Anglophone Riot

Dear Colleagues,

“Riot” is an ambivalent term with complexly interlaced referents.  In the domain of the social and the economic, “riot” refers to “a violent disturbance of the peace by a crowd,” as the OED reports.  In the domain of the aesthetic, the term “riot” has long named “a roaringly successful show, performer, etc” as well as “a person […] or thing which is extremely popular or makes a big impression.”  In contemporary anglophone vernacular, riot occurs in streets, in prisons, in protests, and in spaces of exceptional social combustibility—spaces that are nowadays increasingly “common” in three senses: frequent, popular, and public.  Riot also occurs in aesthetic space: there are riots of color, riotous performances, riotous behavior, and riot as aesthetic judgement, as in, “the book was a riot.” Importantly, there were also riotous developments in language and pedagogy.  This issue zeroes in on the varied meanings of riot in the period, as well as now.  For Romanticists, the doubledness of this term is hidden in plain view in Wordsworth’s definition of poetry, which is as familiar as the air we breathe.  “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” Wordsworth writes, and from the perspective of 2024 we know too that the “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” is also one of the primary definitions of “riot.”  

This special edition invites papers on the archive of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century riot literature as it relates to an increasingly global anglophone world—by which we mean the motley archive of news, stories, poems, and plays that document bread riots, swing riots, dock riots, theater riots, colonial riots and more—is an important mediator of aesthetic practice during the Romantic period. “No one knows what the riot wants,” writes Alain Badiou in his recent book on the subject, to which we can add that because riot itself is amorphous and unpredictable, capturing it in poetry, on stage, or in the novel poses interesting aesthetic problems.  Departing from social historian E.P. Thompson’s (and more recently Joshua Clover’s) periodizing conclusion that the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a time when riots were ambient features of social and economic life, and, given the well-known fact that Wordsworth and Romantic-era writers in general were bravura upcyclers of “situations from common life,” this paper takes seriously the notion that reports of political “riot” were remediated through the literary into new and novel poetic and literary forms. From this perspective, it is possible to see the commons as a maker of Romanticism rather than the more conventional view in which the Romantics represent the commons. 

Dr. Daniel DeWispelare
Dr. Victoria Barnett-Woods
Guest Editors

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• riot
• literature
• anglophone world

Title: Hydrocolonialism, Countersurveillance, and "The Traveling Spectator": Poetic Framings of the Revolutionary Tea Parties

Abstract: Between December 1773 and May 1775, several port cities and towns across the American seaboard participated in a "tea party" as an act of political defiance toward the recent onslaught of taxation laws implemented by the British government on American colonists. Indeed, on October 19th, 1774, in Annapolis Maryland, Loyalist taxpayer Anthony Stewart was coerced by the Sons of Liberty to burn his ship to the water line to prove his patriotism to the American cause, despite his Loyalist leanings. The circumstances that led to the Patriots targeting tea as their symbol for destruction, the Bostonian group to attire themselves as Mohawks and throw boxes overboard, the multiple threats made to Customs officials and Loyalists alike, speak to the American Revolution borne of a relationship between the mechanisms of hydrocolonialism (concentrated at the Custom House and at major trade docks) and countersurveillance systems implemented by the Sons and Liberty and enforced by emerging poetic forms rising with the times of revolution. This is most demonstrated in the "poet of the American Revolution," Philip Morin Freneau, specifically his poem, "The Traveling Spectator." Taking the example of the Annapolis Tea Party and Freneua's poetry under the consideration of Isabel Hoffmeyer's "Dockside Reading," this essay will consider the push and pull of imperial surveillance and patriotic (compulsory) countersurveillance at the breaking point of the American Revolution, when riots between colonists over goods and taxes spoke to larger socioeconomic systems of control that remain ever present in American cultural values.

Title: Projects for Riot in Bentham’s Defense of Usury and Smith’s Wealth of Nations

Abstract: With an opening discussion of Jeremy Bentham’s witnessing of the 1780 Gordon Riots, this essay examines the role that the riot had played in his speculative “projects” at home and abroad. Alff provides significant cultural contexts to Bentham’s understanding of the riot, informed by his own writing, as well as those of Bentham’s contemporaries. It is argued in this essay that Bentham’s use of the project, informed by his experiences, was an “imperfect but indispensable tool for engineering peace.” What this essay further establishes is that “project” during this period was understood to be much more speculative than it is understood today, with the potential for there to be significant financial loss should a “project” not do well (i.e. the South Sea Project). One of Bentham’s most vocal adversaries to the matter of “projects” was Adam Smith, who argued that “projectors” were no better than coercive manipulators, pulling wealth from actual and quantifiable productive labor. The debate between these two figures about the socioeconomic promise of the “projects” reenforces Bentham’s views towards, and firming belief that, there were multiple approaches that one could quell or suppress a riot, perhaps even prevent one from occurring. Though we “tend to think of riots as addressing themselves to a state or state-sponsored institution from which they expect retribution,” Bentham’s projects ideas were well situated within the whirlwind of capital-driven market forces. Though both men associated “riot with disorder”, they firmly disagreed on whether projects would “confront or belong to this disorder.” This essay examines this debate and the larger implications the “riot” had in terms of both governance and economy.

