Reading "the Indies": Transnational Ventures in Early American Literature

In the course of his prescription for how best to engage with the "mind of the past" in "The American Scholar," Ralph Waldo Emerson makes use of a metaphor that is at once exotic and homely, insisting "[a]s the proverb says, 'He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies'" (60). Emerson's larger point concerns the necessity of active reading, but his use of this trope suggests the importance of the link between the Americas and Asia for US nationalism: the "Indies" include both the "East Indies" of South and Southeast Asia and the "West Indies" of the Americas themselves. The "Indies," East and West, are here imagined as sites of plenitude and desire, linked by their corresponding distance from a European center and by their common capacity to produce desirable physical and intellectual goods. The interest of transcendentalists such as Emerson in South Asian religions and philosophies has long been discussed by scholars, but recent work in early American literature and culture has made increasingly clear that the mid-nineteenth-century fascination with Asia does not emerge from nowhere, but rather has deep roots in the cultural, intellectual, and material commerce between Europe, the Americas, and Asia throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.¹ In this understanding, British America and the early republic are linked to Asia in multiple ways: through the burgeoning trade between Asia and America, through the circulation of ideas and goods through England from and to farflung parts of its emerging global empire, and through patterns of reading and literary representation that acknowledge cultural and material exchange alike. The four studies discussed below indicate the range and complexity of these linkages.

The most explicit in this regard, Jim Egan's Oriental Shadows: The Presence of the East in Early American Literature, makes a substantial intervention on behalf of the view that Asia cannot be ignored in the quest for genealogies of early American literary culture. Egan's brief but trenchant argument in favor of a framework for American literary nationalism that takes into account the presence of Asia creates a literary counterhistory to Perry Miller's famous account of American literature as proceeding "from Edwards to Emerson," suggesting that a trajectory from "Bradstreet to Poe" may be more illuminating.² For Egan, the crux of the matter of America's engagement with the East is seen in the emergence of American cultural nationalism. Although early America is distinct from the "East" of European imagination, Egan argues that "British American writers, and those of the new nation, could, at least, use the infinitely greater cultural power granted Eastern people, places, and things in their own quest for acknowledgment as a truly civilized community by European and Creole writers" (7). The framing of the relationship between North America and Asia here is rather counterintuitive: rather than simply imagining a static, colonized Orient that is by definition inferior to a dynamic, colonizing Occident, Egan suggests that the writers he examines are in fact dependent on the "cultural power" associated with the Orient in order to achieve their own aspirations. Indeed, Egan contends that the representation of the Orient in British America is different in both its tropes and its aims from its representation in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, precisely because the mode of representation used in British America is a response to British America's assumed position of cultural inferiority vis-a-vis Britain.

In the case of the first author Egan considers, Anne Bradstreet, we have a...