Response: Transatlantic Studies and The Transatlantic Indian

It has been a real privilege to read three such engaged and thoughtful responses to The Transatlantic Indian, and to be invited to reflect, with hindsight, upon both my own arguments and emphases and my methodological choices. The latter, in turn, have bearing on the practice of interdisciplinary scholarship in general, and on transatlantic studies—however these be defined—in particular.

The question of audience is a key one when it comes to thinking through one's choices, and I should say at the outset that in wanting to be read by scholars in cultural history, literature, and Native American studies, Iwas from the start knowingly embarking on an impossible balancing act, whilst at the same time believing that the figure of the Indian—however mediated—was an exemplary figure through which to examine the interlinking of disciplines that remain separately conceived. This was a study that could have been pursued looking solely at literary texts, whether canonical or popular; through iconography (in a more extended treatment of visual culture than I was able to offer, cartoons and advertisements, Academy paintings, illustrations to James Fenimore Cooper, and plates in magazines would have featured even more prominently); or through the political and spiritual interactions of Indians and British, whether on North American or British soil, without referring much to imaginative treatments at all. Added to my decision to amalgamate different objects of analysis were the problems associated with maintaining a position that does not implicitly favor one nation's identity over another. This is an issue that filters down even to the most basic level of project justification. When I began working on The Transatlantic Indian in the late 1990s, I was still living and working in England. The book gained inestimably from my move to the United States in 2001, and from being in sustained dialogue with people working within a newly expanded sense of what American—and indeed transatlantic—studies might entail. Here, and in Canada—and I fully acknowledge that I now write from an American standpoint—there was little need to explain or justify what I was up to. Yet in England, I still received the response: "What? You're writing a whole book on Red Indians?" On opposite sides of the Atlantic (and it's interesting to me that none of my three reviewers has a UK background), readers bring different givens into play.

Transatlanticism, in other words, invites consideration of an author's subject position as well as her choice of subject matter. In his response, Jonathan Elmer very pertinently asks whether the label "transatlantic" applies to a method as well as to an archive, and I would maintain most emphatically that it does. Maybe "method" isn't quite the right term—I think I'd favor "approach"—but in any case, I see a transatlantic study as involving a deliberate emphasis on flow and exchange. As I argue in the same review essay that Elmer cites, one needs to take seriously the presence of the Atlantic. That fluid atopia is traversed by many people (whether traders, tourists, slaves, emigrants, performers, or travel writers), but also stands symbolically as a site in which ideas, stereotypes, and theories are imported, exchanged, and transformed. In my book, I emphasize the transformation that took place when individuals encountered at first hand the culturally unfamiliar, whether in the form of Indians visiting the Surrey Zoological Gardens, a tunnel under the Thames, or Westminster Abbey, or in the form of English people entering homes in an Indian village or going game hunting with Indian guides. What did it mean, I asked, for a white British subject to encounter a "real" Indian, as opposed to the whooping tomahawker of popular fiction, or for a visiting Ojibwa to see extremes of poverty on the streets of industrial cities? Beyond this, how did these experiences translate conceptually, even linguistically? And what about the blurred areas, where an Indian performed the stereotype for strategic or financial gain, or a white person adopted red-face? In all of these cases, individual, racial, national, and tribal notions of identity are at stake, and...