Title: Lyrical Riots, 1798: Poetry, Orality, Circulation

Abstract: Nobody riots in the Lyrical Ballads, or so it would seem. With their insistent focus on vagrancy, poverty, and subsistence, many of the Lyrical Ballads famously revolve around crises of social reproduction. Given the equally well-known 1790s preoccupation with riot or even revolution as a potential result of scarcity, it’s striking how non-riotous the impoverished figures in the collection are. However, the 1798 edition of the Lyrical Ballads does in fact engage extensively with the crises of scarcity, subsistence, and circulation as staged in riot throughout the 1790s, in particular through the evocations of print orality that echo, in surprising ways, the forms of contemporary print narrative that sought to render riots apprehensible as events. Furthermore, the collection’s oft-noted preoccupations with the biological sciences, the category of life, and poetry’s relation to the human can also be expanded and enriched if seen through the lens of riot, because the intersections between riot, subsistence, and scarcity allows us to understand “human life” as thoroughly intertwined with commodity circulation and the forms of governance that sought to manage its risks. I take as my case studies one riot and one poem. The 1798 riot, in which a crowd of coal-heavers targeted the newly established Thames River Police Office in Wapping, diverges from our more familiar historiography of food riots in its emphasis on the police and their role in the redefinition of theft on the London docks. By tracking the multiple resonances between this riot and “Goody Blake, and Harry Gill”—one of the collection’s most ‘ballad-like’ poems and one that overtly highlights connections between orality, sound, poetic form, scarcity, and subsistence—I propose that the poem and the juridical archive of the riot can illuminate each other, as both reveal different aspects of the stakes for theorizing orality and collectivity among concentrations of population created by, and reliant upon, commodity circulation. My argument is twofold. The first claim is that printed narratives of riot—especially newspaper accounts—rely on forms of print orality that collate multiple voices into a sense of collective intent that ascribes a “voice” to a crowd. Attempts to represent riots in print thus grappled with some of the same key questions animating Romantic literary theories of poetry: orality, print, voice, and collectivity. The second claim is that in his experiments with the print orality of the ballad, Wordsworth engages with many of the same crises of both semiotic and political representation posed by riots in the 1790s, even as these poems portray nothing we might easily call a “riot” per se. In particular, I trace how “Goody Blake, and Harry Gill” stages a crisis of subsistence whose entanglement in commodity circulation also forms the conditions of possibility for the poem’s own theorization of voice, orality, and poetic signification. I reveal this by taking seriously the material connection between the riot and the poem I place at the center of my analysis: coal. If the 1798 Wapping riot explicitly articulates the fact that household heat can increasingly only be accessed through commodity circulation (and not through the form of urban “gleaning” previously considered workers’ customary entitlements), “Goody Blake, and Harry Gill” only glancingly references the coal trade by explicitly bracketing it from the poem’s action. I ask how the poem’s pointed exclusion of coal’s circulation might help us rethink how its theory of orality and voice relates to scarcity and subsistence. Why does this crisis of subsistence have to be rendered local and stationary—revolving around a hedge rather than the maritime trade in coal? What might this deliberate choice reveal about how the poem links speech, “human passions,” and the ascription of vocal collectivity to crises of subsistence?

Title: Smoke poetics: The Wapping Coal Riot, the River Police, and Romantic forms of urbanity

Abstract: This paper reads coal as a metonym for London’s social fabric in the writings of police theorist Patrick Colquhoun, the archival reports on the Wapping Coal Riot, the anti-carceral poetry of William Blake, and (potentially) the contemporary riot poetry of Sean Bonney. In 1798, at the behest of the West India Committee, Colquhoun had developed the first modern police force, the Thames River Police, which predated Robert Peel’s metropolitan police by over 20 years. Colquhoun’s “Treatise on the Commerce and Police of the River Thames” (1800) center coal in his case for policing. In his argument, coal’s energy economies link domestic affairs with the entire metropolis, making policing a city-wide problem, one that merits public support (and public funding). In reading Colquhoun’s treatise as an example of the entanglement of policing and fossil fuel power, I discuss relevant literature from the energy humanities that connects fossil energy to the larger extractive ideologies of empire. Colquhoun’s treatise is haunted by early resistance to the River Police, particularly by coal lumpers, who in October 1798 rioted outside new police offices in Wapping. Police fired on the crowd, killing an unnamed civilian, and return fire killed a master-lumper-turned-officer. Through close readings of Colquhoun’s treatise and newspaper reports on the Wapping Coal Riots, I demonstrate that these texts use coal and smoke as key figures for thinking about public spaces, crowds, and economies. This metonymic relationship translates into poetry: Blake’s Jerusalem and Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy use smoke to index dispersed systems of carceral power but adopt the haziness and unwieldiness of coal smoke to summon dynamic, un-policeable crowds. Smoke is a central image for these authors, but it also becomes a formal commitment to expansive, airy poetics and an attentiveness to diffuse political violence, pollution, and waste.

