Patriotism by Proxy

The Civil War Draft and the Cultural Formation of Citizen-Soldiers, 1863-1865

Colleen Glenney Boggs author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:1st Oct '20

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Patriotism by Proxy cover

At the height of the Civil War in 1863, the Union instated the first-ever federal draft. Patriotism By Proxy develops a new understanding of the connections between American literature and American lives by focusing on this historic moment when the military transformed both. Paired with the Emancipation Proclamation, the 1863 draft inaugurated new relationships between the nation and its citizens. A massive bureaucratic undertaking, it redefined the American people as a population, laying bare social divisions as wealthy draftees hired substitutes to serve in their stead. The draft is the context in which American politics met and also transformed into a new kind of biopolitics, and these substitutes reflect the transformation of how the state governed American life. Censorship and the suspension of habeas corpus prohibited free discussions over the draft's significance, making literary devices and genres the primary means for deliberating over the changing meanings of political representation and citizenship. Assembling an extensive textual and visual archive, Patriotism by Proxy examines the draft as a cultural formation that operated at the nexus of political abstraction and embodied specificity, where the definition of national subjectivity was negotiated in the interstices of what it means to be a citizen-soldier. It brings together novels, poems, letters, and newspaper editorials that show how Americans discussed the draft at a time of censorship, and how the federal draft changed the way that Americans related to the state and to each other.

The author's clever analysis and daring questions are evident in each chapter of this wide-ranging and thought-provoking book. * Brian Matthew Jordan, Home Front Studies *
A remarkable analysis of the culture of the Civil War draft that brings together literature, history, and theory in exciting and original ways. Boggs excavates a wonderful archive of songs, poems, novels, political cartoons, and other works, offering lively close readings that show the importance of the Civil War draft to struggles over identity, citizenship, and power. * Elizabeth Young, Carl M. and Elsie A. Small Professor of English; Chair of English, Mount Holyoke *
Colleen Glenney Boggs has given us a breathtaking reminder that, however vast the historiography of the US Civil War, new insights still await — especially when the richness of wartime cultural production comes under a great literature scholar's keen eye. With fastidious research and spellbinding analysis, Patriotism by Proxy unearths the tropological effects of the US's first national military draft and its peculiar logic of substitution. In Boggs's lucid and captivating account, the draft jolted the cultural meanings of citizenship, extending the reach of federal power into American lives yet unleashing the emancipatory potential of citizenship for Black soldiers. * Christopher Hager, Trinity College; author of I Remain Yours: Common Lives in Civil War Letters and Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing *

ISBN: 9780198863670

Dimensions: 242mm x 164mm x 17mm

Weight: 456g

192 pages