Abstract
This chapter develops the concept of immunity in relation to its formulation in critical theory and political philosophy, particularly in the work of Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito. The chapter goes on to identify immunity as the animating concept in the discourse of American exceptionalism, which informs national identity vis-à-vis intense global contact and conflicts with such geopolitical sites as Haiti, North Africa, and Cuba.
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Notes
- 1.
On the origins of American exceptionalism see Jack P. Green, The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity from 1492 to 1800; for more recent studies see Godfrey Hodgson, The Myth of American Exceptionalism; Donald Pease, The New American Exceptionalism, and William V. Spanos, Redeemer Nation in the Interregnum.
- 2.
The term “empire” was used synonymously with sovereignty until about the first half of the nineteenth century. On this point see J. G. A. Pocock, “States, Republics, and Empires: The American Founding in Early Modern Perspective,” in Conceptual Change and the Constitution, 68; Richard W. Van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire, 78; William Appleman Williams, Empire as a Way of Life: An Essay on the Causes and Character of America’s Present Predicament along with a Few Thoughts about an Alternative, 37.
- 3.
Priscilla Wald and Ed Cohen give us, in their own distinct ways, contrasting accounts of the discursive medicalization of politics and the politicization of medicine, respectively. My project differs from theirs in that the biomedical field’s appropriation of the concept of immunity does not figure in this study.
- 4.
See Roberto Esposito, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life.
- 5.
As the editors of the anthology Globalizing American Studies put it, “the closing of the so-called American Century, less as a unit of time than a decided shift in global conditions, signals the weakening of the long-and-enduring myth of American exceptionalism. American Studies, as a result, must yield to a context within which such a formation—of America’s special place and role in the world—requires the bracketing of fictions that can no longer be sustained,” Edwards and Gaonkar, 50.
- 6.
The melding of “exceptionalism and empire” allowed expansionists what Thomas Hietala calls “the luxury of righteous denunciation of their critics at home and abroad,” 257.
- 7.
George Washington, “Farewell Address.”
- 8.
Pease, 13; Spanos, 14.
- 9.
The following anthologies attest to the radical reorientation of American Studies in recent years: Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell, Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature; Russ Castronovo and Susan Gillman, States of Emergency: The Objects of American Studies; Winfried Fluck, Donald Pease, and John Carlos Rowe, Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies.
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Rodriguez, R. (2019). Immunity’s Sovereignty. In: Immunity's Sovereignty and Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Pivotal Studies in the Global American Literary Imagination. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34013-1_1
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