Reading Less Littorally: Kentucky and the Translocal Imagination in the Atlantic World

Let me begin with an obvious observation: the ship has served, as Paul Gilroy succinctly describes in his foundational project, as the "central organizing symbol" for Atlantic studies (4).¹ Whether one is describing culturally integrating forces produced by panoceanic routes of commercial exchange, the migration of classical republican thought from Europe to the Americas, the emergence of a diasporic British literary culture in North America, or the formation of a Black Atlantic as a counterculture of modernity, the ship looms large in this work for both intuitive and empirical reasons.² It traverses what now are deemed arbitrary boundaries between disciplines, periods of study, and national literatures. But the ship is more than just an object of analysis; it's a potent metaphor. It embodies the Middle Passage—a space that conjures up the nightmares of slavery and the dreams of a redemptive return to the African homeland. Yet as intellectually generative as it has proven, the ship—as a trope—potentially delimits as much as it expands our critical imagination. It often docks its dynamism at port; it calls to mind larger communities—perhaps not nations but certainly empires—even while critiquing these power structures. Local forms of affiliation are registered but frequently as static spaces disrupted only by inaugural moments of imperial deterritorialization and reterritorialization.³ I want to pose a potentially absurd question: is it possible for Atlantic studies to give up its favored metaphor—is it possible to abandon the ship?

I broach this question to register the relative absence of a dialogue between early Americanist studies focused on local literatures and communities and Atlantic studies scholarship. To consider this absence is to return to one of the central concerns of Michael Warner's "What's Colonial about Colonial America?" Warner pushed back against the "preinterpretive commitment" to nationalism in early American literary studies and implored his fellow literary critics to engage the problem of colonialism with greater complexity (50). In the decade since this essay first appeared in print, its clarion call has lost some of its urgency. A voluminous number of recently published articles and books addressing the myriad aspects of imperialism, transatlanticism, and Creole culture treat the adjective colonial as anything but an indispensible term.⁴ This work takes aim at the nationalist impulse that once defined early American studies, but it does so less along the lines Warner originally envisaged by leaving "the question of who gets to be local" largely unaddressed (54). For him, making "the struggle to be local" one of the centerpieces of his transatlantic inquiry necessarily means unsettling the idea of local settlements and treating locality as a contingent rather than as a fixed category (56). By pursuing larger comparative projects, a lot of Atlantic studies scholarship stops short of venturing inland and tends instead to foreground the fluidity of the ship or the routes of commercial and cultural exchange it metaphorically signifies and circumscribes.

Though not always rallying around a shared theoretical vernacular, a number of illuminating studies on local literary cultures have moved away from nation-centered readings by focusing on regional literary and political phenomena. When attending to the cultural transformations taking place within the interior, this work regards the Atlantic studies paradigm with varying degrees of skepticism. Postcolonial accounts of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century regionalism explain how "the primacy of the Northeast and the marginality of other regions in the Nation is the product of the nineteenth-century colonization of its provinces" (Watts, American xvii). Others draw on cultural studies problematics to situate colonial discourses and practices within local spaces, by maintaining that writing about the backcountry points to a "cultural distance between the agrarian regions and the Atlantic littoral" (E. White, Backcountry xiii).⁵ Many print histories conclude that in lieu of a "'nationalized' print public sphere" forming in the years bracketing the US Revolution, "a proliferating variety of local and regional publics scattered across a vast and diverse geographic space" emerged (Loughran xix). Even studies on how maps produced "nationalistic fantasies of interstate unity" have found that early US atlases created "the...