"I Longed for a New World": Colonial Hysteria, The American, and Henry James's Paris

The focus of this essay is James's "Americano-European" legend, located as an object of nostalgia and as a primal scene of conquest and contrast, reiterated in James's global/ "international" spaces. More precisely, this reading centers on the insistently colonial script in The American, correlated with a psychoanalytical approach to the "hysterical body" (Ender), extrapolated here to include the foreign land. Using this joint approach, my paper proposes the notion of "colonial hysteria" as a major mode of constructing and relating to the space of otherness which, ultimately, is revealed as already buried under a narration of exile simulating, and rehearsing, return.