Speculative Endeavors - (Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century) by Selina Foltinek & Karin Hoepker & Katrin Horn (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book focuses on alternative forms of knowledge production and speculation in nineteenth century US-American society, and highlights the strategies that minoritarian subjects developed to understand and navigate these complex cultures of knowledge and capital.

Book Synopsis

Speculative endeavours contributes to an emerging field of scholarship that focuses on alternative forms of knowledge production and speculation in nineteenth century US-American society. It sheds light on unofficial knowledges such as insider information, rumour, gossip, slander, emphasising how knowledges excluded by institutional discourses and authorities form a core part of the developing market economy. Ranging from the Early Republic to the Gilded Age, contributions analyse entanglements of financial, cultural, and social capital. They focus on social actors who differ from the newly minted ideal of the (free, white, male) entrepreneurial individual. The speculative endeavours discussed include illicit communications located in slave quarters and domestic spaces, communal interventions into a commercialised print market, debates on immigrant fiduciary and legal competency, and disciplinary techniques of pecuniary pedagogy. Taken together they offer unprecedented interdisciplinary insights into an emerging age of capital.

From the Back Cover

Speculative endeavors describes the connections between speculation and minoritarian subjects and practices during the rise of capitalism in the US.

Drawing on diverse historical perspectives, the volume challenges conventional historiographic narratives by spotlighting historic agents traditionally excluded from discussions of knowledge and capitalism. Through a series of meticulously researched essays on pedagogical practices, domestic manners, public court cases, and behind-the-scenes publishing habits, the book delves into the quotidian forms of knowledge on the fringes of nineteenth-century society. Each original contribution sheds light on how seemingly inconsequential narratives are part of the fabric of the period's burgeoning market economy and financial capitalism.

Speculative endeavors is a call to reconceptualize our understanding of the past. Through its rigorous analyses of epistemic and economic practices and compelling narratives of marginalized agents, this groundbreaking collection invites readers to reconsider the intersections of power, privilege, and precarity in the turbulent times between the early republic and the Gilded Age.

About the Author

Selina Foltinek is a doctoral candidate of American Studies at the University of Bayreuth and a teacher of History, English, and Political Science
Karin Hoepker is Associate Professor of North American Studies at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg
Katrin Horn is Professor of Gender Studies at the Institute of English and American Studies at the University of Greifswald