Millennial Literatures of the Americas, 1402–2002 (review)

The theme of the apocalypse has been pervasive in the literatures of the Americas ever since Christopher Columbus pondered, in the letter from his fourth voyage as well as in his Book of Prophecies, the eschatological significance of his transatlantic journeys. Cutting across not only centuries but also cultural, linguistic, and national borders in the Americas, the theme has been of interest also to such inter-American comparativists as Lois Parkinson Zamora, Frank Graziano, Djelal Kadir, and, most recently, Thomas Beebee in his superbly researched, learned, multidisciplinary, and wide-ranging study Millennial Literatures of the Americas, 1492–2002. Beebee builds on the more localized studies of previous comparative Americanist scholarship (as well as on the massive scholarship on millennialism in the Western tradition), but he also provides a comprehensive synthesis that covers literary classics as well as popular culture from the anglo-, hispano-, luso-, and francophone Americas over some five centuries. His study breaks new ground by focusing on how apocalyptic prophecies could function not only as a rhetoric of conquest but also as a hybrid counterdiscourse to (neo-)European (post)colonial hegemony in the New World—he examines everything "from a reliance on African loas as a resistance to Christianity … to a hope that the papacy will relocate to the Americas and usher in a new era" (19). In the Americas, Beebee argues, millennialist movements always have a dual nature: progressive and conservative; they "always look forward and backward at the same time" (20). While acknowledging that apocalyptic prophesies are not exclusive to the Americas, Beebee argues that the Americas present a "special case" in the history of millennialism because of the foundational role played by technology there; in the Americas, there is a special confluence between the histories of eschatology and technology that he calls "eschatechnologies" (10).

The first chapter goes over some of the early American archival territory already familiar from the studies of John Phelan, Georges Baudot, Marcel Bataillon, Djelal Kadir and others by discussing the early modern/colonial literature that attributed apocalyptic significance to the Europeans' "discovery" and "spiritual conquest" of the New World—the works of Franciscans like Motolinia or Jerónimo de Mendieta, Puritans like John Eliot, and Jews like Manasseh ben Israel. But this chapter also considers some real gems that have received less attention in the scholarship—the missionary histories, catechisms, and linguistic treatises written by the Jesuit Antonio Ruiz de Montoya about the Guaraní of Paraguay, for example—along with well-known texts that have not usually been read in the context of millennialism, such as Martín del Barco Centenera's epic poem Argentina. Especially intriguing here is Beebee's discussion of the intercultural translations of eschatological beliefs between the Guaraní concept of the "Land without Evil" and the Christian notion of the New Jerusalem (43). (A consideration of the European medieval concept of the "earthly paradise" would also have been intriguing here.)

Chapter 2 considers the literary histories of various charismatic "hybrid messiahs," both fictional and historical, in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Americas. These hybrid messiahs are creolized figures whose "power of prophecy derives from the knowledge of elements of the dominant culture but is delivered in creole or in the language of the native" (49). However, precisely for this reason, Beebee goes on to argue, the hybrid messiah (usually male) is considered dangerous from the ideological point of view of the dominant nineteenth-century neo-European nation-states in the Americas, where these hybrid messiahs are usually seen as a version of the biblical Anti-Christ. Beebee's first example of such a figure is Herman Melville's Ahab in Moby Dick, but other figures discussed in this chapter include Nat Turner (and his manifestations in Thomas Gray's Confessions, William Styron's Confessions, and Daniel Panger's Ol'Prophet Nat), Wovaoka/Jack Wilson and the Ghost Dance movement (in Paul Bailey's Ghost Dance Messiah) in the United States; Louis Riel Exovide, a leader of two...