Unmoored
Ana Schwartz
Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press 
Geisteswissenschaften, Kunst, Musik / Geschichte
Beschreibung
New England’s Puritans were devoted to self-scrutiny. Consumed by the pursuit of pure hearts, they latched on to sincerity as both an ideal and a social process. It fueled examinations of inner lives, governed behavior, and provided a standard against which both could be judged. In a remote, politically volatile frontier, settlers gambled that sincerity would reinforce social cohesion and shore up communal happiness. Sincere feelings and the discursive practices that manifested them promised a safe haven in a world of grinding uncertainty.
But as Ana Schwartz demonstrates, if sincerity promised much, it often delivered more: it bred shame and resentment among the English settlers and, all too often, extraordinary violence toward their Algonquian neighbors and the captured Africans who lived among them. Populating her “city on a hill” with the stock characters of Puritan studies as well as obscure actors, Schwartz breathes new life into our understanding of colonial New England.
Kundenbewertungen
Unhappiness, Contact zone, Resentment, Repression, Affect, History of Knowledge, Colonial New England, Settler colonialism, Biopolitics, Shame, Early modern imperialism, Early Atlantic world, Friendship, History of biopower, Middle ground, Anglo-American settlement, History of emotions, Early modern colonization, Paranoia, Anglo-Algonquian Contact, Denial, Disappointment, Puritan America, History of Psychoanalysis