Messy Beginnings: Postcoloniality and Early American Studies (review)

This rich and varied collection of essays has a lot to offer readers interested in exploring the possibility of constructing readings of early American cultural texts informed by postcolonial theory. In their introduction, the editors of Messy Beginnings implicitly acknowledge one of the potential problems of trying to bring together the sometimes conflicting fields of postcolonial studies and early American studies. They do this by recognizing the essentially bifurcated nature of postcolonial studies. On the one hand, the term "postcolonial" can be used to refer to texts that document "the struggle between imperial and local claims to cultural authority" (2). On the other, the term can simply refer "to the analytical procedures of postcolonial studies" (3). And herein, of course, lies the problem: Is postcolonial studies fundamentally concerned with a specific set of artifacts (historical, literary, sociological) which derive their status from their origins in the aftermath of colonialism? Or, is postcolonial studies a set of critical practices that can be profitably deployed in any number of contexts? The editors answer both of these questions with a resounding yes: "Above all, 'postcolonial' in this book does not name a society as a whole but rather refers to procedures and processes, representations and articulations" (3). In so doing, they seem to be trying to stake out a middle ground between Laurence Buell's now famous suggestion that "American Renaissance" literature could be read as postcolonial and Anne McClintock's strenuous objection that American literature cannot possibly "qualify as 'post-colonial' " (139).

The editors of Messy Beginnings have organized the twelve contributions into four sections, each of which contains three essays. The sections are titled as follows: Part I—"Puritan Imperialisms and Postcolonial Resistance"; Part II—"Intraracial Colonialisms"; Part III—"Race, Gender, and Nation Making"; Part IV—"Transnational Nationalisms." Since these phrases do not really do justice to the diversity of the collection, I would describe the primary preoccupations of this collection by means of a list of questions, which seem to function as recurrent themes throughout the collection: Can postcolonial theory be used to construct readings of texts written by white writers in the early national period? To what extent was colonial consciousness and later early national consciousness always inflected and informed by what lay outside the geographic boundaries of the colony and nation? Can postcolonial theory be profitably used to explore and explain early American racial and ethnic hybridities? Can postcolonial theory be used to counter the strongly teleological force exerted by enlightenment thinking in early American studies? Does early American studies offer us an opportunity to improve upon existing versions of post colonial theory and practice by allowing us to include writers, texts, and phenomena that often fail get the attention they deserve in other postcolonial readings?

The first section of Messy Beginnings opens with Laura Donaldson's fascinating essay "on the Indian-Christian interactions of two case studies: the encounters of Mi'kmaw women with seventeenth-century reformed Franciscan missionaries and a nineteenth-century Pequot named William Apess with the religious movement that came to be known as Methodism" (30). The essay is unique in the volume for the apparent skepticism it voices on the collection's principal stated goal, namely to use postcolonial studies to reinvigorate or rehabilitate early American studies. Instead of enthusiastically endorsing the merger of these two fields, Donaldson instead asserts that her essay will show "how postcolonial studies have acted in concert with American studies to suppress the experiences and voices of American Indians" (30). Rather than undermining the book's attempt to mix postcolonial and early American studies, however, Donaldson's skepticism helps her to construct a truly credible model for integrating the two. Kristina Bross's essay on the "praying Indians" of seventeenth-century Massachusetts (as well as her just published book-length study from which the essay is drawn) offers readers a long overdue examination of this important colonial phenomenon. In a sophisticated argument supported by careful close...