![[Introduction to] Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism](https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1356/thumbnail.jpg)
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Description
In Animate Literacies Nathan Snaza proposes a new theory of literature and literacy in which he outlines how literacy is both constitutive of the social and used as a means to define the human. Weaving new materialism with feminist, queer, and decolonial thought, Snaza theorizes literacy as a contact zone in which humans, nonhuman animals, and nonvital objects such as chairs and paper all become active participants. In readings of classic literature by Kate Chopin, Frederick Douglass, James Joyce, Toni Morrison, Mary Shelley, and others, Snaza emphasizes the key roles that affect and sensory experiences play in literacy. Snaza upends common conceptions of literacy and its relation to print media, showing instead how such understandings reinforce dehumanizations linked to dominant imperialist, heterosexist, and capitalist definitions of the human. The path toward disrupting such exclusionary, humanist frameworks, Snaza contends, lies in formulating alternative practices of literacy and literary study that escape disciplined knowledge production.
ISBN
9781478004790
Publication Date
2019
Publisher
Duke University Press
City
Durham
Keywords
literacy, social aspects, African American studies, black diaspora, affect theory, literary theory
School
School of Arts and Sciences
Department
English
Disciplines
English Language and Literature | Political Science
Recommended Citation
Snaza, Nathan. Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
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Read the introduction to the book by linking to the Read More button above.