Access Type
Open Access Embargo
Date of Award
January 2023
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Department
English
First Advisor
Lisa Maruca
Abstract
Death Writing: Gender and Necropolitics in the Atlantic World (1660–1840) explores life writing through its underworld of death writing, a term I use to convey the necropolitical aspects of these texts. Achille Mbembe defines necropolitics as the capacity to dictate who can live and who must die in a colonial zone. I analyze the necropolitical function of death writing in colonial hagiography, travel writing, wampum belts, death notices, newsprint epitaphs, posthumous memoirs, book reviews, and collected works. I argue that the newsprint obituary consolidated these forms’ functions into one genre to convey news of death with instant biography. Chapters explore death writing in the Atlantic world by and about the first Indigenous saint, Catherine Tekakwitha, in the Jesuit Relations (1682) and Pierre F. X. de Charlevoix’s History and Description of New France (1745); periodical editors’ use of their own obituaries in the Gentleman’s Magazine (1754–1826) to create the dominant death-writing system of the Atlantic world; GM editors’ use of the first newsprint death notices of African individuals including Ignatius Sancho (1780) and Sara Baartman (1816) for their own agenda; and the posthumous literary warfare against Mary Wollstonecraft (1797) and William Godwin (1836); culminating in a reading of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748) as a 1,500-page obituary. I contend that we must curate our own collected works of long eighteenth-century death writing to correct the necropolitics that are our inheritance.
Recommended Citation
Plante, Kelly Joann, "Death Writing: Gender And Necropolitics In The Atlantic World (1660–1840)" (2023). Wayne State University Dissertations. 3873.
https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations/3873