Literature to 1800

This year in early American literary scholarship sees a continuation of the critical focus on transnational narratives and methodologies. Rather than conceptualizing early American identity and experience as fixed in an affirmative mold of nationhood tracing its more or less common roots back to the Puritan errand in the wilderness, critics have determined to explore the more fluid nature of identities in the American hemisphere through a recognition of multicultural, ethnic, and gendered presences that converge upon but are by no means confined to the American continent. It is the global traffic and flux of these ideas and identities over and within borders, flowing in either direction across the oceanic highways of the period, bringing their complex mix of worldviews, needs, anxieties and agendas in tow, that gives this discourse both its mission and its vitality. Even within this continuing trend, however, there emerge differing strategies, viewpoints, and approaches that will be addressed and summarized in this review.

At its best, the transnationalist turn has allowed for a reinvigorated conversation on former early American themes such as “exceptionalism,” “contact,” “frontier,” “captivity,” “savagery,” “civilization,” “the melting pot,” “liberty,” and “nationhood,” to name just a few. It poses a direct challenge to the idea that a monolithic national identity can be freely established and contained in anything as fluid and intangible as international boundary lines. And in doing so, it lays bare the layers of coercion and outright violence that make the idea of such an identity even remotely feasible even in our own times. The transatlantic lens, however, also provides avenues for reifying the paradigm of a colonial geography strictly bounded within English expansion and settlement by encouraging critics to couch their scholarship in the well-mined transatlantic tether between the colonies and Great Britain. Often there is a fine line between transnationalist narratives that provoke and challenge the dominant history of this traditional focus in early American scholarship and those that seem to, whether consciously or not, reinscribe it. As Bryce Traister notes, somewhat ironically, the “nation has never been more emphatically our shared scholarly topic as it is in the postnational age of American studies.” Nevertheless, the best work of 2011 has helped to significantly expand the conversation on Native American literacies both prior to and beyond European contact; has created new paradigms for retracing the contours of well-studied colonial conflicts like the Pequot War, King Philip’s War, and the American Revolution; and has provided fresh insights into the transatlantic careers of Revolutionary-era women such as Susanna Rowson and Phillis Wheatley, offering up new ways to study, value, and comprehend their contributions in what David Waldstreicher has significantly rechristened the “Wheatleyan Moment.”

i Key Words

A roundtable discussion published in the final 2011 issue of Early American Literature (EAL 46) offers a suitable launching point from which to open up this review. Titled “Critical Keywords in Early American Studies” (pp. 601–32) the article asks each of six prominent scholars in the field to provide a key term for future study and to offer up a genealogical analysis of its ongoing relevance. This is best performed, in my opinion, by Joanna Brooks, who unpacks the key word colonialism and in so doing raises some of the same concerns identified above. Brooks notes that in its traditional usage colonialism denoted the unself-conscious and therefore unproblematic settling of new lands in an age of European exploration and expansion. It was a “neutral descriptor for Anglo-America’s cultural dependency on Great Britain.” However, the term evolved over time to also denote the exploitative practices of imperial forces that come to inhabit and control the territories of sovereign indigenous peoples. Brooks traces the genealogy of these two different usages, noting how the later usage grew out of decolonization movements championed by individuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon and locating its interventions in discussions on race and class. While this later usage came to dominate the discussion in American Quarterly from the 1970s on, Brooks notes that EAL tended to concentrate on the former definition of colonialism until at least the mid-1990s...