Situation Critical

In Situation Critical, Max Cavitch and Brian Connolly issue a rousing call for a return to critique, arguing for the importance of the study of early America to some of the most urgent questions of twenty-first-century life. Locating contemporary ideas about sovereignty, race, sexuality, justice, and power in the unsettled state of colonial and early national American culture, the essays collected here engage early America not as a stable ground or point of origin but rather as a particularly fertile site for a critical history, one that brings empirical and theoretical approaches into dynamic relation.” - Meredith L. McGill, Professor of English, Rutgers University

“What an edifying delight to think along with the scholars gathered in Situation Critical, whose objects of analysis range from Puritan annoyance to Melvillean justice, queer possibility to secular rectitude, cultures of abolition to settler colonial fantasy. Max Cavitch and Brian Connolly have convened essays that are surpassingly lively, nimble, exacting, and generous in their engagement with the amplest possibilities of critique. Situation Critical is a greatly welcome intervention.” - Peter Coviello, author of Is There God after Prince? Dispatches from an Age of Last Things

“Situation Critical advances a full-throated, theoretically sophisticated defense of the ongoing importance of critique to early American studies. . . . Its essays clearly represent some of the most exciting work in early American studies today.” - Thomas Koenigs, Eighteenth-Century Studies

"The range and subtlety of the contributors’ analyses of the relationships across paradigms of critical self-reflection, discursive artefacts, and the American historical imagination is uniformly impressive." - Matthew Pethers, Early American Literature