On Friday, professors and students gathered for a talk about the role of death in history and the obligation of the living to be like Haley Joel Osmond in “The Sixth Sense” and listen to what the dead have to say. The forum, entitled “Dead Politics,” was the first of this year’s Americas Forum, an annual symposium sponsored by the Center for the Americas.
The speaker, Russ Castronovo, Jean Wall Bennett Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, claimed that the dead have informed American politics throughout history.
“From death comes political life,” Castronovo said at the Russell House lecture.
According to Castronovo, most people are unable to see the direct impact of the dead on their lives.
“Where Osmond sees, [President] Bush refuses to,” he said.
Throughout the talk, he dwelled on the concept of “dead citizenship,” or the idea that the American citizen has abstracted and removed the concept of freedom from its proper historical context. According to Castronovo, dead citizenship is especially pertinent to slavery and the fetishization of death in American politics.
“The stream of information [in the lecture] was never-ending,” said Ben Goldstein ’06. “It was difficult to step back from it.”
Focusing on the odd and sometimes downright bizarre, Castronovo made continual reference to the role of spiritualism in American politics of the nineteenth century, especially to the prevalence of spirit channeling. Castronovo described how the Founding Fathers were often contacted for advice beyond the grave.
Castronovo also discussed gender roles in the pre-Civil War era, stating that the men’s eroticism towards young girls was a means of relieving their male anxieties.
“I liked how he re-contextualized female passivity as enviable to men,” said Norah Andrews ’07.
According to Castronovo, the history of America as a democracy has been deeply fissured by lines of race, which he called a fictitious construction. As long as Americans practice dead citizenship, he said, by refusing to place the concept of freedom in its proper historical backdrop, citizenship will be dependent on abstraction.
Calling for a reinvigoration of today’s citizenship, he claimed that contemporary American democracy suffers from psychological passivity. Instead of a true democracy, he said, we have scripted debates. Castronovo went on to outline the need for an anarchic influence in politics as a means to increase the spontaneity and populism of the American state and to revitalize the concept of freedom.
The Center for the Americas is also sponsoring two other colloquiums as part of the 2004 Americas Forum. The talks, entitled “Slavery, Sex and Death: Zombies and the Colonial Legacy in Haiti” on Oct. 21, and “The Return of the Spirits” on Nov. 11, will also discuss death in history.
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