“Stateless Romanticisms” opens onto a past that enables us to rethink not only the thematic implications of statelessness, but also the formal conditions of its discursive field, by revisiting a historical juncture at which categories such as the ‘national’, the ‘native’, the ‘natural’ emerged prominently and were being called into question in the very process of this emergence. More poignantly still, Romantic texts interrogate not only these categories, but their very condition of possibility, as the state(less) can be read as describing not only the presence or absence of a political entity (whose conceptual and experiential dimensions were being fiercely contested), but also the potential absence of an epistemological position, of a ‘state’ from whose vantage point knowledge might cohere. Thus, not only who or what “belonged” together, but the very taxonomies of “belonging,” the systems under which one thing or person could be said to “belong” to another, were destabilized. In the realm of botany Theresa Kelley speaks of “an extended counternarrative that within a century made romantic era thinking about plants and nature anything but a settled project” (Clandestine Marriage, 1). An analogous unsettling of taxonomic enclosures pervades the human sphere. Joseph Albernaz writes of the “Groundless community” which he identifies as a Romantic concept: “Groundless community names the exilic matrix of relational habits that emerge as the resistance or evasion of general equivalence, totality, and enclosed identity (...)” (Common Measures, 13). How do Romantic texts claim and unclaim ‘states’ of and as coherence, and how might these discursive tensions “illumine our tempestuous day?”
Jacob Romanow’s paper, “Frankenstein’s Forked and Destroying Tongues,” reads Mary Shelley’s novel as claiming differences (primarily linguistic and national) that are obscured by the language of the text: while numerous foreign languages are mentioned or implied, they are never encountered. In this tension of universal claim and obscured difference, national culture lurks just beneath the surface of the novel’s globalisms. As such, the creature becomes a model of statelessness in Hannah Arendt’s sense; without a national-linguistic standpoint, he is “alone irrevocably excluded” (68) from the Kantian right of “universal” hospitality. Romanow’s paper thus uncovers exclusion in the ostensible claim of universal belonging.
Jonathan Sachs’s paper, “Suspended Belonging, Statelessness, and the Limits of Romantic Poetry,” asks how formal qualities of Romantic writing register the unstable boundaries that define belonging. The paper begins with Charlotte Smith’s “The Emigrants,” which asks what it means to encounter subjects whose political belonging has been abruptly suspended. Smith’s poem does not treat exile as an isolated event but as part of a broader environment of displacement produced by revolution, war, and economic upheaval. The paper then turns to Byron’s Don Juan, as its expansive narrative traces the movement of bodies through imperial circuits of war, slavery, and commerce. What formal strategies do these poems pursue, and how might we read those formal qualities as an immanent register of the instability of borders and political identities? More broadly, what can literary scholarship contribute to discussions of statelessness and migration, and what are some limits to its explanatory reach?
Taking up these broader questions, Jacques Khalip’s paper "The Poetic Blur" theorizes boundaries of belonging, inclusion and exclusion at the limits of (poetic) texts and other art forms, relating the concept of the poetic blur--what blurring might look/read/sound like within a poetic line--to the statelessness of Romanticism as a form of understanding. If blurring refers to the uncertainty between different concepts, a kind of blot or smear that unsettles precision, designation, and design, how can thinking through poetic blurs help to track the different ways in which Romantic writers and artists approached the undoing of normative conceptualizations of a "state" or "states"?
The session includes panelists from four different institutions (American and Canadian) at various ranks from postdoctoral to full professor. Each speaker will be giving a presentation of no more than 18 minutes to ensure ample time for discussion.