Unsettled States opens, appropriately enough, with a series of devastating earthquakes that initially struck in the early morning of 16 December 1811 in New Madrid (present-day Missouri) – and continued throughout the first few months of 1812. This incident had the paradoxical quality of being at once a stable empirical event, and conversely a trembling historiographical fault line upon which a variety of competing early nineteenth-century discourses vied for space. So as the imperial state began folding this disaster into cohesive narratives of national perseverance and endurance (Congress passed the much-lauded New Madrid Federal Relief Act of 1815), alternative communities offered competing explanations: for revivalist “Earthquake Christians” this was messianic time shifting with the ground beneath their feet; for Tecumseh and the Shawnee tribe, it was the Great Spirit at last directing anger towards the invasive enemy. The earthquakes, according to the editors of this volume, “are at once a pretext for, and a hyperbolic illustration of, the unsettled meanings of [a] place and time … where competing readings, foreclosed historically, persist in and as critique” (5). In listening beyond and through the sanctioned history of any determined or coherent “United States,” the editors of this excellent volume hope to encourage a “diffusely minoritarian orientation” (7) to nineteenth-century literary studies. This is not to adopt any traditionally conceived minority perspective or cause (that is, “minorities” as defined in opposition to the brutalities of empire), but rather, via Deleuze and Guattari (and always Foucault), to tune into those partially remembered futures and fragmented articulations rendered mute by the authorized discourse of nation.

The collection is divided into three sections; the first, “Archives Unbound,” sets out with an understanding (most recently formulated by Lloyd Pratt in his Archives of American Time (2011)) that archives “cathect complex temporal crosscurrents” (14) rather than serve as a repository for any stable historical record. Tavia Nyong'o's brilliantly disruptive and combative essay “Race, Reenactment, and the ‘Natural Born-Citizen’” deconstructs the Tea Party's “self-evident” collective reading aloud of the US Constitution as the 112th Congress opened in January 2011. Contrasting this amnesiac performance with David Walker's alternative take on citizenship in his Appeal to Coloured Citizens of the World (1829), Nyong'o argues that by adopting a powerful “archival performative,” Walker contributes to “a negative cosmopolitanism that sets up black collective memory as a counterapparatus to sovereign subjectification” – “one that reckons fearlessly with the masks and ruses of history” (97).

The second section, “States of Exception,” examines the potentialities of unmapped spaces (both transnational and hyperlocal), asking what new imaginative combinations such territories might open up for enquiry. With characteristic flair, Hester Blum reports “The News at the Ends of the Earth,” claiming that “Polar Periodicals” afford us an altered parallax perspective on a globe partially uninhibited by the constraints of nation. From unmappable space, the collection shifts to unmappable sex; the final part of this collection, “Speculative Sexualities,” expands upon the recent work of Peter Coviello (and particularly his 2013 book Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America). Two very different essays here, one by Kyla Wazana Tomkins and the other by Elizabeth Freeman, focus on the potential of masturbation to subvert national teleologies. Freeman's essay is particularly interesting and one of the more playful pieces in this volume, aligning as she does anxieties surrounding effeminacy and deviancy with self-consciously “bad” historiography.

If a criticism is to be levelled at this excellent collection (and it's one the editors anticipate in their introduction), it is that the epistemologically diffuse “potentiality” supposedly governing the commitment of each of these essays sometimes feels ominously noncombative or slightly politically disengaged. According to Dana Luciano and Ivy Wilson, the transformative work of this minoritarian approach “takes place through the multiplication of aesthetic, political, and ethical encounters”; instead of seeking synthesis, “they develop, through ‘myriad connections, disjunctions, and conjunctions,’ other ways of being” (7). Refusing to offer any clearly delineated foci of political resistance, the effort here is to loosen up a definitive oppositional stance with a view toward rethinking the idea that “politics itself is already a known form” (21). This is all very stimulating and hopeful, but often only abstractly so; I cannot shake the misgiving that the energies of this supposedly “postdisenchanted” (21) moment – the turn away from ideology critique – constitute a political quietism disguised (convincingly sometimes) as a mode of passionate engagement. Surely this volume might have also provided, for example, a moment of reflection on the well-known institutional crises that currently define our discipline? What about the “unsettled states” that many scholars in our field continue to experience? What about the attempt to speak directly back to the institutions and administrations that are currently moving the terrain beneath our feet?