After Sovereignty

The first issue of the 2018 volume of SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 seeks to answer the question, "can there be anything 'After Sovereignty.'" That title presents a special issue of nine papers examining the historical aspects of sovereign power in the context of English literature and contemporary thought. Joseph Campana, Associate Professor and Alan Dugald McKillop Chair in English at Rice University, edited the issue in his role as Editor for Editor for 1500-1659 at the journal. He joined us for a Q&A about the inaugural issue of the journal's 58th volume.

You mention the issue developed from a 2016 MLA panel. How did the plan evolve from that time to publication?

The issue came out of one of those incredibly fortuitous encounters at a conference. I attended a wonderful panel on a subject deeply of interest to me. From there I contacted the panelists to see who might be available for the special issue. Then, I supplemented those contributions with a few new faces and two respondents. We debuted the special issue on a panel at the 2018 Renaissance Society of America conference in New Orleans. Every phase of the process, happily, has been one great conversation building on another. 

Whether we use the word or not, sovereignty refers to that never-ending quest to answer core political questions:

1. What ensures the legitimacy of any idea of government or governmental power? 
2. What constitutes and binds together a community around a common understanding of political legitimacy? 
3. How does any governmental form ensures its survival or perpetuity?
4. What gestures—aesthetic, cultural, or otherwise—confirm or disrupt our sense of what sovereignty, legitimacy, and political community might be? 

Given the historical roots of sovereignty and the excesses of absolutism of various kinds, the strong impulse to get beyond or away from sovereignty is no surprise. But we constantly have to ask and answer these questions. And at a moment in history, 2018, in which invocations of tyranny, absolutism, and constitutional crisis abound in the United States and elsewhere, it’s more clear than ever that how we understand the ongoing crisis that is sovereignty in action. 

How important is it for SEL to create special issues like this?

I think there’s a perception that new patterns of readings and habits of searching for scholarship make special issues a thing of the past. On the contrary, I think there are those readers who still hunger for the coherence and the focus of a special issue. Moreover, at a time when edited collections can run anywhere from $50-$200, journal special issues offer exceptional content generally for anywhere from $12-20. That’s hard to beat. I love edited collections as much as anyone. I’m in quite a few and I’ve edited a couple.  But I wonders to what extent special issues can take up the slack for this increasingly expensive and economically unsustainable creature that is the edited collection.

What did you learn in putting this issue together?

Something special happens when a group of writers think and write intensively on a topic together and develop a conversation. Writing the introduction was instructive and humbling. I got the chance to write about plague and population, which have interested me for some time as ways of thinking about dilemmas of sovereignty in the era. But more importantly I learned a lot from Jen Rust about alchemy and pastoral government in Ben Jonson, from Russ Leo about digger biopolitics in Michel Foucault and Gerard Winstanley, from Jen Boyle about how important media questions are for sovereignty in Margaret Cavendish and Thomas Hobbes, from David Glimp about taxes and sovereignty in Shakespeare, from Benjamin Parris about sleep and sovereignty in Marlowe, from James Kuzner about friendship and self-possession in Katherine Phillips, from Daniel Juan Gil about communitarianism and Shakespeare, and from respondents Julia Lupton and Graham Hammill about virtue and mayhem as concepts for changing a venerable conversation about a topic that keeps making itself new.