Every Document of Civilization is a Document of Barbary? Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Spaces Between: A Response to Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse

Toward the conclusion of Lydia Maria Child's 1824 novel Hobomok: A Tale of Early Times, the young Episcopalian Charles Brown reappears as the proper marital partner for the novel's female protagonist, Mary Conant—and just in time. Readers of Hobomok will recall that the narrative begins with a scene in which Hobomok, the novel's noble savage and title character, leaps into a magic circle drawn by Mary in order to conjure her ideal future husband, Charles Brown. Hobomok's disruption of that ritual and his apparent usurpation of Brown's narrative role evoke an "involuntary shriek of terror" from Mary (13–14). Her nerves are calmed only by Hobomok's retreat, and the subsequent appearance in the circle of Brown. Following a series of plot twists, including the disappearance of Brown during his voyage to the East Indies in search of "wealthe" and "treasures," the novel concludes as it fulfills its telegraphed plot (143). Child first weds Mary and Hobomok (a union that produces "Little Hobomok," the "fearless young Indian" [148]), and then relies on the elder Hobomok's voluntary nullification of that marriage in order to enable the fated alliance of Mary and Charles (a union that results in the renaming of "Little Hobomok" as "Charles Hobomok Conant" [150]). His "Indian appellation" gradually forgotten during a distinguished career at Cambridge (150), Mary's son comes to identify solely with his Anglophone matronym and, through that identification, to embody the synthesis of Puritan New England and Episcopalian Old England. Along the way to this maternalist resolution of both the "Indian" problem and the "national" problem, love tutors Mary to overcome her initial disgust at Hobomok's "savagery" and renders Hobomok "civilized" enough to recognize Brown's superior claim to Mary's heart, even as it leaves him sufficiently "savage" to flee west where he "pursued with delirious eagerness every animal that came within his view" (140).

At least, that is what I concluded the last time I wrote about Hobomok. In that 2004 essay, I suggested that the explicitness of Child's interweaving of affective, national, and imperial themes ought to push us to think more critically about why research conversations focused on these imperial intimacies could be received as news in the early twenty-first century. I traced that sense of novelty to the acts of archival mis-construction and textual misinterpretation occasioned by nationalist paradigms of American studies and American literary history. I stressed the distortions those acts have embedded in our understanding of what I join Ann Laura Stoler, Amy Kaplan, Lauren Berlant, and many others in thinking about as the archives and heuristics of sentimental imperialism and imperial benevolence. I still believe that to be the case, but I have also become increasingly dissatisfied with the predictability and generality of this now familiar argument. In contrast, consider the unpredictability and specificity of Brown's response to the question of where he was during his three year absence from New England: "I came in an English vessel, which lies two miles below waiting for the wind. My story is no uncommon one for an East India passenger. Our vessel was wrecked, and for nearly three years I have been prisoner on the coast of Africa. How I effected my escape, I have neither the strength nor the spirits to tell you now" (145). If we take Brown at his word and assume that his is a common story, then why does it sound uncommon to our ears? The linkage of British colonial and imperial ambitions in the East Indies and the Americas are relatively well charted, but how do we account for Brown's captivity along the "coast of Africa"? Is it a formalist attempt by Child to balance the captivity experiences of her male and female leads? Is it a condensed displacement of the question of slavery and its inter-relations with politics of Cherokee removal in the 1820s? Is it a desperate plot device to explain Brown's absence? Is it...