How can literary scholars productively engage with the contradictions of revolutionary violence, both as a historical phenomenon and as a legacy that continues to script contemporary politics? In particular, how might we situate major upheavals like the American Revolution, Haitian Revolution, and US Civil War—when violent insurrection proved central to dismantling and defending figurative and literal forms of slavery—alongside latter-day instances of antidemocratic, white-supremacist violence that reveal the as-yet-incomplete nature of those very events? This essay takes up these questions by considering three recent publications. Shelby Johnson’s 2020 article, “‘The Fate of St. Domingo Awaits You’: Robert Wedderburn’s Unfinished Revolution,” and Betsy Erkkila’s 2021 article, “Phillis Wheatley on the Streets of Revolutionary Boston and in the Atlantic World,” each consider an early Black Atlantic theorization of insurrection forged at the crossroads of antislavery activism, evangelical Protestantism, and revolutionary ideology. Reading these works in dialogue with Chris Hayes’s January 7, 2021,...
The Unfinished Business of American Insurrection
alexander mazzaferro is assistant professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a specialist in colonial American and early US literatures. His current book project recovers the early modern prohibition on “innovation” as a framework for rereading the rise of Anglo-American settler colonialism and its contestation by outbreaks of mutiny, heresy, Indigenous resistance, and slave insurrection. His scholarship has appeared in Early American Literature and Early American Studies, and his J19 article on the Nat Turner revolt was awarded the American Literature Society’s 1921 Prize.
Alexander Mazzaferro; The Unfinished Business of American Insurrection. English Language Notes 1 April 2023; 61 (1): 102–105. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-10293217
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