Techno-Prosthetic Romantic FuturismThe Pure Ruse of PurityHumanity is hybrid. Always was. Always will be. The emergence by the late eighteenth century of the habit of reducing mixed to pure identities (national, racial, ethnic) may have served imperial aspirations nicely, but it's anathema to our more mongrel futures. [1] The Romanticism that understood this is the one to turn to now. It's the Romanticism of Equiano, of Blake, of Spence, of Wollstonecraft, of Wedderburn, of Barbauld, of Southcote, of the many mute hewers of wood and drawers of water whose work made possible the glittering dome of British culture. [2] We don't need an expanded canon. We need counter cultures--of monstrosity. Notes1. The canonical account of this emergence is Linda Colley's Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1992). 2. The indispensable counter-history here is Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2001). Navigation |