Incipient Fevers: Then & Now

By March 2018, I hope to complete the bulk of my new project, Incipient Fevers: The Haitian Revolution & the Early Republic of Letters (1800-1820). This manuscript explores how early Americans debated the impact of the Haitian... [ view full abstract ]

By March 2018, I hope to complete the bulk of my new project, Incipient Fevers: The Haitian Revolution & the Early Republic of Letters (1800-1820). This manuscript explores how early Americans debated the impact of the Haitian Revolution; how, in other words, they understood it as unsettling the futurity of the Republic. I chart this Haitian preoccupation by attending to how literary texts from this period were intimately concerned with non-national spaces and diasporic Africans. In so doing, I argue that these concerns were recursively routed through debates about the meanings of identity, citizenship, union, and freedom. While working on the project, I have been struck by the reverberations between this earlier period and our own contemporary moment. Indeed, many of these early C19 texts exhibit deep concerns about such issues as fake news, white nationalism, cultural instability, and assertions that BlackLivesMatter. This era was also haunted by white supremacist “preservationists,” by politicians who demonized immigrants, and by a media addicted to an apocalyptic rhetoric. In short, it is easy to see this past as present in our present. This resonance, in part, sparks my interest in “Expanding Forms.” This seminar would enable me to think about my project’s introduction and to explore writing about this material for a broader public audience (an issue which I feel a certain urgency about). Finally, I hope this seminar will help me strategize about how to encourage CUNY doctoral students to write for public audiences as they develop their expertise.