Introduction: After Sovereignty

This introduction to the special issue "After Sovereignty" examines the problem of sovereignty in the context of several centuries of conversation about the natures and structures of political legitimacy and community. It considers the tension between the recent critical ambition to move past or beyond sovereignty and the stubborn recurrence of sovereignty, which as a concept aspires to perpetuity and thus continues to haunt conversations about politics. It then examines this tension in the context of outbreaks of plague in Renaissance England, a phenomenon that simultaneously affirms and contradicts the idea of sovereignty, and then surveys literary responses to plague in order to generate new languages for describing the before, after, and other than of sovereignty. The introduction closes with an overview of the articles that follow in the issue.