The Brink of Freedom

"The Atlantic world exceeds itself when David Kazanjian sounds its everyday archives of futurity and fugitivity, showing us that the transformation of how we do things, of how little and how much we’re willing to take, of how we come to imagine the materiality of our own transverse earthliness, is the making of history. Kazanjian discovers and extends the poetics of that making at The Brink of Freedom. Who could ask for anything more?" - Fred Moten, author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition

"Standing out for its breadth, analytical clarity, and sophistication, The Brink of Freedom makes a monumental intervention to unfolding narratives of freedom. Embodying the new American Studies, it will be widely read in literature and cultural studies courses with a historicist or Atlantic orientation. This book's brilliance is dazzling." - Herman L. Bennett, author of Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico

"With exhilarating virtuosity, The Brink of Freedom weaves two nineteenth-century case studies (the letters of African American settlers in Liberia, on the one hand, and the writings of Mayan rebels during the Caste War in the Yucatán, on the other) into a groundbreaking new model of contrapuntal scholarship. David Kazanjian’s deft readings demonstrate that these supposedly "minor" archives—halting, fragmented, quotidian—carry remarkable philosophical heft, as improvised (though no less profound) reflections on the very meaning of freedom." - Brent Hayes Edwards, author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism

"David Kazanijan’s The Brink of Freedom is a bold and inspiring work that proposes new ways to think about Atlantic history and the problem of freedom during the height of nineteenth-century liberalism and the expansion of capitalism." - Julie Gibbings, Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies

"Terrific. . . . Innovative." - Sean X. Goudie, American Literary History

"Kazanjian has constructed an extensively well-researched and theoretically complex study that develops a new approach to comparative scholarship, highlights new paths to archival research, and suggests new reading strategies that help us examine how non-European actors imagined a future defined by freedom, one of the principal tenets of modernity and of nineteenth-century liberalism." - Ty West, The Latin Americanist

“David Kazanjian’s ambitious project adds a new model for consideration in Atlantic World studies, as well as in slave, settler, and indigenous studies, and should be seen as valuable.” - Autumn Quezada de Tavarez, Ethnohistory

“The Brink of Freedom is an innovative study that serves as a model for interdisciplinary research.” - Christina C. Davidson, Hispanic American Historical Review

“[The Brink of Freedom suggests] rich new directions for the study of aesthetics and politics across an expansive Americanist archive.”