Title: Ashanti folklore, Jamaican Anansi stories, Obeah, Queen Nanny, and ‘Talkee Amy’: the Epistemological Stakes of Robert Wedderburn’s Revolutionary Project

Abstract: Son of the “rebellious” Rosanna, and grandson of an obeah-practitioner, ‘Talkee Amy’, Robert Wedderburn was a formerly enslaved Black ultra-radical prophet, pamphleteer, and anti- abolitionist campaigner who migrated to England from Jamaica in 1778. Though much early scholarship celebrated him as a “linchpin” (Linebaugh and Rediker) linking Afro-Caribbeans to English workers; the minutia of such arguments too often over-emphasizes Wedderburn’s Blackness as securing the relevance of European Radicalism to subaltern worlds. More recently, Katey Castellano, Shelby Johnson, Helen Thomas, and Joseph Albernaz have worked to highlight how Afro-Caribbean practices of ecology, communality, and resistance inspired Wedderburn’s revolutionary zeal. My paper contributes to this latter tradition. Wedderburn’s pamphlet, Axe Laid to the Root, repeatedly apostrophizes “ye Africans,” “my countrymen,” and “ye oppressed.” Spies identified “West Indian Blacks” as audience members at his debate house and outed a conspiracy to send his “pamphlets... to [west] india to those suffering blacks to open their eyes.” Therefore, my arguments begin from a previously unstated assertion: Robert Wedderburn wrote for Black audiences—and they lived on both sides of the Atlantic. Following Dixa Ramírez D’Oleo’s call for scholars to check impulses to rescue White supremacy as the heuristic for thinking post-apocalyptic futures, I’ll read Wedderburn’s archives through subjunctively posited interpretive frameworks perhaps shared by African, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-British audiences. In doing so, I’ll bring focus to the epistemological stakes of Wedderburn’s revolutionary project. Europe’s revolutions have failed, suggests Wedderburn, “But you my countrymen... the equality of your present station in slavery, is your strength.”

Title: Kuyili and the Return to the Romantic Ballad

Abstract: This essay studies a recent Indian attempt at the revival of the printed Romantic ballad. Vanavil Ravi’s Kuyili: The Ballad of the Warrior-Girl (2022) narrates the story of Kuyili, and her role in the Sivagangai rebellion - an eighteenth-century anti-colonial resistance to British colonial exploits in Tamil Nadu, South India (major battle 1800-1801). Kuyili, a military commander, is said to have set herself on fire and detonated the British armory, ensuring an upper hand and eventual victory for the rebels. Kuyili’s memory has largely been kept alive through Tamil folklore. The state of Tamil Nadu has seen re-memorialization of key figures from this rebellion in the last few years - spurred in part by caste equations and their political dividends. Kuyili, a lower-caste female figure has been at the center of these conversations. Ravi’s long poem returns to this Romantic era rebellion via a Romantic era form. In this retelling, Ravi ‘nationalizes’ Kuyili as a Hindu anti-colonial warrior. Ravi’s ballad carefully side steps the internal conversations in South-India about Kuyili’s local caste identity and renders her a pan-Indian figure, in line with the fierce redefining of local cultures as part of the neo-nationalist Hindutva project. This refashioning of what Trumpener calls ‘bardic nationalism’ helps revisit key conversations in South Indian literary criticism about ballads, balladization of folk songs via English Romanticism, and print nationalism (Vaanamaamalai, Azhagarasan, Blackburn). I argue that a version of the Romantic ballad ‘affords’ Ravi the possibility to refashion Kuyili and this local anti-colonial rebellion. This ballad employs the formal convention of narrativizing rebellions vis-a-vis nationalism. Ravi brings the Romantic ballad into the on-going renarrativization of rebellions, insurrections and riots. In this process, the Romantic ballad itself undergoes key formal changes as it accommodates riots and adaptations of inter-lingual folk traditionsHindutva project. This refashioning of what Trumpener calls ‘bardic nationalism’ helps revisit key conversations in South Indian literary criticism about ballads, balladization of folk songs via English Romanticism, and print nationalism (Vaanamaamalai, Azhagarasan, Blackburn). I argue that a version of the Romantic ballad ‘affords’ Ravi the possibility to refashion Kuyili and this local anti-colonial rebellion. This ballad employs the formal convention of narrativizing rebellions vis-a-vis nationalism. Ravi brings the Romantic ballad into the on-going renarrativization of rebellions, insurrections and riots. In this process, the Romantic ballad itself undergoes key formal changes as it accommodates riots and adaptations of inter-lingual folk traditions