Review Reports - Hydrocolonialism, Countersurveillance, and “America Independent”: Poetic Framings of Revolutionary Tea Parties

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This is a well-researched, well-written article which, in a purely rhetorical sense, does the job. It is so determined to call out the participants in the Boston Tea Party for various modern-day sins of colonialism and gender. racial hierarchies (while exempting the British side of the conflict from these almost entirely) as to make the paper seem argumentatively thin. It is very easy to call out these targets from the twenty-first century. To talk about the masculinity in the Tea party--which is certainly a legitimate topic--it might be better to contrast the style of masculinity (including the appropriation of Indigenous identities) of the Tea party perpetrators with their loyalist counterparts. If one is going to regard the tea party as a mode of performance, seminal sources on performance in the American Revolution, such as Jared Brown and Jay Fliegelman, need to be cited. Also, there is a lot of scholarship on Freneau (starting with Emory Elliott), which could be cited. The late Joshua Clover was a talented poet and a glavaziing polemicist and analyst, but he was not a scholar of this period, and his book should not stand as the main historical source.

With regard ot the issue of Lockena human rights ot being extended ot the Loyalists, certainly the Tea Party perpetrators never claimed otherwise to be Lockean! That is an ideology muted by later commentators to Jefferson, who read and was influenced by Locke but also read and was influenced by lots of other people. But even if one accepts the article's premises, the Loyalists were offered membership in the American commonwealth, and chose not to accept it and to take the other side in the war. Any polity can only accommodate those who subscribe to its basic terms.

I think the author's analysis of the passage in Freneau's "America Independent" about the Loyalists being exiled to a remote spot in northern Scotland is very interesting. Two aspects of this passage the author misses is: 1: By placing the site of the eixlein Scotad, Freneau was reminding the Loyalists that they were not just retiring to the "England" that their ancestors have left but to a "Great Britain" which included other nations and greater cultural heterogeneity, of a different but parallel sort to that which they were leaving behind in the US. 2) That 'going back ot England' did not necessarily mean going back to a chic district in London, but to going where they could afford or where they would fit in socially. In other words, Freneau, admittedly a tad vindictively, was warning the Loyalists that they would not automatically have the privilege 'back in England' that they had in America. Certainly, the many Loyalists who bravely and with mcuh effort carved out new lives in Ontario or Nova Scotia would have, albeit from a different vantage point, understood his words.

The Greenwich Tea Party is more broadly termed the Greenwich Tea Burning. As John Fea points out, the Cohansey region was very strongly aligned ideologically with Patriot viewpoints, and did not really require a sustained coordination with the Boston Tea Party, no more than people in Tunisia and Bahrain coordinated during the 2011 Arab Spring. If Greenwich is going to be mentinoed at all, a greater inclusion of background on the Cohansey-Cumberland County region should be provided. Anti-Americanism is no more an interpretive hermeneutic than is Russophobia, Anglophobia, or Sinophobia. The author should go back and write about performance in the Tea Party, certainly not muting any of the many possible criticisms of the ideology of its perpetrators, but also realizing that rival actors were performing according to analogous ideologies.

Author Response

Thank you for your comments and suggestions. I found them very helpful. In conjunction with both the reviewers' suggestions, I have done the following:

Restructured the essay to separate the Annapolis Tea Party from the poetic analysis.
Included the discussion of two more poems as suggested by Reviewer #1
Gave more thought to the dock as a site.
Removed the discussion of the Greenwich Burning
Included the discussion of performance and the public nature of tea parties, including the scholarship of Richards and Schaffer. I had searched Fleigelman and, given the responses I received from the search, do not believe he is appropriate for this article.
Revised the essay for overall clarity.

Point by point responses:

Reviewer: This is a well-researched, well-written article which, in a purely rhetorical sense, does the job. It is so determined to call out the participants in the Boston Tea Party for various modern-day sins of colonialism and gender. racial hierarchies (while exempting the British side of the conflict from these almost entirely) as to make the paper seem argumentatively thin. It is very easy to call out these targets from the twenty-first century. To talk about the masculinity in the Tea party--which is certainly a legitimate topic--it might be better to contrast the style of masculinity (including the appropriation of Indigenous identities) of the Tea party perpetrators with their loyalist counterparts. If one is going to regard the tea party as a mode of performance, seminal sources on performance in the American Revolution, such as Jared Brown and Jay Fliegelman, need to be cited.

