Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism

Prologue: Undoings

{1} Prologue Undoings Dislocating Race and Nation is about literary practice in a historical mode. It does not set forth a new theory of American literary nationalism; it does not ‘‘locate’’ race and nation or offer any other all-encompassing explanatory paradigm; it does not argue for unbroken connections between the works and periods that are examined in its four main chapters or ‘‘episodes.’’ In crucial respects, this book is about undoing paradigms and rethinking historical connections; it seeks to disrupt rather than construct, even as it suggests the reconstructive potential of disruption. Proceeding chronologically, it moves from the late eighteenth century through the nineteenth century and turns to the works under consideration for guidance in thinking about issues currently central to Americanist literary debate, particularly the vexed connections (and disconnections ) between race and nation. This book attempts to complicate our understanding of American literary nationalism by emphasizing the con- flicted, multiracial, and contingent dimensions of its various articulations. In addition, it attempts to understand selected works in relation to debates of their contemporary moment in ways that, I hope, can help to complicate thinking about race and nation in our own moment. Because I am interested in recovering a sense of the provisional and contested nature of American literary nationalism, I could tendentiously say that this study does not impose an interpretive frame or paradigm upon selected texts but instead permits those texts to speak their truths across the centuries to our current critical moment. But the fact is that this book, like all critical books, is about the needs of the present and is thus shaped by the present, though it makes an effort to explore and to some extent recover aspects of the past. It is a book that is indebted to the historical turn in American literary studies, but, as elaborated below, it is also critical of recent historicist criticism that has too confidently imposed {2} Prologue fixed narratives on the past—a practice that risks diminishing the otherness or alterity of the past and thus closing off, rather than opening up, the complexities, problematics, and specifics of debates on race and nation both of an earlier age and our own. According to historical theorist David Scott, the most valuable critical works display a ‘‘fidelity to a distinctive mode of historical criticism, one in which the nature of the question the past is called upon to answer is self-consciously shaped by the discontent in the present . . . in order to fashion a future without those sources of dissatisfaction.’’∞ Though I see great value in such utopian imaginings, I am concerned that Scott and other like-minded critics can be too quick to read the past entirely in terms of the demands and concerns of the present. Much recent historicist criticism emphasizes the implication of writers in the power structures of their culture. But as I will be emphasizing in the pages to follow, writers of the past can be just as knowing about their culture, and just as resistant, as the critics who seek to expose their blind spots, and thus they may make the best sort of allies for critical projects intended to fashion a better future.≤ Writers convey their knowingness in their writings, and Dislocating Race and Nation thus pays close attention to form and language , whether of novels, essays, newspaper articles, or diplomatic missives . But equally important to this study is the unknowingness that writers convey in their writings, an unknowingness that often takes expression as a resistance to cultural certainties and what I would term a wise bafflement about the meanings, trajectories, and plots of the unfolding narratives of history. In this brief prologue, I want to sketch out the implications of such unknowingness for a literary-historical investigation of race and nation in nineteenth-century U.S. literary and cultural studies. But first a few words about American literary nationalism. As conventionally understood, American literary nationalism arose at the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary moment as a crucial component of nation building. Desirous of a national literature that would display the emerging United States as different from and better than monarchical England, cultural leaders called for distinctively ‘‘American’’ writings that would draw on native materials (the landscape, Native Americans , colonial history, and so on), emphasize the nation’s republican political culture, and bring a new sense of unity and pride to the postcolonial citizenry. As Eve Kornfeld remarks, American literary nationalists such as Philip Freneau, Noah Webster, Joel Barlow...