André, Theatricality, and the Time of Revolution

Abstract

In her excellent study Anglophilia, Elisa Tamarkin reveals a widespread fascination in antebellum America with being“lost in the indeterminate worlds of colonial loyalties.” She describes the“uneven temporality of national experience,”in which“American independence simply feels like the vertiginous capacity to be both nationalistic and nostalgic for our antenational relations”(148). In these reveries, the colonial past is not repudiated or sloughed off, but rather virtualized as an imaginative keep-sake. Instead of a definitive new order, from which there is no turning back, the revolution installs an“uneven temporality.” Independence with-out revolution: history is what doesn’t hurt.