Author: Thank you for your thoughts and reflections to the article. It is positioned as providing an alternative perspective to the Tea Parties (as indicated above). However, it is researched and supported. The topic of masculinity is not central to the conversation, but the note you provided is generative. What is very useful is the reference to the “tea party as a mode of performance.” While Jay Fliegelman does not feature in the revised iteration of this article, other scholars who consider the same topic are integrated.

Reviewer: Also, there is a lot of scholarship on Freneau (starting with Emory Elliott), which could be cited. The late Joshua Clover was a talented poet and a glavaziing polemicist and analyst, but he was not a scholar of this period, and his book should not stand as the main historical source.

Author: I have included additional works of and by Freneau to provide additional context. As this essay is part of a special issue on “riots,” with nearly all essays including Clover, it feels appropriate to keep the references to him in, maintaining special issue continuity.

Reviewer: With regard ot the issue of Lockena human rights ot being extended ot the Loyalists, certainly the Tea Party perpetrators never claimed otherwise to be Lockean! That is an ideology muted by later commentators to Jefferson, who read and was influenced by Locke but also read and was influenced by lots of other people. But even if one accepts the article's premises, the Loyalists were offered membership in the American commonwealth, and chose not to accept it and to take the other side in the war. Any polity can only accommodate those who subscribe to its basic terms.

Author: That is a very interesting point.

Reviewer: The Greenwich Tea Party is more broadly termed the Greenwich Tea Burning. As John Fea points out, the Cohansey region was very strongly aligned ideologically with Patriot viewpoints, and did not really require a sustained coordination with the Boston Tea Party, no more than people in Tunisia and Bahrain coordinated during the 2011 Arab Spring. If Greenwich is going to be mentinoed at all, a greater inclusion of background on the Cohansey-Cumberland County region should be provided. Anti-Americanism is no more an interpretive hermeneutic than is Russophobia, Anglophobia, or Sinophobia. The author should go back and write about performance in the Tea Party, certainly not muting any of the many possible criticisms of the ideology of its perpetrators, but also realizing that rival actors were performing according to analogous ideologies.

Author: I have removed the discussion of the Greenwich Tea Party/Burning, as to the reviewer’s point, the contexts for the Burning are far more nuanced and complicated. This deviates from the primary argument of the article. Thank you for the suggestion.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This is an interesting argument, especially the idea of applying the concept of hydrocolonialism to tea parties in general and Freneau's poetry in particular. However, while the subtitle of the essay suggests an emphasis on a consideration of poetry, only two Freneau poems are actually discussed at any length in this essay. There is a brief discussion of a third poem, "A Voyage to Boston," but the analysis as it currently stands does not support this statement--"Within a hydrocolonial context, Freneau’s poetics possess and dominate the Tory’s body, wielding it for his own narrative exploits and extractive pleasures"--since the quoted text from the poem does not refer to water/ports or similar hydrocolonial elements. Finally, while there is a discussion of the Greenwich Tea Party, which took place in NJ, Freneau's home state, he never wrote about that incident, so including it doesn't really seem to make sense. That might be better suited to a note, or it could lead into the discussion of the tea parties Freneau actually did write about. .

All this being said, a discussion of additional Freneau poems would enrich this essay. For example , in "An Ancient Prophecy" he also refers to tea burning, and in "On the American Frigate Alliance" he employs the land/sea dichotomy. Since the abstract does not make the case that the only Freneau poetry will be what he wrote about tea parties, the latter might be useful to further develop the hydrocolonial aspects of the argument. In fact, the section on Freneau references "Port Poetics," not tea parties.

As noted above, this essay would also benefit from some general reorganization. The section just mentioned contains an extended discussion of the burning of the Peggy Stewart, but there is nothing at all about poetry or poetics in that analysis. It might make sense to discuss that incident prior to the consideration of Freneau's poetic interventions into tea parties. This could then be followed by the broader discussion of Freneau and hydrocolonialism in the poems suggested above. Whatever the decision, the current organization is a bit confusing.

