Daniel DeWispelare's paper "Disquiet: On the Cultural Memory of Eighteenth-Century Riots and Rebellions" will treat the cultural and ideological effects of riot, particularly as these conflict with the aesthetic distance required by poetic composition according to Wordsworth's famous formulation. However,“the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” is also one of the primary definitions of “riot.” The Romantic era saw periodic riots that were experienced by the nation at large as ambient features of social and economic life. This paper posits that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century riot literature, the motley archive of news, stories, poems, and plays that document bread riots, swing riots, dock riots, theater riots, and more, is an important mediator of aesthetic practice during the Romantic period. Because riot itself is amorphous and unpredictable, capturing it in poetry, on stage, or in the novel poses interesting aesthetic problems needing remediation.
In "Imprisonment Panic," Kate Singer will address the affective experience of enslaved persons during the period. Her paper will examine imprisonment panic as an affect at the intersection of anger, shame, and dionysian freedom (itself an affective formation), one that arises as both a symptom of and a resistance to the eighteenth- and ninteenth-century necropolitical order of the slave trade and the abusive economy of enslaved labor. While panic can certainly reveal and instigate social paralysis, as an affective rhetoric it also offers a jittery reinvestment in bodies and non-necropolitical subjects pointedly not choosing the violence of Jeffersonian public happiness, but moving in unchartered fits and spurts toward cultural change.
Elizabeth Fay will address the problem of sexual panic in "Hysteria Unbound," both in Gothic texts and as it extends into racially oriented riots, or oriented toward cultural others. Psychoanalytically and culturally hysteria has been gendered as feminine. Panic in Romantic period texts, however, manifests as ungendered and loosed from a strict yoking to the body in order to focus it on othered bodies. In fact, Freud analyzed hysteria as arising in the body but then becoming a communicable affective syndrome, typically targeting other female bodies. Romantic panic spreads otherwise. It is not decoupled from sexual panic, but does feed off it through conspiracy plots concerning political sexual misconduct that endangers the state. Hystericized thinking and hystericized communal behavior force an incautious and callous affective state that can feed destructive energies at a grand scale such as the Reign of Terror in France and other forms of scapegoating. Gothic texts such as Polidori’s “The Vampyre” and Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya emphasize sexual panic and racial others in a way that casts light on the racial aspect of historical riots that are often treated as sexually oriented. The eighteenth-century race riot treated in the graphic novel by Mat Johnson, The Great Negro Plot, will help illustrate the the structural ways in which sex, race, and hysterical panic play out on the historical stage.