Introduction: Unfixing Revolution—Notes on Turns and Re-turns

The introduction lays out this book’s argument that American exceptionalism relies for its coherence upon a set of temporal and territorial exclusions that are held in place by the identification of the American Revolution with the birth of the U.S. nation-state. Despite the intervention of spatial turns that have expanded Early American Studies’ geographic scope of inquiry, the Revolution has remained largely intact as the chronological threshold between colonial and U.S. national time. It thereby sutures the historical frame of reference for Early American Studies and U.S. settler regimes of power alike. Yet this book shows that the U.S. nationalist understanding of the American Revolution was a retrospective invention, underwritten in its earliest expressions by colonial and racial violence, historical erasure, and ideological commitments to narratives of progress that are belied by the materials this book examines from the 1770s–1790s.