Risk Culture: Performance and Danger in Early America (review)

In his compelling new book, Risk Culture: Performance and Danger in Early America, Joseph Fichtelberg aims to broadly sketch the central "mediatory role of risk" that early Americans deployed "to tell the story of modernity to themselves" (3). In ranging across different temporal nodes from the seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century, Fichtelberg focuses on emblematic moments wherein the performative and discursive practices that shaped a "risk culture" most vividly appear. Building on the work of sociologist Anthony Giddens, Fichtelberg figures risk as the structure of feeling most applicable to comprehending how early Americans confronted the tensions between tradition and innovation. Fichtelberg's case studies are figures whose agency is disputed and diluted by their spacial and temporal locations, so much so that he defines risk as "the sensation of the normal under conditions of emergency" (5). By focusing on the central issue of agency, Fichtelberg differentiates his work from other recent critical studies by arguing that the authors he examines embrace the possibilities of risk. Rather than record or contain potential risks, to blunt their efficacies, the figures Fichtelberg considers seek "to wed the experience of risk to its apprehension, and to make writing the means and the measure of action" (8). In such an embrace, the risk culture that Fichtelberg moves to reconstruct is not simply defined by economic issues, but rather marked by the relationship between personal agency and the formation of social structures. While a consideration of the commercial fluctuations of the circumatlantic world is part and parcel of Fichtelberg's analysis, he deftly considers a complex web of religious, political, and secular discourses that have varying influences on the question of agency for the "refugees and wanderers" he fruitfully examines (7). The temporal range of the volume does at times make the arguments of the chapters seem loosely connected, but overall the volume suggestively maps a new framework for thinking across the various periods under consideration. Fichtelberg's textual readings are persuasive and his historical groundings provocative, and there is much in Risk Culture that will be of interest to a wide range of scholars.

The first two chapters of Risk Culture focus on John Smith's Virginia and the Salem witch trials. Each is impressive in its own right, although the chapter on Salem makes a stronger intervention into our understanding of the complex dependence of Puritan culture on the power of speech acts. Fichtelberg positions Smith at the nexus of a shifting dynamic: as a cultural order governed by hierarchy and the residual influence of a chivalric code was being supplanted by the more turbulent rule of contracts and commerce. In Fichtelberg's eyes, Smith was aware of the performative nature of both the residual order and the emerging one, in so much as he sought to conduct (both textually and publically) colonial encounters so as to maximize his profit and minimize his risk. But Fichtelberg's biggest contribution is not in reading familiar accounts of Smith in a slightly innovative way, but rather in demonstrating how Smith was conscious of his own sense of exposure during these orchestrations. As his argument unfolds, Fichtelberg registers Smith's cognizance of this exposure and how such an awareness functioned to call the entire enterprise of colonial dominance into question.

By focusing on the complex function of Puritan testimony, Fichtelberg essentially underscores how "a community that depended on the ritual exchange of words" incurred acute risks in the interpretative crisis occasioned by the Salem witch trials (72). The insecurities embedded in the trial transcripts demonstrate the ways in which church discipline was a performative act, one that was undermined by the trauma of public accusations against personal agency. This chapter is particularly engaging in its examination of Tituba's location at the crossroads of two opposed discursive paradigms. Fichtelberg argues that Tituba was uniquely positioned midway between "the two great performative influences on the Salem testimony- the biblical cadences of her master and the witch gossip of the community...