Humanists love to hate the state, perhaps now more than ever. Negativity toward the state is de rigueur in the humanities and Trump's version of the white supremacist fascist state in many ways manifests critical theory’s darkest visions. But as democratic institutions in the US and around the world come under increasing attack, as civil servants are fired and authoritarianism rises, it is time to take stock of the limits of state negativity. How can we imagine and theorize the state outside the dark horizon that looms ever more heavily upon us? What can we learn about the state from genealogies of welfare or state-led development, the legacies of liberalism, the histories of national and local institutions that support everyday life, postcolonial independence movements, or from alternative versions of the state that were dreamed but never fulfilled? This seminar invites papers that consider a range of theories and histories to reimagine the state, illuminate its positive actions, or dwell with its alternative possibilities. What of aesthetic objects and literary forms? What genres and narratives have dominated how we imagine the state, and what limits have they placed on the ways we conceptualize it? How can literary scholars see the state newly with different forms? When and how does literature convey the complexities of the state - at local, regional, or national levels? What genres and modes do we have for reading the state in more positive or at least in contradictory ways? How do courts, bureaucracies, agencies, or executive heads and legislators appear in novels and other texts? What do we learn by disaggregating the state? Rather than homogenizing the state into a singular bad form – the settler state, the necropolitical state – or ceding it to the puppeteering of corporate capital and right-wing repression, can we resuscitate those versions and aspects of the state that we want, that support community, democratic participation, material needs, and robust forms of citizenship? To do so we must expand the narratives, tropes, and genres through which we view the state. This seminar thus also seeks papers that explore how particular forms, narratives, and texts reveal the state anew, as a site of complexity, intervention, or desire. In all, this seminar invites papers that show how particular objects, methods, or histories can help us see beyond the quagmire of state negativity