Finally, in the final portion of the essay, more might be done to address this statement in the final paragraph, which is compelling: "Finally, there is opportunity for us to examine the role of the port, the dock, and the pier, liminal sites that are neither sea nor land but provide the man-made links between the two, in addition to the multitudinal chains of global exchange that grew to define the modern era." It seems worth spending a bit more time on.

Overall, I think if these matters are addressed, this essay will be a strong addition to Freneau scholarship and to tea parties as a compelling element of hydrocolonialism during the American Revolution.

Author Response

Thank you for your comments and suggestions. I found them very helpful. In conjunction with both the reviewers' suggestions, I have done the following:

Restructured the essay to separate the Annapolis Tea Party from the poetic analysis.
Included the discussion of two more poems as suggested by Reviewer #1
Gave more thought to the dock as a site.
Removed the discussion of the Greenwich Burning
Included the discussion of performance and the public nature of tea parties, including the scholarship of Richards and Schaffer. I had searched Fleigelman and, given the responses I received from the search, do not believe he is appropriate for this article.
Revised the essay for overall clarity.

Point by point responses:

Reviewer: This is an interesting argument, especially the idea of applying the concept of hydrocolonialism to tea parties in general and Freneau's poetry in particular. However, while the subtitle of the essay suggests an emphasis on a consideration of poetry, only two Freneau poems are actually discussed at any length in this essay. There is a brief discussion of a third poem, "A Voyage to Boston," but the analysis as it currently stands does not support this statement--"Within a hydrocolonial context, Freneau’s poetics possess and dominate the Tory’s body, wielding it for his own narrative exploits and extractive pleasures"--since the quoted text from the poem does not refer to water/ports or similar hydrocolonial elements. Finally, while there is a discussion of the Greenwich Tea Party, which took place in NJ, Freneau's home state, he never wrote about that incident, so including it doesn't really seem to make sense. That might be better suited to a note, or it could lead into the discussion of the tea parties Freneau actually did write about. .

Author: Thank you for these points. I have removed the discussion of the Greenwich Tea Party, as it does not contribute to the argument that is being made in the article. Thank you. Further, I have added more poetry to the article at your suggestion. It provides much more of a balance between the tea parties and the poetry.

Reviewer: All this being said, a discussion of additional Freneau poems would enrich this essay. For example , in "An Ancient Prophecy" he also refers to tea burning, and in "On the American Frigate Alliance" he employs the land/sea dichotomy. Since the abstract does not make the case that the only Freneau poetry will be what he wrote about tea parties, the latter might be useful to further develop the hydrocolonial aspects of the argument. In fact, the section on Freneau references "Port Poetics," not tea parties.

Author: Thank you for these titles. I have added them to the article.

Reviewer: As noted above, this essay would also benefit from some general reorganization. The section just mentioned contains an extended discussion of the burning of the Peggy Stewart, but there is nothing at all about poetry or poetics in that analysis. It might make sense to discuss that incident prior to the consideration of Freneau's poetic interventions into tea parties. This could then be followed by the broader discussion of Freneau and hydrocolonialism in the poems suggested above. Whatever the decision, the current organization is a bit confusing.

Author: The reviewer makes a really great point here. I have committed to restructuring the article for more clarity. I now have a clear divide between the tea parties and the poetry. The reader will move from the Boston Tea Party to the Annapolis Tea Party, to Freneau’s poetry. I hope that this new structure will help the reader with the overall flow of the argument.

Reviewer: Finally, in the final portion of the essay, more might be done to address this statement in the final paragraph, which is compelling: "Finally, there is opportunity for us to examine the role of the port, the dock, and the pier, liminal sites that are neither sea nor land but provide the man-made links between the two, in addition to the multitudinal chains of global exchange that grew to define the modern era." It seems worth spending a bit more time on.

Author: Unfortunately, I did not have enough time to address this more fully in the revised article. Perhaps this will be the subject of a new piece.

Reviewer: Overall, I think if these matters are addressed, this essay will be a strong addition to Freneau scholarship and to tea parties as a compelling element of hydrocolonialism during the American Revolution.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The author has satisfactory addressed the concerns pointed out in the review and it is now ready for publication.