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Prospects for the Present

More than a decade into the twenty-first century, the temporal turn in American studies—which finds scholars across period specialties and critical perspectives exploring various social, historical, corporeal, mechanical, and phenomenological “time binds,” to borrow a phrase from Elizabeth Freeman’s indispensable contribution—is by now flourishing in such fertile soil that it has developed a number of distinct, if intertwined, branches: queer studies, body/affect, print and material culture, aesthetics, transnationalism. Indeed, this turn has produced some of the most compelling Americanist scholarship of the twenty-first century, much of it emanating from queer studies. The works reviewed here indicate the emergence of yet another offshoot. Each of these works addresses the formations, reformations, and promises of the present, the now and the not yet—not just in the simple or superficial sense of the moment in history we currently inhabit, but the ideation and theorizing of the present and its relations to what did not, has not, might not, or has yet to come to be. By beginning to take now seriously, these scholars herald a long overdue arrival of the present as a locus of theoretical inquiry and critical practice. Yet they also remain respectful of and attuned to history and historicity, which is one reason for examining this strain in three otherwise distinct works: together, they point beyond historicist paradigms that many Americanists find severely limited in helping to contend with the rich literary–cultural past and our precarious present. Two related historicist assumptions have foreclosed the present as an object of interest in its own right. First is historicism’s unreflexive understanding of a temporal chronology allowing for both periodization and contextualization. The second assumption follows from the first: once one walls off the then of texts’ production from the now of their study, maintaining the distance between them becomes a methodological injunction. Indeed, it seems axiomatic