Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance by Mark Rifkin (review)

Emerging from Native American studies, this book analyzes how antebellum literary texts, especially those that represent Indians obliquely, if at all, illuminate the phenomenological significance of the fact that the US is a settler-state, founded on the displacement of indigenous peoples and maintained by the legal structures and sanctioned violence that ensure the ongoing authority of the settler government. Rifkin trains his eye on three texts that he reads as figuring queer possibilities resistant to a dominant settler-state logic centered on property ownership and the heterosexual nuclear family: The House of the Seven Gables, Walden, and Pierre. The long, abstraction-heavy chapter on Pierre merits careful reading for its originality of interpretation. There Rifkin argues that Melville avoids directly challenging the exploitative system of manorial property-holding in upstate New York (one that led to the Anti-Rent movement begun in 1839) or proposing land reform solutions and instead explores the queer, “antinormative possibilities” of city life in ways that reveal the enticements of new, fluid social formations that serve as a “predicate for (liberal) freedom” (143). Rifkin demonstrates that Melville constructed narratives of elite white experience that erased the struggles of Anti-Renters and Native Americans: for instance, the influx to the city of the people and goods that create the city’s disordering, liberatory potential is possible only because the state’s growing network of roads and waterways occurred through the coerced appropriation of Haudenosaunee lands. If you are one of the many readers who has never wondered where the Indians are in Pierre … well, your—and Melville’s—lack of curiosity is precisely Rifkin’s point.