’s that attend to how systems of power effect and infect those below the threshold of citizenship, to borrow Allewaert’s phrase.⁴¹ This is especially apparent in the nineteenth century, when the broader reality of what Achille Mbembe calls necropolitics, or the way modes of biopolitics generated forms of social death for nonwhite persons denied political bios, created the conditions for what Russ Castronovo terms necro citizenship. As Castronovo explains, this era saw racialized and gendered others caught in a deathly logic of citizenship that sentenced [them] … to excessive and lethal embodiment while an abstract notion of legalized identity reigned supreme.⁴²

Indeed, in the nineteenth-century United States, socioeconomic oppression was starkly apparent in battles over the fate of chattel slavery. Those seeking to end this longstanding institution faced the necessity of naming enemies, of drawing ethical lines in the sand, and, as Frederick Douglass famously demonstrated in his 1852 What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? speech, of calling out the violence that liberal society smoothly maintained. As Kerry Larson points out, the term liberal was most commonly used in antebellum America in reference to religion—with liberal Christianity, for instance, connoting a Christianity that was tolerant and accommodating, avoiding petty doctrinal intransigence.⁴³ In the nineteenth century, as today, the characteristics of liberalism Larson outlines crossed over into the secular realm, shaping the value of diversity (hence pluralism) and debate (hence agonism). But what about the systemic violences obscured by the polite function of safe rhetorical norms and the half-truths of master signifiers such as liberty and equality? The violence not seen (willfully or otherwise) through lenses shaped by liberal fantasies is what Douglass calls out in his Fourth of July speech: not just that slavery is a violent problem, but that the means by which a liberal political sphere addresses itself (conceptually and rhetorically) toward this violence is a problem. Douglass asks, "Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? After answering emphatically in the negative, he follows with: What then remains to be argued? He concludes by suggesting that scorching irony is now required, which includes the act of pour[ing] a fiery stream of biting ridicule into the nation’s ear."⁴⁴

Such an odd blend of seemingly divergent ideological positions within the civic frame of a so-called liberal republic is, of course, not all that far from our own political landscape. Contemporary scholarly responses to neoliberal policies have inspired a rich array of studies of liberalism and its origins. Building with post–World War II shifts in economic thinking in the Mont Pèlerin Society and the Chicago School of Economics and breaking in the late seventies with Thatcherism (inspired by Friedrich Hayek) and Reaganomics (shaped by Paul Volcker and later Alan Greenspan), neoliberalism is, as David Harvey explains it, a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.⁴⁵ As the 2008 Great Recession brought home, these neoliberal practices and policies included widespread—and by now practically total—deregulation, privatization, and the decimation of publics and commons. Through international bodies such as the World Bank, IMF, and WTO, neoliberal policies allowed capital to expand rapidly through structural adjustment programs and austerity measures.⁴⁶ Earlier liberalisms and contemporary neoliberalism (the former, at best, offering various notions of freedom from institutional constructions that open up the space for democratic ideals, and the latter offering various notions of freedom from state and civic control that allow market forces to override all boundaries) share a historical base in the development of capital and its socioeconomic ramifications beginning, according to most accounts, in the early seventeenth century. Indeed, the structural adjustment policies forwarded by the Washington Consensus (operating under the aegis of the IMF and World Bank) tellingly synthesized traditional liberal tenets of openness, tolerance, and freedom with developing neoliberal financial policies. John Williamson’s 1989 list of structural adjustment measures, for example, includes concepts such as trade liberalization and liberalizing foreign direct investment.⁴⁷

The historical and conceptual connections among earlier liberalisms and neoliberalism, however, are anything but continuous, and, as mentioned, the nature of these relations remains a charged topic with significant stakes. There are those, such as Amanda Anderson (Bleak Liberalism [2016]), who remain defenders of liberalism and offer various attempts to offset contemporary critiques of this tradition. Anderson argues that challenges to liberalism—described as psychological, social, and economic barriers to its moral and political ideas—may derive, at least in part, from outside of liberalism. This claim allows her book to pivot elliptically toward its primary consideration of the emotional toll rendered by attempting to adhere to embattled liberal ideals. By examining the bleakness of such liberal positions, Anderson seems to suggest that this tradition is somehow thickened (aesthetically and otherwise) and, by implication, more relevant or tenable.⁴⁸ To the middle-left of Anderson, a number of contemporary scholars are attempting to counter the forces of neoliberalism and right-wing responses to it via revisionist or activist reinvigorations of liberalism. In their own ways, each of these scholars asserts a break within liberalism—either one to come in a necessary future (as with Mills and his notion of purging liberalism of its racist historical structures) or as a constituent rupture that has already occurred, often with the advent of neoliberalism (such as Eva Cherniavsky referencing the divorce between capitalism and democracy, Dawson Barrett calling the era of neoliberalism a post-liberal America, and Mouffe asserting the difference between political liberalism and economic liberalism).⁴⁹ Further left still, scholars and writers continue to engage neoliberalism via the perspectives of Marxism and other emerging materialist approaches and practices not aligned with the traditions of liberal-humanism or the horizon of recognized politics per se. For example, Achille Mbembe asserts emphatically that [i]t would be a mistake to believe that we have left behind the regime that began with the slave trade and flourished in plantation and extraction colonies.⁵⁰ In lieu of imposing a definitive fissure within liberalism, and offering something of a staged schematic for what Cedric Robinson calls racial capitalism and what Fred Moten terms racial state capitalism, Mbembe conceives of the development of modernity as a series of three critical moments related to capital and the vertiginous assemblage that is Blackness: the Atlantic slave trade (1500–1900), the birth of writing near the end of the eighteenth century (essentially the creation of republican-liberal political idealism and its attendant revolts and revolutions), and neoliberalism.⁵¹

