Toward Critical State Studies: Bringing the Democratic State Back into American Literary Criticism

This essay starts from the apparent disconnect between democracy and the State in American literary studies. Taking the case of antebellum US literature (James Fenimore Cooper and Lydia Maria Child), it contends that literature is one place of elaboration of a democratic statecraft. Nineteenth-century US literature has been read as both complicit with and resisting to reigning models of statecraft endorsing racial domination, bureaucratization, and the monopoly of violence. However, we remain indifferent at our own peril to the potential forces of State as a democratic public authority and of state regulation as a non-arbitrary public provision. Putting American literature to the test of statecraft and statecraft to the test of literature, critical State studies proposes to revisit literary practices as a mode of critique in nineteenth-century state building. Nineteenth-century literature, I argue, both facilitated and performed this critique. Reading nineteenth-century US literature from the perspective of critical State studies—here, reading The American Frugal Housewife as a manual of democratic regulatory practice, or The Pioneers as an attempt at democratic environmental governance—allows us to investigate how literature, as a mode of representation and a political practice, gives shape and voice to alternative modes of statecraft.

Turning the State into a methodological problem, a pressure point of generative possibilities, critical State Studies requires that we attend to an alternative genealogy of the State and recover a past that has not yet been present in our reading of American literature.