In Ugly Freedoms Elisabeth R. Anker reckons with the complex legacy of freedom offered by liberal American democracy, outlining how the emphasis of individual liberty has always been entangled with white supremacy, settler colonialism, climate destruction, economic exploitation, and patriarchy. These "ugly freedoms" legitimate the right to exploit and subjugate others. At the same time, Anker locates an unexpected second type of ugly freedom in practices and situations often dismissed as demeaning, offensive, gross, and ineffectual but that provide sources of emancipatory potential. She analyzes both types of ugly freedom at work in a number of texts and locations, from political theory, art, and film to food, toxic dumps, and multispecies interactions. Whether examining how Kara Walker's sugar sculpture A Subtlety, Or the Marvelous Sugar Baby reveals the importance of sugar plantations to liberal thought or how the impoverished neighborhoods in The Wire blunt neoliberalism's violence, Anker shifts our perspective of freedom by contesting its idealized expressions and expanding the visions for what freedom can look like, who can exercise it, and how to build a world free from domination.
Elisabeth R. Anker is Associate Professor of American Studies and Political Science at George Washington University and author of Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom, also published by Duke University Press.
Acknowledgments ix Introduction. Ugly Freedoms 1 1. White and Deadly: Sugar and the Sweet Taste of Freedom 37 2. Tragedies of Emancipation: Freedom, Sex, and Theft after Slavery 77 3. Thwarting Neoliberalism: Boredom, Dysfunction, and Other Visionless Challenges 113 4. Freedom as Climate Destruction: Guts, Dust, and Toxins in an Era of Consumptive Sovereignty 148 Notes 181 Bibliography 207 Index 231
"Ugly Freedoms argues that the history of freedom as 'a majestic practice' erases 'the appalling violence that traffics under its name' and refuses to dignify as freedom the small but inventive actions whereby courageous people resist domination. Elisabeth R. Anker rectifies both these wrongs. Beginning with Locke's liberal individual, read through the lens of the Barbadian 'planters' who likely inspired it, Anker brilliantly finds in the creases of our history and culture a more just freedom for our own not very beautiful world." - Bonnie Honig, author of (Shell-Shocked: Feminist Criticism After Trump) "Elisabeth R. Anker takes us into unnerving, disconcerting, even disgusting territory to find the hidden treasures in this revelatory new book. Approaching the impasses and confusions of our political present, she draws on the best contemporary political theorists to go significantly beyond them, seeing 'freedom' as ugly and 'ugliness' as a resource for practices of the free. Read it, teach it, sit with it. Let Ugly Freedoms change the way you think about political possibility." - Lisa Duggan, author of (Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed) "Anker's interventions offer a lively, energetic rethinking of the foundations and future of liberalism. Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty." - S. M. Barndt (Choice) "Building on scholarship in Black studies, queer theory, and Indigenous studies, Anker explores the flip side of ugly freedom's brutality in affirming wayward practices, unrefined affective orientations, opaque gestures, and interstitial acts that are usually obscured and undervalued as instances of lauded freedom. . . . Ugly Freedoms is an exciting and persuasive study that challenges contemporary political theorists to rethink their approaches to the historical problem spaces of freedom." - Jason Frank (Perspectives on Politics) "Ugly Freedoms stands as a fine demonstration of how objects can be valuable and important sites of analysis. ... [It] provides a good introductory text for those looking to understand the formation of modern American freedom, while serving as an invitation for others to explore additional alternative freedoms." - Sarah-Nicole Aghassi-Isfahani (Cultural Critique) "Ugly Freedoms is engaged in a project of reorienting readers to already available facts by attending carefully to what has been often dismissed. . . . The book is a bracing reminder that political theorizing benefits from and indeed requires . . . rigorous eclecticism. . . ." - Derek Gottlieb (Comparative Political Theory)
