Creatures of Habit

Table of Contents
Introduction: America's Metaphor: The Black Automaton
1. Automatic Selves, Automatic Slaves: The Logic of Racial Automatism
Human, Animal, Automaton
Primitive Reflexes and Nervous Hierarchies
Social Imitation and Racial Plasticity
Habits of Perception
2. Mechanical Incapacity and the "Measure of Men"
Masters and Machines: Technology as Civilizational Metric
Relocating Automatism: Black Interventions
"The Princess Steel"
3. Suspended Agency: Hysteria, Mesmerism, and Double Consciousness
Psychological Automatism and the Divided Will
From Secondary Selves to Racial Double Consciousness
Pauline Hopkins and the Reanimation of the Black Body
Mesmerism, Slavery, and Black Interiority in Of One Blood
4. Everybody's Automatism: Gertrude Stein and Race Psychology
Race Psychology and the Automatic Black Subject
"Perfectly Normal": William James and the Psychological Laboratory
Repetition and Racial Character in Three Lives
"Individual Being": Beyond Racial Taxonomy
The Turn Towards Anti-Race Psychology
5. Reconditioning Race: Jean Toomer, Behaviorism, and the Harlem Renaissance
Techno-Primitivism in Cane
"Mechanical Puppets": Gurdjieff's Automatons
Racial Habitus and Social Conditioning
"Verbal Machinery" and Behaviorist Word-Habits
Gender, Race, and Robots in Toomer's Late Drama
Becoming Plastic: Racial Reconditioning
Conclusion: The Afterlives of Racial Automatism