This chapter presents contemporary African American theater and drama as a democratic art form that addresses social injustice and racial inequalities in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement and the Obama presidency. The plays The White Card by Claudia Rankine and Fairview: A Play by Jackie Sibblies Drury are discussed in light of recent developments in Black performance theory and with regard to Jacques Rancière’s argument on the democratic and egalitarian potential of theatrical performance. Both plays work toward a revision of how racial identities are configured in what Rancière has called the “distribution of the sensible.” The White Card reflects on the theatrical representation of police brutality and its mediation through photography and art. Fairview provides an example of how contemporary playwrights elaborate on a tradition of actor–spectator interaction in African American theater as a means for destabilizing the social allocation of racial and spatial positions in society. In this sense, Rankine and Drury transform African American theater into an oppositional site that challenges the configuration of racial discourses in a variety of contexts and instances.

In Chapter 5, I follow this lead further and demonstrate that one of the most prominent sites where this new aesthetic regime and its colonial history was articulated most forcefully was the nineteenth-century French novel. Discussing Jacques Rancière’s influential work on novels by Balzac and Flaubert and his suggestion of the new idea of literature emerging through the “democratic petrification” of writing, this chapter shows how the context of such a development in France was historically much wider than developments within its national borders. Instead of thinking the historicity of literature through Europe alone, this chapter shows how the literary sovereign shaped the central ideas of textualization and readability through colonial documents, translations, textual representation of the orient, and so on. This textual history is then embedded within larger registers of visuality in contemporary French cultures that extended the colonial paradigm further.

Chapter 2 looks at the formation of a highly influential genre of modern war writing, the critical-military history that can be traced to the Welsh military officer Henry Lloyd and his History of the Late War in Germany (1766-90). Recent criticism has challenged traditional views of Lloyd as a merely neo-classical author with little relevance to modern conceptions of war. Building on this new research, this chapter shows how Lloyd’s approach to military history not only helped introduce concerns with the aesthetics of genius and sublimity into military thought, but that it also established a new way of conceptualising the historical conditions of war. By turning military thought away from traditions of memoir and maxims, Lloyd’s writing was critical for breaking down a neo-classical view of the commander as a figure of authority, command and action. As it transformed the history of war from a storehouse of examples to an object to be studied, it simultaneously reimagined the commander in relation to the quasi-natural ‘life’ of the army. A new, biopolitical conception of strategy emerges from Lloyd’s history as he attempts to comprehend the army as, in effect, an organism that lies outside the general’s complete control.

The introduction outlines the central argument of this study, that military literature was of vital importance to the cultural understanding of warfare in the Romantic era. Locating military writing in relation to the massive expansion of print of the latter half of the eighteenth century, it also delineates the theoretical basis of the study in Jacques Rancière’s theorisation of indisciplinarity, or a poetics of knowledge. Concerned with how a science assumes authority over a domain of knowledge, an indisciplinary approach means asking how military thought was able to position itself as a science and assume authority over war discourse. At the heart of this was the growth of a new disciplinary regime that conceptualised the disciplined subject in terms of what Michel Foucault describes as the ‘natural body’, a biopolitical body of vital, living forces, a body informed by inner depths and potentials that resist the imposition of ‘mechanical’ authority. The introduction concludes by observing the striking yet inverted parallels between Romantic concerns with the living body and the sublimity, genius, organicism, perceptions and force associated with this new conception of war that place the state’s war machine in a strangely transposed relationship with Romantic aesthetics.

“The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair,” wrote Theodor Adorno in 1946–47, “is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption … Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.”1

This chapter asks what American literature can teach us about democracy as a political practice premised on disagreement and as an ethical orientation toward others. It contends that many literary texts and much literary criticism concerned with politics seeks to get “beyond” politics to a hoped-for state of “the people’s” solidarity and turns instead to texts that try to imagine the what the work of democratic engagement looks like and the capacities it requires.

This chapter reconstructs rumors and demonstrations in 1968 around the death of Gholamreza Takhti, Iran's beloved gold-winning wrestling champion, recentering them in the history of the 1979 revolution and the global 1960s. The account of the demonstrations provided here explains a mobilization tactic used to great effect in the lead up to the 1979 Iranian Revolution: the staging of protests on the fortieth day of mourning. Locating this tactic in 1968, at a moment of global protest, and before ideological disputes between leftists and Islamists congealed in Iran, casts a spotlight on the indeterminate quality of the revolution as a lived event. The authors argue that discussions of “global 1968,” and approaches to global history more broadly construed, must account both for the local specificity and the global echoes signaled by events like the Takhti demonstrations.

The chapter analyses the person protected by privacy rights as a political person instead of an individual in charge of their own affairs.

This chapter offers an understanding of puritan aesthetics by approaching it through the religious experience of conversion. Insofar as aesthetics are ever thought of in relation to puritanism, the usual scholarly conversation concerns the role, relevance, and consequences of the puritan plain style. Plain style matters, but it does not explain the broader aesthetic intentions or forms of puritan writing. Conversion comes much closer to the heart of it. Radical Protestants in early New England insisted that true religion began with the power of God acting on the individual to produce conversion to a new life of delight in God. The unconverted might seek to “prepare” themselves for that transformation of the heart, but predestinarian theology demanded that the crucial moment of change must be utterly external – a true work of God and not one of self-fashioning. In preaching, in poetry, and in personal conversion relations, puritans used the language of the heart to describe God’s power in conversion. This chapter traces how the response to sorrow and beauty characterizes puritan conversion stories from the first establishment of the colony of Massachusetts.

Davinia Caddy examines the role of music and music-listening in the stage shows and reception histories of dancer Loie Fuller. A midwestern American, Fuller found fame across Western Europe and the United States with her dance-and-light effects, theatrical performances that seemed to transform her body into a flower, fire, waves or the sun: to her symbolist observers, into pure metaphor or idea. Music was often incorporated into this abstract mélange, thought to symbolize a sphere of influence or aesthetic condition that text and visuals (dance, set design, props) could only aspire to. With reference to little-known source material, the author offers a revisionist reading of Fuller’s musical initiative and her spectators’ attention to it. Drawing analogies with early modernist visual art and advertising, the chapter suggests new and different ways of envisaging music, and music-listening, in relation to Fuller’s dance shows and the copy-cat craze they inspired.

Chapter 2 traces the ways in which Stevens explores the autonomy and social function of poetry by constructing built environments and architectural archetypes. It discusses a wide range of poems from Ideas of Order and The Man with the Blue Guitar to highlight how Stevens engages in issues of poetry’s autonomy and its social function by means of making up places for poetry. His spatial formations operate with an impulse to project an independent aesthetic territory. Far from an instance of aesthetic indifference, the impulse to demarcate a separate space is motivated by a desire to envisage new forms of engagement with the period’s unsettling cultural and sociopolitical circumstances. The chapter teases out these forms of engagement in Stevens’ approach to the cultural debates over a “usable past,” his exploration of citizen-state relationship, his treatment of the poet’s fláneuresque connection to the city, and his vision of poetry’s relation to community.