Afterlives of the American Revolution

This book challenges the historical common sense that the American Revolution terminated in the birth of the United States. Prevailing narratives of the Revolutionary period rest on the assumption that the war ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1783. Yet from London to Philadelphia, and from the Six Nations’ trans-Appalachian homelands to the shores of Sierra Leone, the decades after the treaty’s signing roil with accounts that disturb the coherence of this chronological division. Insurgent Remains assembles a counter-archive of textual and visual materials—ranging from popular seduction tales and political cartoons to the writings of self-liberated African Americans—that furnishes alternative visions of revolutionary historical experience as an ongoing negotiation with violence and contingency. The book argues that the minor temporalities and political literacies registered in this archive cannot be accommodated by the progressive plot of nationalist history, in which the war figures as a contest of only two sides (Tory/Whig, British/American, Loyalist/Patriot). Instead, they become legible as “remains”: traces of attachments, modes of collective association, and unresolved struggles that bear insurgent political potential in their own right.

Emma Stapely is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside.