Floating Capital: The Trouble with Whiteness on Twain's Mississippi

In the antebellum slave market that was rigorously conducted on and along the Mississippi River, Mark Twain recognized a fundamental plot that he found still visible in his own post-frontier United States, where the promise of a free, unbounded space of nationalist imagining had finally dried up. The fundamental national plot Twain noted in the antebellum Mississippi's volatile market culture involved selling something that does not belong to you, the misappropriation of others' labor and sentience. Since the late eighteenth century, the river had been a primary conductor of commercial traffic, carrying, among more innocent commodities, slaves and slave-grown cotton. Imagining the great river highway, Twain identified our American pleasure with a commercial imperialism which perpetuated the piracy and slaving that had characterized the era of mercantile capitalism; in his Mississippi River fictions, he reproduces in miniature the volatile commercial space of the early modern oceans. For Twain, the North American West had not been about the political disinterest, domestic economy, and republican virtue long associated with agricultural settlement, from eighteenth-century European agrarian philosophy through Thomas Jefferson. The Mississippi River was the West that Twain returned to, again and again, because it was water and not land that could ever be settled. The river was a carrier of economic desire and troubled commodities that flowed beyond continental spaces, suturing the U.S. to global networks of capital. Reading the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) against the unfinished novella Tom Sawyer's Conspiracy (1897-1899) transforms Twain's classic river novel into a profound, postnational critique of white mobility on the western frontier. As Twain rewrites Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through Tom Sawyer's Conspiracy,he reconnects the racial and spatial praxes of U.S. expansion, or manifest destiny, to an always international slave market that enabled the emergence of the United States' normative—white, middle-class—national character.

Mark Twain's West was never a Turnerian frontier, a "line of most rapid and effective Americanization" that healed sectional and racial conflict. Cultural historian Richard Slotkin has aptly described Mark Twain as a "post-frontier" thinker, although his use of this epithet is primarily limited to a chronological meaning. Slotkin suggests that Twain writes about the Frontier Myth when it is no longer possible to imagine "'real life' . . . constituted (if it ever was) to provide farms, ranches, and gold mines to the first comers for no cost."¹ By Frederick Jackson Turner's definition, the frontier is essentially over once there is no longer a habitable region in the United States, or the territories it claimed, occupied by fewer than two people per square mile. I'd like to prescribe another use for the term "post-Frontier," which is similar to the pragmatic use of the term "postmodern." Rather than imagining particular moments in time when the idea of the frontier is superseded, I recognize "post-frontier" as the marker of a literary style and a political orientation that exists alongside frontier literatures and ideology as an ongoing critique of their limitations. Specifically, I recognize Twain as participating in the school of post-frontier U.S. history that Patricia Limerick has rather wryly named "expansion of the world market studies," a school that draws on the work of world systems theorists like Immanuel Wallerstein and Fernand Braudel.² Twain recognized the importance of a national and international market culture to the North American West long before the world had heard of global studies or the New Western Historians' radical recontextualizations of the United States's expansion as a continental nation. Amy Kaplan has offered a suggestive analysis of Twain's Letters from Hawaii, originally published in 1866 in the Sacramento Union, to argue that "the routes of transnational travel" first enabled Twain's exploration of U.S. race relations.³ While the still so-called foreign territory of Hawaii may have contributed to the opening of the young Twain's racial memory, I think it crucial to emphasize that Twain made visible the intersections of U.S. race prejudice and international capital in fluid sites within the apparently domestic territory of...