Description
Book SynopsisIn
American political fantasy, the Founding Fathers loom large, at once historical
and mythical figures. In The Traumatic Colonel, Michael J. Drexler and
Ed White examine the Founders as imaginative fictions, characters in the
specifically literary sense, whose significance emerged from narrative elements
clustered around them. From the revolutionary era through the 1790s, the Founders
took shape as a significant cultural system for thinking about politics, race,
and sexuality. Yet after 1800, amid the pressures of the Louisiana Purchase and
the Haitian Revolution, this system could no longer accommodate the deep
anxieties about the United States as a slave nation.
Drexler
and White assert that the most emblematic of the political tensions of the time
is the figure of Aaron Burr, whose rise and fall were detailed in the
literature of his time: his electoral tie with Thomas Jefferson in 1800,
the accusations of sed
Trade Review
The Traumatic Colonelis a significant and unique contribution to early US studies, deftly synthesizing the recent historiography on the political economy of slavery in the construction of the US hemispheric empire. Innovative and original, White and Drexler locate Aaron Burr as the symbolic pivot for the representations that emerge politically around the repression of slavery. -- Dana Nelson,author of Bad for Democracy
By considering how both neglected and familiar literary materials 'propose an Africanist presence as the object cause of desire,' White and Drexler expand existing notions of the contours of early American studies. In so doing, they provocatively decode the ways in which the 'Founders' functioned as a system of structuring fictions for the nascent Republic. The Traumatic Colonelis one of the most innovative interventions into our sense of early US cultural development in quite some time. It will have a major impact on the field, and profoundly shape work written in its wake. -- Duncan Faherty,author of Remodeling the Nation
Studies of early America should be emboldened by Drexler and Whites attempt to approach questions of racial violence from such a refreshingly idiosyncratic angle. * American Historical Review *
Table of Contents
Contents Acknowledgments xi Burrology-Extracts xiii Introduction 1 1 The Semiotics of the Founders 15 2 Hors Monde, or the Fantasy Structure of Republicanism 42 3 Female Quixotism and the Fantasy of Region 74 4 Burr's Formation, 1800-1804 102 5 Burr's Deployment, 1804-1807 135 Conclusion 168 Notes 181 Index 201 About the Authors 207
