American Enchantment: Rituals of the People in the Post-Revolutionary World by Michelle Sizemore (review)

When the political elite of the new post-Revolutionary nation set out to define "the people," rather than accounting for the affects, movements, loyalities, and interests of actual people, they produced an Enlightenment figure, rational, self-sufficient, engaged in progressive time. Creating that subject, the founders consolidated power in a centralized government administered by the wealthy, bolstered authority through appeals to a nobler past, created laws to exclude immigrants and squash dissent. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

For those purportedly named as "the people," however, achieving popular sovereignty in the void left by the king's absence proved a trickier endeavor. How could sovereignty be vested in a population as diverse and dispersed as that of the early United States? How could that sovereignty be expressed without alienating other voices or melding them into a purportedly unified vox populi? What can heritage mean when the cult of the founders established a single national history? What is the relationship between a "people" and living persons? What affects and what temporalities arose from the disparities between everyday rhythms and the teleological movement of national time? How do changes in geography and in character undergone by individual people coordinate with the seemingly static entity, "the People"? And what forms of representation respond to the difficulties posed by all these challenges?

Those are among the questions addressed in Michelle Sizemore's original, ambitious, and illuminating study, American Enchantment: Rituals of the People in the Post-Revolutionary World. Although primarily a literary study (Sizemore offers fresh readings of a range of authors including Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Catharine Sedgwick, and Nathaniel Hawthorne), Sizemore's text brings a wide range of political and social theorists from the eighteenth century to the present to supply a deep and complex theory of post-Revolutionary political culture. The centerpiece of that account is the key term in Sizemore's title—enchantment—"a ritual mood that creates the conditions for the collective social and political subject to emerge," and that "temporarily furnishes the people with a new body after the original goes missing with the king" (1). In Sizemore's account, enchantment is "a contingent state of embodied cognition (or 'mood'), wherein cognition is understood as a reciprocal relationship among body, mind, and world" (10). Particularly at moments of social transformation and crises in national self-definition, from the Whiskey Rebellion and the Second Great Awakening through the Nullifcation Crisis and the War of 1812, enchantment serves, in Sizemore's words, as "an experience uniquely capable of producing new forms of popular power and social affiliation" (8).

Sizemore is particularly interested in a form of enchantment she calls "civic mysticism," which she opposes to models of the early national public sphere built on Enlightenment individualism and reason. Civic mysticism comprises a variety of "nonsectarian practices of transcendence that engender the people" (1). Throughout American Enchantment, Sizemore explores civic rituals, ranging from maypole ceremonies to literary pilgrimage, that are not centered on any particular belief system (the ideological results of enchantment, Sizemore insists, are impossible to foresee), but on magical thinking, process ontology, alternative temporalities, and bodily movements and affects. Sizemore argues that "early U.S. political life is not merely shot through with mystical occurrences and irrational acts, but also conditioned by these phenomena" (2).

Because she acknowledges the unpredictability of enchantment's outcomes and the various social investments in civic mysticism, Sizemore is able throughout American Enchantment to avoid simple oppositions between compliance and resistance, cultural dominance and subcultural resistance, pro- or antinationalisms. Rather, she shows with admirable care how post-Revolutionary citizens adapted the interpellative strategies of the consolidating nationalism, often with unpredictable and uneven results. To a large extent, these uncertain outcomes arose from the dual identifications at the heart of civic mysticism. Citizens often identified with a "transcendent sovereign principle" (6) and, simultaneously, with the material realities of everyday life, with the temporal disorders of "sacred...