This book investigates bodies: what they are, what they know, and how they relate to one another. Elizabeth Freeman seeks to uncover aspects of human embodiment in nineteenth-century America that go unnoticed when scholars view the bodies of the past through our contemporary lenses of identity, selfhood, and personhood, and within the framework of what Michel Foucault calls the "regime of sexuality," which fully took hold in the twentieth century (qtd. 6). But the nineteenth century examined by Freeman actually stretches from the 1770s to the 1930s.

The first chapter considers the history of Shaker dance. Then, surveying instances of what Freeman calls "playing dead" in African American literature from the second half of the nineteenth century (54), chapter 2 highlights the Br'er Rabbit folktales, Henry Box Brown, and Harriet Jacobs's account of her years as a fugitive hiding in an attic in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Chapters 3 and 4 each pair works of fiction by different authors. Setting Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) beside Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins's Of One Blood, Or, The Hidden Self (1902-1903), chapter 3 measures the erotic dimension of historiography. Setting Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" (1853) beside Gertrude Stein's "Melanctha" (1909), chapter 4 explores the idea of chronicity, as in the "chronic" time of incurable but not necessarily terminal disorders (125). After chapter 5 tracks Djuna Barnes's interest in Catholic sacraments in her novel Nightwood (1936), the book ends with a coda on Amiri Baraka's short story "Rhythm Travel" from 1995.

Primarily, Freeman aims to probe a gap in Foucault's theory of the relationship between power and the body. Moving from one extreme to another, she argues, Foucault shows how power penetrates either the small scale of the individual body or the very large scale of the population. On the one hand, he contends, "biopower" infiltrates the human body and thus generates the individuated docile modern citizen-subject. On the other hand, he posits, "biopolitics" racializes entire populations that are classified as either valuable or superfluous (6). Between these two poles, Freeman finds an omission. Larger than the individual subject but smaller than an entire population, she argues, forms of "engroupment" evade the disciplinary forces of the state (5). These intermediate forces range from Shakers worshiping through dance and participants in Catholic sacraments to figures like Brown and Jacobs. Having endured and written about their lives as fugitives, they forged a bond with others: men and women forced to find ways of surviving within the realms of social death wrought by the Middle Passage, chattel slavery, and their aftermath.

According to Freeman, these alternative ways of thinking about relationships among groups of bodies--collectives that sometimes defy the imperatives of disciplinary power--can be seen more clearly in light of time. "[T]he sense of time," she writes, "is instrumental to becoming social in the expansive mode I call a queer hypersociability, and...time is itself a mode of engroupment for both dominant and subordinated human energies" (17). Through time, she contends, bodies may reach one another in ways that expand the field of queer sociality, redefining what social life looks (and feels) like and what constitutes queer social arrangements. Besides treating the experience of rhythm, she shows how the time-traveling narratives of Twain and Hopkins dramatize the connection of bodies across vast expanses of historical time.

According to Freeman, this connection exemplifies "queer hypersociability" (14). By means of this concept, she tries to move queer theory beyond a focus on genital sexuality and even beyond some broader understandings of the erotic. Most of all, she aims to correct the "anti-social thesis" in queer theory (12)--a thesis most fully explicated by the psychoanalytic criticism of Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman. Bersani in particular has valorized self-shattering or jouissance, a Lacanian term which, for Bersani, is perhaps most importantly exemplified in anal sex (170). But according to Freeman, the idea of a queer impersonality that might defy the concept and phenomenology of the ego relies too heavily on the wholeness of a self that such a theory seeks to dismantle. While self-shattering requires a self to shatter, Freeman sometimes aims to think outside of the world of selves altogether.

In other words, Freeman suggests that Bersani's concept of the self-shattering ego may rely too much on the ego itself, reinstalling or reifying it in the process (170). For Freeman, I infer, most versions of anti-social theory do not go far enough toward reimagining the social. Yet while her concept of "hypersociability" is suggestive, can we jettison the ego from queer theory altogether? As the foundation of liberal humanism, it is too persistent to be overly minimized. To chart an escape from the ego-anarchy of liberalism, Bersani and Edelman define forms of social belonging that defy hierarchical thinking by defying the epistemological assumptions of liberal humanism, of thinking that centers on a liberal concept of the self. In this broader school of antirelational queer theory Freeman includes Foucault's theorization of the relationship between the sadist and the masochist (170-171). Discussing the S/M relationship in a 1982 interview with James O'Higgins, Foucault states that while S/M is a kind of game in which there may be a winner and a loser, winning such a game does not mean domination. Instead, losing results from a failure to acknowledge and comply with the desires of the Other--when, say, the sadist fails to comply with the needs of the masochist. So rather than unifying the self through domination of or fusion with the Other through coupling, S/M requires a prolonged acknowledgement of the lack--the essential incompleteness--that animates desire.

