Jason Shaffer on Max Cavitch and Brian Connolly’s *Situation Critical: Critique, Theory, and Early American Studies*

Is there a field of literary studies in which literary scholars focus on texts that are so frequently distant from what the layperson would recognize as “literature” as in the study of early America? Even decades after Renaissance Self-Fashioning made an academic star of Stephen Greenblatt, I would argue not. Likewise, is there a literary field in which, as a result, close attention to text demands a greater familiarity with (purportedly) empirical methods of historical study? Same answer. Such are the disciplinary conditions, then, under which Situation Critical: Critique, Theory, and Early American Studies, edited by literary scholar Max Cavitch and historian Brian Connolly, was produced.

In 2016, a group of literary scholars and historians focusing on early American and, in some cases nineteenth-century, American studies gathered at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania to discuss this fraught interdisciplinary relationship, characterized famously by Eric Slauter as a “trade gap” in history’s favor. The conference did not make a lasting peace between the two camps, but it did lay bare the power of practicing historicism infused with theoretical critique on even the most difficult early American texts. It also yielded this insightful volume of essays.

Familiar poststructuralist bugbears as Jacques Derrida or Jacques Lacan are in little evidence here (or anywhere else in contemporary literary research). Sigmund Freud does appear, but the presiding genius of the collection is clearly (the still plainly poststructuralist) Michel Foucault, with honorable mention going to Bruno Latour (perhaps poststructuralism’s most trenchant critic in the humanities). As Cavitch and Connolly point out on the first page of their introduction, the very idea of “America” is intertwined with John Locke’s dictum in his Second Treatise of Civil Government that in “’In the beginning, all the world was America,’” an assertion as firmly rooted in Locke’s own theories as in anything we might charitably call historiography (qtd. 1). The very words “early America,” they note, provide a starting point for explicitly ideological historical narratives running from the extreme right to its counterparts on the left—producing a vast number of narrative fantasies whose assumptions might as usefully be unpacked with theory as with data—or better yet, with both. In all cases, the book comes back to theory—specifically Foucault–in that the editors compare doing this sort of analysis to Foucault’s interpretation of the Greek ideal of parrhesia—boldly declaring the truth to power (4). In Foucault’s reading parrhesia inherently presents a risk to the subject in disclosing truth (surely as true in 2025 as it was in 2016).

The volume begins with two essays on theory’s utility for historiography: Joan W. Scott’s meditation on Freud (poststructuralist readings of Freud) as countering the drive for narrativized truth inherent in practicing history (and psychoanalysis) and Michael Meranze’s reading of Foucault’s analysis of Oedipus Rex and Euripides’ Ion as they relate to the perils of parrhesia for early Americanists in the era of The 1619 Project. Rapidly transitioning into a broad range of textual, the remaining essays cover a vast territory—perhaps too vast for some early Americanists–ranging from the seventeenth century to the Mexican-American War.

These essays are organized into three more sections, with the second part on subjectivity featuring Ana Schwartz (poet Edward Johnson’s ballad on the “annoyances” of dangers invited upon early settler colonists), Christopher Looby (the encrypted and queer marginalia of Michael Wigglesworth’s diary), and Mark J. Miller (Foucauldian confessional discourse in the sexual content of George Whitfield’s sermons) detailing the colonial era. The third part interrogates critiques of empiricism and fact in the early nineteenth century. Here, Justine S. Murison analyzes the truth effect of the backlash in American evangelical narratives against Tom Paine’s secularism and his purported deathbed conversion, Britt Rusert uncovers a genealogy of Enlightenment rationalism in antebellum Black writing, and Jordan Alexander Stein exposes the overlap between abolitionist literature’s rejection of the patriarchal idea of “domesticity” with queer critique—notably as practiced by the late Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner in their pathbreaking 1998 essay “Sex in Public.” The final section continues this move toward public discourse by bringing war and violence to bear on theories of equity and justice in American history, with Matthew Crow tracing the concept of equity as it appears in the writings of Herman Melville and John Garcia critiquing the inherent rhetorical violence of historical periodization in the effacement of the Mexican-American War within the Antebellum period. (He concludes the volume by proposing that this period should properly be named “Interbellum” (281)).

This collection presents a lively interaction among a variety of literary and historical methodologies, underscoring the inherently theoretical nature of interpretation. As one reads, the conflicts between the disciplines of early American studies and their potential for fruitful commerce (trade gap be damned) become clear. In closing, I would playfully inquire about the book’s cover, which features John Singleton Copley’s 1778 painting Watson and the Shark. Is the shark about to devour the poor cabin boy Brook Watson meant to allegorize critical theory about to devour historical truth, historicism about to devour literary studies, or the now seemingly permanent crisis in the humanities about to devour us all?