Too Much With Us, Too Much Missing: Race, Coloniality, and Romantic Time

Abstract For many decades, scholars of romantic-era literature have recognized their field’s complicity in the rise of racial capitalism and European imperialism. This essay wonders what romanticism has left to teach us about race, empire, and coloniality. Three recent books offer different approaches to this question. Tristram Wolff’s Against the Uprooted Word (2022) takes a measured approach: Wolff focuses on the naturalization of language in romantic philology and poetry, a turn that bolstered the civilizational aspirations of empire but which, he argues, offer a more varied set of temporal forms resistant to developmentalist thought. Deanna Koretsky’s Death Rights (2021) critiques the romantic myth of the suicidal genius as a touchstone of liberal antiblackness that persists today. In a more positive vein, Lenora Hanson’s The Romantic Rhetoric of Accumulation (2023) argues for romanticism’s critical vitality, excavating from romantic poetry and other social practices a rhetorical theory of subsistence that recognizes language as a means of survival in the face of dispossession. In spite of their disparate evaluations of romanticism as a field of study, Hanson, Koretsky, and Wolff share a predilection for historical juxtaposition, anachronism, and montage, techniques rooted in romantic-era experiences of the uneven temporalities of capital and empire.