Corrosive Solace

"In Corrosive Solace, O'Quinn argues that the loss of the American colonies instantiated a complex re-organization in sociability and politics in the British metropole that has had longlasting effects on British national and imperial culture, which can be seen and analyzed within its performative repertoire. He analyzes how the analysis of feeling or affect can be deployed to address the inchoate causal relation between historical events and their mediation. In this sense, Corrosive Solace's goals are two-fold: first, to outline the methodologies necessary for dealing with the affective recognition of historical crisis; and second, to make the historically familiar strange again, and thus make visible key avenues for discussion that have remained dormant. Both of these objectives turn on recognition: How do we theorize the implicit affective recognition of crisis in a distant historical moment? And how do we recognize what we, in our present moment, cannot discern? Corrosive Solace addresses this complex cultural re-orientation by attending less to "new" cultural products than to the theoretical and historical problems posed by looking at the transformation of "old" plays and modes of performance. These "old" plays-Shakespeare, post-Restoration comedy and she-tragedy-were a vital plank of the cultural patrimony, so much of the author's interest here lies in how tradition was recovered and re-directed to meet urgent social and political needs. Across the arc of Corrosive Solace, O'Quinn tracks how the loss of the American War forced Britons to re-fashion the repertoire of cultural signs and social dispositions that had subtended its first empire in the Atlantic world in a way more suited to its emergent empire in South Asia. In doing so, the author traces the development of a new set of performance protocols, tropes, and identities that would ground a new form of imperial rule that was inextricably linked to the rise of middling biopower. Thus, much of the book's political and historical argument is tied to changes in class-based understandings of sexuality and gender that ultimately impinge on the consolidation of whiteness as a precursor to the application of biological state racism in the nineteenth century"--