American Dolorologies
Pain, Sentimentalism, Biopolitics

American Dolorologies presents a theoretically sophisticated intervention into contemporary equations of subjectivity with trauma. Simon Strick argues against a universalism of pain and instead foregrounds the intimate relations of bodily affect with racial and gender politics. In concise and original readings of medical debates, abolitionist photography, Enlightenment philosophy, and contemporary representations of torture, Strick shows the crucial function that evocations of »bodies in pain« serve in the politicization of differences. This book provides a historical contextualization of contemporary ideas of suffering, sympathy, and compassion, thus establishing an embodied genealogy of the pain that is at the heart of American democratic sentiment.

Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Chapter One: What Is Dolorology?
Chapter Two: Sublime Pain and the Subject of sentimentalism
Chapter Three: Anesthesia, Birthpain, and Civilization
Chapter Four: Picturing Racial Pain
Chapter Five. Late Modern Pain
Notes
Works Cited
Index

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