Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II by John Carlos Rowe (review)

Reviews John Carlos Rowe. Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World WarII. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2000. 377p. Darryl Hattenhauer Arizona State University West This study exemplifies the best ofrecent developments in American Studies and new historicist literary criticism. Like other leaders in the field, Rowe forsakes the old national culture models and uses multicultural, international, transnational, and postcolonial methods. As such, some of his primary influences are Annette Kolodny, Arnold Krupat, Patricia Limerick, Edward Said (above all), Mark Seltzer , Richard Slotkin, Eric Sundquist, and Ronald Takaki. Rowe's task is to show how America's literature and imperialist foreign policy have had a mutual cause and effect relationship since their inception. His focus includes America's projection and displacement ofits imperialism onto other nations. In general, Rowe's analysis grows increasingly original and valuable with each successive chapter. After an introductory discussion of theory and method, he devotes one chapter to each often writers: Charles Brockden Brown, EdgarAllan Poe, Herman Melville, John Collin Ridge, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Henry Adams, W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Elk, and Zora Neale Hurston. Although it is not new to discuss the racism ofBrown and Poe, Rowe's treatment oftheir imperialism is more trenchant than that of his predecessors. Rowe's resistance to recent efforts at folding Melville into the dominant ideology is indispensable. Challenging the ideology ofAmerican exceptionalism, Melvillewas one ofthe first and few to compareAmerica's slaverywith the colonialism ofAmerica's expansion, and to compare those two to world imperialism. Since John Collin Ridge has not been studied much, the chapter on him is almost necessarily Rowe's most original. Focusing onA Connecticut Yankee in KingArthur's Courtas an early anti-imperialist text, Rowe deflects recent attempts to construct Twain as a racist, but he shows that (unlike Melville) Twain did not understand that imperialism had long been an American trait rather than a symptom ofthe Gilded Age, nor that free trade was as much the problem as the solution. The chapteron Crane is rather like those on Brown and Poe in that to focus on Crane's racism (especially his war journalism ) is not to focus on something new, yet Rowe's reading is more subde and complex than are previous studies. Rowe uses Henry Adams as an example of how fetishizing the aesthetic can mystify imperialism. Adams ostensibly eschewed politics in TheEducation, but he aligned himselfwith imperialism in his letters to his close friend, Secretary ofStateJohn Hay. Inwhat is perhaps the most original and significant chapter, Rowe revises prior constructions of Du Bois' sexism, and he FALL 2002 * ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW * 103 shows how Du Bois understood the connection between racism and imperialism, yet failed to see the imperialism of Stalinism. Black Elk also emerges as undermining yet supporting the dominant ideology. The last chapter, an examination ofHurston's non-fiction, revises the heretofore evasive approaches to her conservatism , in particular her advocacy ofAmerica's occupation ofHaiti. Although die new historicism may be the most important method ofthe last twenty years, its flaws mar this study. Ostensibly die new historicism immerses texts in contexts and shows how each constitutes die odier. But too often discourse is the presumed cause and economics the effect. Several times Rowe assumes rather than demonstrates that because adiscourse preceded an event, diediscourse caused die event. One does not have to subscribe to the notion of an all-determining economic base to suspect philosophical idealism in such statements as "the territory to be conquered and the commodities to be exchanged are already effects of discursive production" (51). Similarly, when lesser scholars than Rowe speak of economism as "vulgarlyMarxist," theycan bevulgarly pluralist (196). Rowe avoids the pious tendentiousness diat confuses progress for all with progress for one's selfinterest group. However, Rowe's historicist trait ofjudging dievalue ofadiscourse by its political utility—by whether or not it spurs us to action—is not historicism but pragmatism. And it is an odd historicism that implies on one page that history controls us and dien on die next page diat we can control history. In addition, he subscribes to the opposition offormalism and historicism. He refers to his method as "anti-formal close...