Coming amid the second critical historical moment noted by Mbembe, the antebellum era saw many of the dictums produced by liberalism’s ideological agenda reifying, including a longstanding process of culling and renarrating aspects of the ancien régime for various Enlightenment agendas. The ancient Greek concept of demos, fantasies of the Roman Republic, as well as subsequent Judeo-Christian institutional conceptions of civic and personal lives laid the foundations for socioeconomic structures that developed out of early seventeenth-century corporations (the Virginia Company was chartered in 1606) and later Enlightenment political revolutions. In Jethro Lieberman’s terms, western imagination was seized by a beguiling idea nearly four centuries ago: A just balance between disorder and repression could be achieved if the state withdrew from the business of imposing an ultimate good.… Liberalism … holds that it is not only possible but also morally proper to govern by refraining from decreeing ultimate ends, and that the state’s only business is to prevent people from harming each other. Lieberman, however, quickly notes a central paradox in the early liberalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the fact that only in the state and by obedience to law was it possible to be free.⁵² Although Douglass’s Fourth of July speech was delivered before John Stuart Mill’s humanistic master narrative On Liberty (1859), it is safe to say that by the early nineteenth century the western and southern transatlantic world had tacitly incorporated a whole host of liberal ideological assumptions about the economy, the state, and civic personhood. According to Stephen Holmes, the core practices of a liberal political order of this era and our own includes:

Religious toleration, freedom of discussion, restrictions on police behavior, free elections, constitutional governments based upon a separation of powers, publicly inspectable state budgets to inhibit corruption, and economic policy committed to sustained growth on the basis of private ownership and freedom of contract. Liberalism’s four core norms or values are personal security (the monopolization of legitimate violence by agents of the state who are themselves monitored by the law), impartiality (a single system of law applied equally to all), individual liberty (a broad sphere of conscience, the right to be different, the right to pursue ideals one’s neighbor thinks wrong, the freedom to travel and emigrate, and so forth), and democracy or the right to participate in lawmaking by means of elections and public discussion through a free press.⁵³

Each of these apparently natural and commonsensical practices, as Holmes calls them, obviously has a complex genealogy. So, too, does the overriding term liberalism. Domenico Losurdo grounds the modern use of the concept in mid-seventeenth-century England, where the specific term—shaped by the Seven Years’ War, the outcome of the Somersett case, and the subsequent rebellion in the North American colonies—acted as an adjective linked to any number of nouns (sentiment, government, commerce, and so on) connoting a quality of freedom and tolerance. According to Losurdo, the term began being used as a noun when the author of an article in the Pennsylvania Packet published on March 25, 1780, self-identified as A Liberal in their case for the abolition of slavery.⁵⁴

In the early nineteenth century, however, being a liberal meant anything but simply supporting a pro-abolitionist agenda. As Losurdo notes, race-based slavery is not something that persisted despite the success of the three liberal revolutions. On the contrary, it experiences its maximum development following that success, especially if one looks at the case of the United States.⁵⁵ It should come as little surprise, therefore, that although many of liberalism’s classic texts, such as Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776), frowned upon slavery as a premodern source of economic stagnation, just as many have either outright supported slavery, especially in the colonies and newly formed republics, or questioned the ramifications of abolitionist movements.⁵⁶ Such notable liberal proponents of slavery, both weak and strong, included Edmond Burke (whose work was used by pro-slavery Virginians such as Thomas R. Dew), Benjamin Disraeli (who explicitly lamented the social and racial implications of the abolition of slavery, even after the U.S. Civil War), Lord Acton (who categorized abolitionists in England as Jacobins), and, yes, even the much-quoted Alexis de Tocqueville (who criticized slavery in principle, but balked when faced with the dangerous socioeconomic reality of abolishing slavery where it already existed).⁵⁷ This narrative gets even more complex when one considers the related widespread civic exclusion of the working classes (many of whom were, of course, people of color), which included indentured servitude of various kinds, an expanding population of the working poor, and developing prison systems that kept the dispossessed subdued via incarceration and indebtedness.

Through the concept of xenocitizen, I seek to explore nineteenth-century formations and positions forged despite, against, or asymmetrically within the complex liberal coordinates presented above. Xenocitizens situates itself in the liminal space, often coded as a limit, fold, or interference, within and without criticism that examines the