Homeland Insecurity

On Lingering and Being Last, Jonathan Elmer’s elegant and sophisticated contribution to transatlantic studies, argues that the principal vehicle for managing the unprecedented fear and opportunity disseminated by the withering away of the Hobbesian monarch and the Westphalian nationstate has been the discourse and practice of Euro-American racialization. It is within the context of Europe’s hyperbolic ambivalence toward its own crises of sovereignty, Elmer convincingly argues, that we ought to locate the transatlantic racism of the last three-hundred-odd years. The economic realities of the slave trade and the systematic displacement and “ethnic cleansing” of Native Americans need to be understood as part of a material and figurative exploitation that is intimately and complexly bound up with the politics and economics of postmonarchism. The African or Native American other thus provided not only the material conditions for modern Euro-American enrichment but an invaluable source of narcotic reassurance: “the racial difference of an Oroonoko or an Atufal, a Logan or a Chingachgook,” writes Elmer, “may be most useful when it serves a desire to disavow what audience and actors in fact share” (20). And what they shared, among other things, was a deterritorialized international space, an evacuation of traditional sites of sovereign power and a humanity defined by its capacity to escape—or be abandoned by—all structures of belonging. The racialized sovereign slaves and “last” representatives that Elmer isolates and so carefully gauges are thus the products of reactionary nostalgia and of a distorted utopian anticipation. “The ideological space of the new world that my texts depict,” Elmer writes, “is not . . . a solution to, or ‘exoneration’ of, a European problematic, but that problematic’s more intense and volatile expression” (14).

It would be easy to miss, I suspect, but Elmer’s reference to a shared experience (“what audience and actors share”) in the passage I have just quoted exemplifies part of what makes On Lingering and Being Last a unique achievement. Where most literary critics addressing “transatlantic” modernity betray an almost desperate desire to pit racializing (racist) white hegemony against its victimized others (and guess which side our authors are on?), Elmer seems far more interested in the ways in which ideologically dense figurations of political vulnerability complicate identifications and antagonisms and disturb our reassuring sense of who is representing what for whom. In her 2008 book, Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940, for example, Laura Doyle suggests that racializing discourse has served to contain the “unthinkable” and “far-reaching” implications of political “freedom” from at least the early seventeenth century on: “The protestant and Saxonist vocabulary of tender conscience and native birthright,” she explains, “worked to position liberty as an interior, racial inheritance, planted in the individual and constituting an irrevocable principle for the government of the state” (4). The idea of race, moreover, provided a “steadying current” for an “unanchored modern self.” “Modern selves,” Doyle concludes, “bind themselves to race as a source of security, history, and identity” (11). At first glance, Doyle’s and Elmer’s books might seem to be working in tandem, telling the same geopolitical story, using the same literary examples (Behn, Equiano, Brockden Brown, Melville). Both writers seem committed to thinking through the intimacy of democratic, rights-based political discourse and the long history of racialized violence in the Western Hemisphere. But by privileging “freedom” over Elmer’s “sovereignty,” Doyle also seems to commit herself to narrating the story of racialization as the story of a “white” solution to what she calls “the existential aporia of an individualist and capitalist notion of freedom” (13). Such an approach has a hard time avoiding the temptation to imagine other “solutions” to an “aporia” that is inadvertently shared with the very discursive communities the author singles out for condemnation. On Lingering and Being Last instead proceeds by privileging and scrupulously reading literary figurations that condense an enormous amount of Western ambivalence with respect to postfeudal political subjectification. Indeed, Elmer’s figures remind...