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Reviewed by:
  • Fugitive Empire: Locating Early American Imperialism, and: The Backcountry and the City: Colonization and Conflict in Early America
  • Andrew Newman (bio)
Fugitive Empire: Locating Early American Imperialism Ady Doolen . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 254 pp.
The Backcountry and the City: Colonization and Conflict in Early America Ed White . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 236 pp.

The pairing of Andy Doolen's Fugitive Empire and Ed White's The Backcountry and the City offers a strong sense of propinquity as well as an interesting contrast. Published by the same press in the same year, they overlap in both bibliography and acknowledgements. One scholar focuses on the very topic, slavery, that the other acknowledges to lie beyond the geographic parameters of his study. One, appropriately, builds a "critical framework" informed by critical race studies and the transnational turn in American studies (Doolen xviii). The other chooses an "inappropriate" theoretical guide: Jean-Paul Sartre (White 19).

Granted, the field of early American studies did not feel the lack of a Sartrean analysis. But White's "leap from Parisian existentialism" to eighteenth-century Pennsylvania succeeds brilliantly (19). His adaptation of the sociological classificatory system that Sartre elaborates in the Critique of Dialectical Reason is revelatory. While White carefully notes the benefits and limitations of his regional and temporal focus, his theoretical innovations have the potential to be far-reaching.

The title pays homage not to Sartre but to Raymond Williams: White notes how different colonial America, with its backcountry, its predominantly rural population, and its primarily urban print culture, was from [End Page 592] the England of The Country and the City. In his first chapter, White argues that these early American demographics lead to a distortion that manifests in what he calls "The Republican Megasynthesis." The "mega" refers to the apotheosis of the "republican synthesis" through a confluence of historical and literary studies. Prominent historians such as Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood situated the American Revolution within the history of ideas, privileging elite discourses and excluding, according to White, "the violent disruption, the messiness, the fear and despair and hatred" (8). However much the republican synthesis was contested by historians, its discursive, ideological emphasis was an irresistible match for literary scholarship: White lists a number of major critical studies, epitomized by Michael Warner's Letters of the Republic, that have collectively shaped our understanding of the period as comprising a revolution of words, contested through urban voices and texts.

White counters the megasynthesis by shifting the emphasis from abstract ideas to situated praxis; he offers an understanding of "republicanism, federalism, and nationalism (and their respective myths)" as formulations arising through the actions and interactions of what Sartre calls "practical ensembles" (24). The term offers more fluidity and range than related concepts such as discursive or interpretive communities or communities of practice in that it applies to the dizzying gamut of subsets and conglomerations, fleeting assemblies and established institutions "that leap out at us from early documents, not to mention the tables of contents of today's scholarly journals" (16). According to White, "It was within, through, around, and against the practical ensembles that early American cultural praxis occurred, took shape, and acquired meaning" (16). To understand this process, and to support productive generalizations about "feelings of structure" (White usefully reverses Williams's "structures of feeling") within which the variety of practical ensembles in colonial Pennsylvania developed, White employs Sartre's typology of Seriality, Fusion and Institution, with a chapter devoted to each concept.

White illustrates seriality through readings of Crèvecoeur ("Eighteenth-century America's theorist of seriality par excellence") and the Pennsylvania records of administrative encounters with backcountry settlers and Native Americans (35). Rural seriality is characterized by "reciprocal isolation"—Crèvecoeur's Farmer James, a Pennsylvania yeoman, tends his own land, blissfully aware of his thousands of counterparts but free from the [End Page 593] oppressive religious and political groupings that involve Europeans in perpetual conflicts. (Incidentally, seriality is a feeling of structure common not only to early Americans but to early Americanists; as with other academic specialists, it is our reciprocal isolation that positions us to carry out such functions as reviewing each others' work...

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