The contributors to Situation Critical argue for the continued importance of critique to early American studies, pushing back against both reductivist neo-empiricism and so-called postcritique. Bringing together essays by a diverse group of historians and literary scholars, editors Max Cavitch and Brian Connolly demonstrate that critique is about acknowledging that we are never simply writing better or worse accounts of the past, but accounts of the present as well. The contributors examine topics ranging from the indeterminacy of knowledge and history to Black speculative writing and nineteenth-century epistemology, the role of the unconscious in settler colonialism, and early American writing about masturbation, repression, religion, and secularism and their respective influence on morality. The contributors also offer vital new interpretations of major lines of thought in the history of critique—especially those relating to Freud and Foucault—that will be valuable both for scholars of early American studies and for scholars of the humanities and interpretive social sciences more broadly.

Contributors. Max Cavitch, Brian Connolly, Matthew Crow, John J. Garcia, Christopher Looby, Michael Meranze, Mark J. Miller, Justine S. Murison, Britt Rusert, Ana Schwartz, Joan W. Scott, Jordan Alexander Stein

Max Cavitch is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman.

Brian Connolly is Associate Professor of History at the University of South Florida and the author of Domestic Intimacies: Incest and the Liberal Subject in Nineteenth-Century America.

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction: Situation Critical / Max Cavitch and Brian Connolly  1
I. Theory for Early America
1. Psychoanalysis and the Indeterminacy of History / Joan W. Scott  33
2. Foucault’s Oedipus / Michael Meranze  52
II. Subjects of Early America
3. Annoyances, Tolerable and Intolerable / Ana Schwartz  73
4. Michael Widdlesworth’s Queer Orthography / Christopher Looby  103
5. George Whitefield’s Sexual Character / Mark J. Miller  139
III. Fantasies of Realism
6. Secularism, Hypocrisy, and the Afterlives of Thomas Paine / Justine S. Murison  177
7. No Matter: Persisting Rationalisms in Antebellum Black Thought / Britt Rusert  202
8. Queering Abolition / Jordan Alexander Stein  223
IV. Power, Knowledge, Justice
9. Equality in the Time of Moby-Dick / Matthew Crow  241
10. Antebellum or Interbellum? / John J. Garcia  263
List of Contributors  287
Index  289