To my mind, any effort to imagine or identify an alternative kind of relation, hypersocial or not, must entail some kind of disturbance of the ego, a necessarily temporary shattering or recognition of lack that belies the fiction of the contained self. Only then can the self be reconstituted with some kind of difference, in a weakened form that opens up new social possibilities. For this reason, I wonder if the social can be remade by forsaking the language of selfhood, if only because we need something that allows us to think ourselves away from the world of the ego and toward a social world assembled around something other than the completely individuated self.

Nevertheless, Freeman's critique of the anti-social thesis is something of a moving target. While her chapter on Nightwood finds it too confining--too much of a "monadic horizon for queer activities" (171)--she states earlier that Bersani "actually has a very lush social imagination" and that the social possibilities she finds in his work "may have been lost in the handing off of the baton of queer antirelationality from Bersani to Edelman" (14). In overstating the coherence of the intellectual genealogy of the antisocial thesis, the book makes the strongest aspects of its contribution to queer studies somewhat harder to discern.

That said, two of Freeman's objections to the anti-social thesis strike me as especially compelling. The first is that in trying to think beyond liberal selfhood, Foucault and other theorists of sexuality have overemphasized sexual relations. Furthermore, she argues, even when they consider other relations such as a more expansive idea of "homoerotic life" or friendship, identity still dominates (172). "[R]elations," Freeman insists, "can be established, invented, multiplied, and modulated through uses of the body that do not necessarily conform to what dominant culture recognizes as sex, yet are not personal and intimate in the way that friendship feels either" (172). In moving away from dominant ideas about sex and friendship, which inevitably entail dominant conceptions of gender and race, Freeman potentially makes room for a queer theory that is at once more feminist and less white.

Secondly, she aims to trade the language of shattering and negation (the "anti-" in anti-social) for what Moten and Stefano Harney call "reroutings" (qtd. 14). This is a useful name for the difficult work of directing energies against the disciplinary ends of state-sanctioned institutions and toward social arrangements that would allow all to thrive.

What literary fiction makes of such re-routings is vividly illustrated by Freeman's chapter on "Bartleby" and "Melanctha." By subtly analyzing the dialogue in both stories, Freeman shows how they anticipate later movements to conserve natural resources, promote public health, and develop human resources. These national-level conversations, she argues, rely on ideas about human vitality, capacity, and productivity that were adumbrated by Melville and Stein. Their stories are said to reveal the slow and increasingly comprehensive conscription of the body by the forces of industrialization--a process which, as both writers show, did not (and does not) happen without resistance.

Freeman's second chapter interestingly ties queer theory to Afropessimist understandings of Blackness. While exploring the meaning and consequences of the endurance of slavery, in particular its suturing of Blackness to social death, Jared Sexton, Frank B. Wilderson III, and other scholars have elaborated Afropessimist thought. Freeman carefully shows how this project intersects with and diverges from major debates in queer theory--what these two fields of study can and cannot say to one another. Looking at Afropessimism through the lens of queer theory, she shows how it has considered the possibility or impossibility of a Black social belonging that does not also extend the history of anti-Black violence. She thus ploughs the sort of ground that Stephen Best tilled in his excellent None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (2018).

As a whole, the book's theoretical apparatus reaches toward insights that feel necessary to me: ways of writing about bodies that draw out or at least gesture toward the unsayable knowledge held within and between them, ways of "conceptualiz[ing] social formation beyond and beside the linguistic" (190). Freeman's analyses of literary texts often make these abstractions specific, as when she probes the complex relationships between individual and collective worship in both the history of Shaker dance and Barnes's creative exploration of the history of the Catholic sacraments. Also, Freeman's reading of Hopkins's Of One Blood nicely conveys the sense of permeability that characterizes history, kinship, and the self in that novel.

Given its heavy involvement in major debates on queer theory, critical race studies, performance theory, and literary studies, this book presents a paradox. Even as Freeman tries to move beyond disciplinarity (in all senses of the word), her key terms and her alternative formulations spring from disciplinary debates. The result is occasionally too inward-facing and theoretically housebound, with too much re-arrangement of disciplinary furniture. But of course this paradox is precedented. In the disciplinary fields that Freeman surveys, certain debates have so much gravitational force that they can keep scholars from approaching their boundaries, or, as Freeman aspires, the limit of conceptual knowledge itself. Expanding what is sayable about any object of study requires some degree of un-disciplining, of resisting disciplinarity and reaching toward the specificity of the object. At its best, Beside You in Time offers such reach.

Jamie Luis Parra is Assistant Professor of English at Skidmore College.