The Unfinished Business of American Insurrection

H ow can literary scholars productively engage with the contradictions of revolutionary violence, both as a historical phenomenon and as a legacy that continues to script contemporary politics? In particular, how might we situate major upheavals like the American Revolution, Haitian Revolution, and US Civil War— when violent insurrection proved central to dismantling and defending figurative and literal forms of slavery—alongside latter-day instances of antidemocratic, white-supremacist violence that reveal the as-yet-incomplete nature of those very events? This essay takes up these questions by considering three recent publications. Shelby Johnson’s 2020 article, “‘The Fate of St. Domingo Awaits You’: Robert Wedderburn’sUnfinishedRevolution,” andBetsy Erkkila’s 2021 article, “PhillisWheatley on the Streets of Revolutionary Boston and in the AtlanticWorld,” each consider an early Black Atlantic theorization of insurrection forged at the crossroads of antislavery activism, evangelical Protestantism, and revolutionary ideology. Reading these works in dialogue with Chris Hayes’s January 7, 2021, interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates about the January 6 US Capitol insurrection clarifies racism’s paradoxical role as democracy’s limit case and its most inexorable summons to fulfillment. Johnson’s eloquent and provocative article offers a reading of The Axe Laid to the Root, an 1817 periodical produced by themixed-race, Jamaican-born abolitionist and radical activist Robert Wedderburn (1762–1835?). Taking as her point of departure the text’s prophetic warning of an “imminent Jamaican insurrection”modeled on the Haitian Revolution, Johnson analyzes The Axe’s formal quirks to excavate Wedderburn’s “radical historical sensibility.”1 Informed by early nineteenth-century millenarianism and ideas circulating in London’s radical underground, the text elaborates a complex political temporality that “layer[s] past and future history” to imagine “a revolution that . . . hasboth alreadyhappened and is yet to come.”2 In so doing, Wedderburn simultaneously evinces a “commitment to revolutionary inevitability and a recognition of its profound contingencies.”3 For Johnson, Wedderburn’s literary ventriloquy—his evocation of multiple voices, including those of the enslaved and the deceased—diffuses revolutionary agency inways that at once defer and guarantee liberation’s eventual arrival. Transforming the liability of individual human “finitude” into an asset through acts of imagined collectivity, The Axe “conjures out of revolution’s unfinishedness a wholly new future.”4