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  • (Re)Writing and (Re)Reading the Nation
  • N. Christine Brookes (bio)
Gretchen J. Woertendyke. Hemispheric Regionalism: Romance and the Geography of Genre. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2016. 224pp. $78.00 cloth.

Another title for Gretchen J. Woertendyke’s book might have been The Nation is Dead! Long Live the Nation! In five nimble chapters with ample sources from beyond the United States, her Hemispheric Regionalism undoes the staid structures of nation and associated national literary identities only to put them back together again—and smartly so—in something loosely resembling the original. In so doing, Woertendyke elaborates standing definitions of romance as a genre and gives it a new role and consequent importance within American (in all senses) literary studies. This concise yet ambitious work therefore yields many treasures in the course of an intellectual re-exploration of the New World and the United States’ nascent identities within it.

The book’s title reveals up front the tensions that Woertendyke masterfully negotiates in her study. The expression “hemispheric regionalism” is meant to signify “multiple scales of geography and history in dynamic relation, rather than . . . a static space against which either hemisphere or region gets defined” [2]. Further, it implies going beyond national boundaries to emphasize hemispheric relations even as it accentuates the relative insularity of a region proper. In particular, this work brings into view an interplay of the American South with the Caribbean and the New World with the Old.

To begin, Hemispheric Regionalism looks closely at the Haitian slave revolts in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century and their impact on the American literary field. Here, Woertendyke invites the reader to contemplate the complex dynamics of slave insurrection and eventual Haitian independence—the first such victory in the New World—in 1804. Seen through the lens of a slaveholding American South, nineteenth-century representations of this uprising, according to Woertendyke, play out in two ways. In chapter 1, she considers the recountings by white writers of slave uprisings or conspiracies led by Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner. Read in light of the Haitian Revolution, these tales tapped directly into an implicit fear of violence (on white “innocents”) in the American South, inscribing themselves as part of the anti-abolitionist movement. [End Page E16]

While these semi-fictional accounts borrowed from the gothic and other popular literary forms of the time, the romances of Scots writer John Howison and Americans Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville, the collective subject of chapter 2, spun fictional narratives of adventure on the high seas that capitalized on gothic fears about fugitive slaves. With the sea functioning as a space of past, present, and future, where anything can and did happen, these stories projected the apocalypse of black mutinies, a uniquely New World nightmare not limited to one geographical region. Woertendyke begins this chapter with an examination of Howison’s story “The Florida Pirate,” published in Black-wood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1821, which keyed up the “racial fantasy and fear” present in both the old- and new-world Atlantic [62]. Likewise, in a story that shares much with Howison’s, Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) exploited fear of the Haitian revolution without naming it as such. As Woertendyke shows, the trope of violent rebellions against whites—or, in this case, only the threat of one—was well in place by the time Poe’s adventure story hit the press. Not subtly, Poe mined this entrenched opposition between black and white in an attempt to reach the average reader, all the while riffing on the Blackwoodian tales that inform the gothic romance’s understanding and reception. Melville, in perhaps a stronger and less-veiled reference to Haiti, drove that message home aboard the San Dominick in his 1855 Benito Cereno, serialized in Putnam’s Monthly. Here, in a terrifying narrative that condemns the violence of slavery, Melville collapsed history by weaving together the hemispheric tensions of Haitian revolution, real-life incidents (a slave-ship rebellion off Chile’s coast in 1805), and the growing national rift that would lead to the Civil War. Woertendyke’s analyses of these works and the genre are compelling...

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