“You Make Me Feel Right Quare”: Promiscuous Reading, Minoritarian Critique, and White Sovereign Entrepreneurial Terror

This article uses two ephemeral patent remedy advertisements from the 1890s to examine an aesthetic-affective category I call white sovereign entrepreneurial terror. Linking the period before the rise of progressivism and New Deal economics to the total collapse and evacuation of those structures following the 2016 election, I detail the qualities of this intoxicated, carnivalesque, free-market affect, outline its affiliation with the aggressive return of white nationalism, and make an argument for a determined return to a pre-twentieth-century archive in American studies, grounded in contemporary queer and minoritarian, in particular African American, critique. I call the methodology of this return “promiscuous reading.”