The art of disappearance: Autobiography, race, and technology

My project traces the changing value of self-mastery (autonomy) through the literary lens of autobiography. Possessive individualism, to cite the term used by political scientist C. B. MacPherson, is a formulation of autonomous subjectivity that originates just before the European Enlightenment in the late seventeenth-century with the theories of Locke's tabula rasa and Newton's perfectible world that continues to this day in relation to our language of autobiography and public personhood. I address aesthetic representations of Enlightenment self-mastery, beginning with particular manifestations of the free subject during the European mid-eighteenth century, and its permutations in the relation to the American slave in the nineteenth-century and the cybernetic machine in the twentieth.; The primary figures I address are the eighteenth-century philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the nineteenth century freedman and orator Frederick Douglass---polemicists and serial writers of autobiography both. Other thinkers of speculative and technological "futurisms," such as Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics, and F. T. Marinetti, the inventor of the futurist avant-garde, are included in the study.; The Art of Disappearance is a project that concerns race in the sense that race is a primary sign of difference that has been utilized in the discourse of mastery to subject others. It is a project that concerns technology in the sense that the distinction between man and machine presents another crucial boundary between self and other. The literary and cultural histories of race and technology represent distinct ontologies of the "inhuman." I argue that there is an imperative to read these two histories in tandem.