"When They Come Here They Feal So Free": Race and Early American Studies

It is exciting to take part in this roundtable about, as Sandra M. Gustafson framed it for us, the theoretical implications of our work for understanding race in the early period. Philip Gould's Barbaric Traffic and Joanna Brooks's American Lazarus raise key questions and offer trenchant analyses from which I have learned a great deal. Both texts deserve to be read on their own terms, as it will be impossible to do them justice in the short space I have here. I am fascinated with questions of method, of how we do the work that we do, especially how we read archives at the intersection of literature and history. So I would like to turn Gustafson's charge into a necessarily sketchy account of how some of the theoretical presuppositions of each of our projects at once allow us to say certain things and place limits on what we might say. I suspect all of us have had the uncanny experience of going back to books recently finished and finding them, at certain points, to have been written by someone not quite ourselves. In the hope that this uncanny feeling can prompt a kind of successful transference, I will then describe how I have tried to respond, in my new research, to some of the limits I encountered in rereading my own book, The Colonizing Trick.

American Lazarus sets out to show how "communities of color reclaimed and revived themselves in eighteenth-century America" by appropriating religious discourse and syncretically regenerating it as an antiracist practice. The figure of "regeneration"—Lazarus instead of Adam—emerges in American Lazarus as a privileged name for this practice, a distinctive aspect of Brooks's work that deserves careful consideration. If I had the space, I would like to think more about how this figure encodes a tension between the importance of taking serious stock of religious discourse¹ and the risk of replicating a kind of mystical faith in subalternity. Walter Benjamin's work thrives precisely on risking mysticism, so it is not surprising that Brooks insightfully turns to Benjamin.

I admire Brooks's insistence that contemporary critics grant agency to those people of color who struggled against racism in the eighteenth century. However—and I am writing about my work as much as I am about Brooks's here—I would like to think more about the limits of such granting, and the complexity of such agency. For instance, Miranda Joseph's Against the Romance of Community offers a rich, sympathetic critique of how the idea of community imposes its own modes of domination and exploitation, and those of us who write about political communities in early America should be in dialogue with it. From a different angle, Jack Forbes's fascinating Africans and Native Americans urges all early Americanists not to fetishize the distinction between African American and Native American communities when we consider the eighteenth century. In turn, Saidiya V. Hartman's work has shown how one can attend to the struggle against racism in early America while also considering how "the barbarism of slavery did not express itself singularly in the constitution of the slave as object but also in the forms of subjectivity and circumscribed humanity imputed to the enslaved," including forms of "self-possession" that characterized agency before and after emancipation (6). Without such considerations, I fear that we close ourselves off to the most radical aspects of antiracist thought in early America, those aspects that challenge our very conceptions of individual or communal agency, of what it means to be free.

Barbaric Traffic urges us to read in literary antislavery a discourse of sentiment that is neither simply an ideological wrapping for the material interests of capitalism nor an unproblematic critique of exploitation. Again, it is not possible to examine the many rigorous accounts Gould gives us of the deeply cultural aspects of putatively economic discourses and debates. Literary scholars, in particular, will find much to learn from this aspect of Barbaric Traffic. Acurious feature of Gould's approach, however, is to make race a...