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  • The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of the Frontier Romance
  • Maurice S. Lee
The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of the Frontier Romance. By Ezra Tawil. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2006.

A general account of race in nineteenth-century America might take the early 1830s as a transitional moment in which American Indians give way to African Americans at [End Page 83] the center of national attention. But if the Indian Removal Act appears to mark an ending and Nat Turner seems to signal a fractious new world, Ezra Tawil sees more continuity than disjunction, arguing in The Making of Racial Sentiment that frontier romances portrayed American Indians in ways that prefigured subsequent literary representations of blacks. For Tawil, race first becomes essentialized in the antebellum period: Earlier taxonomists made invidious distinctions between peoples, but it was not until the early nineteenth century that race became understood not simply as skin color but also in terms of affect. Tawil's literary point is that frontier novels by James Fenimore Cooper, Lydia Maria Child, and Catherine Sedgwick trace how sentiment became racialized and, more specifically, how American Indians were taken to lack the feelings necessary for assimilation into Anglo-American culture. Civilized sentiment is colored white and gendered female in the frontier novels discussed, a politically regressive formulation later adopted by Stowe and critiqued by Melville in their writings on slavery and race.

Such claims are ambitious, which is both the strength and weakness of The Making of Racial Sentiment. Tawil's illuminating treatment of race theory is a synthesis of and contribution to existing scholarship, and it makes important distinctions between "nation" and "race," cultural and essentialized views of human difference. Racial science takes up the first third of the book, and the subsequent readings of frontier novels are largely worth the wait insofar as they elaborate in new ways the problematic racial politics of The Pioneers (1823), Hobomok (1824), Hope Leslie (1827), and The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish (1829). Less successful, it seems to me, are attempts to extend the logic of racial sentiment beyond the main texts of the book. Only a handful of frontier novels, all from northeastern writers, represent the genre; and if Tawil limits some of his claims to semantic realms, he also makes broader cultural assertions with little reference to, say, reception, source study, or the dissemination of racial theory in the period. Similarly, only a few texts about slavery are discussed, and these are restricted to Anglo-American authors. Perhaps, too, connections between contexts and texts could be strengthened; for though the discussion of natural science is excellent, affect in the antebellum era was more thoroughly theorized under the aegis of philosophy and mental science. Tawil does acknowledge some of the delimitations of his book, and interdisciplinary studies that work in multiple traditions cannot follow every possible line of inquiry. All of which is to say that The Making of Racial Sentiment is a provocative but in some ways under-realized book that ultimately—and it should be emphasized, productively—raises as many questions as answers.

Maurice S. Lee
Boston University
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