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Ugly Freedoms

Ugly Freedoms

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In Ugly Freedoms Elisabeth R. Anker reckons with the complex legacy of freedom offered by liberal American democracy, outlining how the emphasis of individual liberty has always been entangled with white supremacy, settler colonialism, climate destruction, economic exploitation, and patriarchy. These “ugly freedoms” legitimate the right to exploit and subjugate others. At the same time, Anker locates an unexpected second type of ugly freedom in practices and situations often dismissed as demeaning, offensive, gross, and ineffectual but that provide sources of emancipatory potential. She analyzes both types of ugly freedom at work in a number of texts and locations, from political theory, art, and film to food, toxic dumps, and multispecies interactions. Whether examining how Kara Walker’s sugar sculpture A Subtlety, Or the Marvelous Sugar Baby reveals the importance of sugar plantations to liberal thought or how the impoverished neighborhoods in The Wire blunt neoliberalism’s violence, Anker shifts our perspective of freedom by contesting its idealized expressions and expanding the visions for what freedom can look like, who can exercise it, and how to build a world free from domination. Elisabeth R. Anker reckons with the complex legacy of freedom offered by liberal American democracy, identifying modes of “ugly freedom” that can lead to domination or provide a source of emancipatory potential. Elisabeth R. Anker is Associate Professor of American Studies and Political Science at George Washington University and author of Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom, also published by Duke University Press. Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. Ugly Freedoms  1
1. White and Deadly: Sugar and the Sweet Taste of Freedom  37
2. Tragedies of Emancipation: Freedom, Sex, and Theft after Slavery  77
3. Thwarting Neoliberalism: Boredom, Dysfunction, and Other Visionless Challenges  113
4. Freedom as Climate Destruction: Guts, Dust, and Toxins in an Era of Consumptive Sovereignty  148
Notes  181
Bibliography  207
Index  231

“Ugly Freedoms argues that the history of freedom as ‘a majestic practice’ erases ‘the appalling violence that traffics under its name’ and refuses to dignify as freedom the small but inventive actions whereby courageous people resist domination. Elisabeth R. Anker rectifies both these wrongs. Beginning with Locke’s liberal individual, read through the lens of the Barbadian ‘planters’ who likely inspired it, Anker brilliantly finds in the creases of our history and culture a more just freedom for our own not very beautiful world.”
“Elisabeth R. Anker takes us into unnerving, disconcerting, even disgusting territory to find the hidden treasures in this revelatory new book. Approaching the impasses and confusions of our political present, she draws on the best contemporary political theorists to go significantly beyond them, seeing ‘freedom’ as ugly and ‘ugliness’ as a resource for practices of the free. Read it, teach it, sit with it. Let Ugly Freedoms change the way you think about political possibility.”
"Anker's interventions offer a lively, energetic rethinking of the foundations and future of liberalism. Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty."

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Weight 1 oz
Dimensions 1 × 6 × 9 in