“The Ruins of Romanticism: Architecture and Circum-Atlantic Revolution, 1776-1835”

Abstract

The Romantic period is uniquely positioned between the heady liberal energies of the Age of Revolutions and the conservative ideologies of the birth of the modern nation-state. This project focuses on Romantic subjects’ interactions with buildings in order to recover the ways in which these citizens challenged, opposed, critiqued, and fought to be recognized in the new national orders. Drawing on materials and texts about the French, American, and Haitian Revolutions as well as civil unrest in Jamaica and Italy, I argue that imaginative and (often) violent interactions with buildings allowed women, minorities, and members of the lower classes to assert their place in the new nation-state. In some cases, architecture was used to question the viability of a post-Revolutionary nation—as in France and America. In others, such as Haiti during and after its Revolution, buildings became the archive for working through post-colonial identity politics and new national policies. In others still, such as Jamaica and Italy, architecture opened up a space for play and critical opposition to confining notions of local national identity. By examining novels, poems, travelogues, memoirs, periodical articles, images, architectural manuals, state documents, and other artifacts, I recover the strategies of resistance, opposition, and expression that relied upon the architectural archive of these Romantic nations. The tensions between the state and the individual, the structure and the body, the myth of homogeneity and the reality of heterogeneity, played out in the ruined and intact buildings of Romantic literature around the Atlantic. These scenes of architectural interaction help us better understand the nature of nationalism, history, and citizenship in the crucial years between the American Revolution and the end of slavery in the British Caribbean.