Indians in Theory and in Practice

Kate Flint's book sets itself two primary tasks, and it succeeds splendidly at both. The first of these, as Flint says at the outset (and I might pause here to note that the book's clarity of purpose, organization, and argumentation is a great gift to the reviewer, not to mention other readers), is to chart "the place of the Native American in the British cultural imagination from the time of American independence up to the early decades of the twentieth century" (1). Working with a large and diverse archive, including newspaper articles, missionary reports, travel writings, accounts of Buffalo Bill's traveling show, visual materials such as Punch cartoons and book illustrations, and a good deal of popular literature as well as the occasional canonical text, Flint reveals in fascinating detail the role played by the figure of the North American Indian in British conceptualizations of America, cultural and racial difference, masculinity, modernity, and British imperial relations.

Rather than argue for a unified transatlantic discourse of Indianness, Flint asserts that the figure of the Indian was more malleable in Britain than in the United States, where it was obviously much more fraught (12). Her survey of the figure's British uses takes the form of a loose narrative, from the Romantic topos of the dying Indian to the twentieth-century embrace of the Indian as "a symbol of defiance to mechanized, fragmented modernity" (289). This last role represents a convergence of British and American attitudes toward Indians, a convergence Flint suggestively aligns with the shift in the nations' political positioning from rivals to allies. In the course of her account, Flint pays particular attention to the role of gender, showing, for example, that Indians shift from modeling "desirable forms of masculinity" (110) to playing the role of "an Other against which masculinity could be tested and proved" (191). In one of her most provocative chapters, Flint shows that in the late-nineteenth century Native Americans became "the archetype according to which all kinds of native peoples were described and assessed" by the British (259). This chapter is sure to inspire further work on the imbrication of Britain's American and imperial relations.

Paradoxically, part of the power of The Transatlantic Indian derives from the seemingly unpromising nature of much of the material Flint examines. As she acknowledges, representations of Indians in imaginative literature are typically crude and predictable, as writers simply "recycl[e] stereotypes whose roots were already established by the late eighteenth century" (52). To her credit, she refuses to find ambiguity lurking beneath every surface: for many novelists, she asserts, "polarization into good Indians and bad Indians was an easy, even lazy way to enhance the dynamics of a plot" (43). This critical caution gives greater weight to the ambiguities and ambivalences she does tease out. In addition, Flint does excellent work with the stereotypes themselves, tracing how they shifted over time and were put to varying uses. Even crude stereotypes, she shows, can do complex cultural work.

Flint's nuanced approach is best appreciated through extended exposure to the arc of an analysis. As an abbreviated example, though, I would point to one section of her discussion of the poetic treatment of Indians by women in the early- and mid-nineteenth century. After demonstrating that Indians are often treated as dignified and even justifiably angry figures, she notes that "despite the standardized appeals to the sympathetic imagination, the emotional melding is more rhetorical than anything else," with Indians "very rarely imagined as having any kind of agency or autonomy," and serving instead "as the stimulus for certain delimited affects" (91). Continuing further, however, Flint argues that "it would be too easy to regard this appropriation solely in a negative light" because "the repeated use of the sentimentalized stereotype carries the potential to disturb"; "the sentimental is not invariably a safe and reassuring space," she affirms, but "could be used, on occasion, to challenge some of the developing features of imperial power" (91). She then goes on to develop this claim through a quick survey of poems by Felicia Hemans, Frances Kemble, and Louisa...