Transnational Paradigms as Feminist Lenses

I was asked to speak to the question of whether or not transatlantic studies should play a significant role in the future of feminist work in early American literature and culture. Cutting to the chase, my response is—absolutely. Transatlantic and transnationalist theories position themselves, as Paul Giles argues, "at a point of intersection . . . where the coercive aspects of imagined communities are turned back on themselves, reversed or mirrored, so that their covert presuppositions and ideological inflections become apparent" (qtd. in Macpherson and Kaufman xiii). If we couple this perspective with the cultural studies acknowledgment that "Every focus excludes; [that] there is no politically innocent methodology for intercultural interpretation" (Clifford 97), I think we can begin to see both the necessity of feminist interventions in transatlantic studies and the challenges to such intervention.

Although early Americanists have, to my mind, been ahead of the curve in transnationalist studies, there has been little attention to women's writings or the impacts on women's lives within this field of study. The recent attention by Kate Davies to Mercy Otis Warren and Catharine Macaulay's literary relationship is a step in the right direction, as is Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer's anthology of early American literature, but let me highlight some ways in which feminist scholarship will be enhanced by attention to transnational studies. We all recognize the truth and poignancy of Frederick Douglass's mid-nineteenth-century question, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?"¹ But if we want to do as Giles suggests and turn the ideology of imagined communities back on itself, the same question might well be inflected with gender—"What to any woman of early America is the Fourth of July?"

If methodologies always exclude, nowhere has this been so true as in studies of national identity and imagined communities in relation to women who lived before the twentieth century. There has been a recognition of exclusion, but far more analytical questioning is needed of what constitutes nationalism and, indeed, transnationalism for women living and writing in the early period. When Mercy Otis Warren sets out to write her version of the American Revolution, how are her ideas of the new nation shaped by her own exclusion from political viability? Why did she first seem to suggest that Catharine Macaulay should be the one to write an American history? Was the English woman's distance from the new nation central to its analysis? And how do Warren's ideas of "empire" as expressed in her letters to other correspondents impact her own conceptualizations of the nation? Is she abetting or exposing her male counterparts' imagined nationalism?

Conversely, how were Abigail Adams's theories of the nation shaped by her lived exposure to French and English perspectives about the new American nation? These were perspectives that Warren did not have; Warren, in fact, repeatedly cautioned Adams against being swayed by a transatlantic perspective—and we need to ask ourselves, to what purpose? In this instance, does living within another nation aid the ability to critique nationalist agendas? Or does it put one in a position of defensive nationalism?

Further, if we only examine the socially powerful members of the forming nation such as Warren and Adams, how are our own theories of transatlanticism and transnationalism skewed? If we examine less privileged colonial women, for example, we might discover very different perspectives on the new American imaginary. Consider two women who blatantly sought to expose the differences between their lived experiences and the colonial mythologies of the so-called new world: first, Lucy Terry, a woman born into slavery but who, with her husband, became the African Americans who were the largest property owners in New England; and second, Elizabeth Bland, an impoverished white British woman who settled in Georgia. As I argued in Executing Race, Terry enters the transnational arena when she questions the received notion of colonists' responses to Native Americans in her satirical ballad, "Bars Fight," composed in 1746. Bland, on the other hand, was a widow with one son who had hoped for a better life in the Georgian...