View article

“In Atlantic modernity, freedom is a race myth” (Doyle 3). This is as chunky a thesis as most of us dare imagine. Admittedly, Laura Doyle cribs it from G.W.F. Hegel’s “the History of the World is nothing but the development of the Idea of Freedom” (qtd. 46), but in the substitutions she visits on that formulation—“Atlantic modernity” for “World,” “race myth” for “Idea”—lie the work’s great promise and its formidable challenge. It is axiomatic that the vulnerability of a scholarly argument increases in direct proportion to its ambition; whether because of the objective challenges of supporting and sustaining hefty claims or because of the ressentimentof envious reviewers, bold projects tend to draw critical fire with a kind of magnetic necessity. Yet Freedom’s Empirestands up admirably to its central test: it sustains a vast array of interpretive acts over the course of some 500 pages and 300 years, brings literary works and historical …