Colonial Flashpoints

The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America . By David Kazanjian. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. 311 pages. $77.95 (cloth); $25.95 (paper).

In July 1793, thousands of French planters and their families fled slave revolts in the French West Indian colony of Santo Domingo. Two thousand refugees came to Philadelphia, then the capital of the United States. White Philadelphians responded with an outpouring of sympathy, quickly raising $12,000 for refugee assistance. Some even canceled their pledges toward the building of the city's African Church and redirected the monies toward French refugee relief. Certainly the irony of this situation was not lost on African Church founders Richard Allen and Absalom Jones: white Philadelphians were more loyal to white French West Indian settler colonists, many of them slaveholders, than they were to their black fellow citizens. The true frailty of national and civic fellowship was fully revealed a few months later when the city of Philadelphia impressed its black population into serving as nurses and grave diggers during the deadly yellow fever epidemic of 1793.

The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America, by David Kazanjian, develops a trenchant new critical apparatus for understanding historical moments like this as "flashpoints" in the "articulation" of a transatlantic white solidarity among settler colonists, which was fundamental to the formation of modern nation-states and neocolonial capital networks. Through readings of literary, historical, and political archives from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Kazanjian teaches us that when we talk about American culture as a product of transatlanticism—a gesture that is gaining currency in early American studies—we must consider not only intellectual and cultural exchange among European and Euro-American elites, but also relations of domination between European colonists and indigenous and black peoples. Transatlantic circuits, he argues, do not necessarily free individuals from constraints of national and racial identity; rather, through a "colonizing trick," transatlantic imperialism leads to the economic and cultural capitalization of new, racially hierarchical nation-states, which in turn become organizational nodes for transnational capital and the international division of labor. The constitutive contradiction of the early United States, according to Kazanjian, is the conjoining or "articulation" of Enlightenment ideals of universal equality with racial hierarchy. He explores this articulation at four distinct "flashpoints": black mariners and early national mercantilism, black intellectuals and the African colonization movement, early national culture and the campaign to assimilate or eradicate Native peoples, and the Yucatan Caste War of 1847.

The fact that I am using terms such as transnationalism, imperialism, and capital to summarize the argument and implications of The Colonizing Trick may raise a red flag for some readers. It is true: Kazanjian does apply the big medicine of Marxism to his subject matter. As Michael Denning, John Carlos Rowe, and others have observed, American studies practitioners—early Americanists especially—have sometimes been reticent about theoretical approaches such as Marxism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism.¹ But early American studies is steadily converging toward current critical methodologies and concerns, especially as new emphases on comparative colonial studies and transatlanticism demand a deeper familiarity with theories of colonialism and postcoloniality. Kazanjian uses Marxist theory in The Colonizing Trick to address a paramount problem in this new early American studies: how do we understand the political and cultural dimensions of transitioning from American settler colonialism to nationhood to neocolonial power?

In pursuing this question, Kazanjian contributes to a decades-old discussion of the relationship between American racial politics and imperialism. From the 1960s, American Indian, Chicano, and African American intellectuals such as Vine Deloria, Rudolfo Acuna, and Harold Cruse described the situation of people of color in the United States as internal colonialism.² The publication of Edward Said's landmark Orientalism (1978) promoted empire as a framework for cultural analysis and produced a new impulse to precisely identify the colonial or postcolonial position of the United States. Because the United States began as British settler colonies, the authors of The Empire Writes Back classified American literature...