Emergent Worlds: Alternative States in Nineteenth-Century American Culture by Edward Sugden (review)

Emergent Worlds is an aspirational and counterfactual history of what might have been—and might yet emerge—within the archives of nineteenth-century American literary and cultural study. These emergent worlds include what Edward Sugden calls the “chaotic Pacific,” “long Caribbean,” and the “immigrant Atlantic.” In a book that makes forceful yet elegant interventions into conversations about the timelines of American studies and oceanic forms of relation, Sugden shows a remarkable ability to zoom among various temporal and literary scales, from the quirkily local to the global, from the canonical to the surprisingly marginalized. These scalar shifts emerge from and are focalized on scenes in Herman Melville’s writing in particular, although a range of other authors and texts might be read within such frames. Sugden is interested in the temporal “folds” that preserve traces of liberatory political roads not taken in the early nineteenth century. In his account, the maritime world or oceanic geoculture both enabled such potentialities and rendered them ultimately diaphanous.

As an example of how the telescoping methodology of Emergent Worlds functions, here is how Sugden understands Queequeg in Moby-Dick, from the global to the local scale. The Polynesian sailor Queequeg is at large within the “chaotic Pacific,” an interstitial space that is foreclosed by the global events of 1848, which “rationalize” an unruly Pacific cultural system that had previously not been imagined as part of US imperial expansion. With the “comparatively unexpected incursion of the United States onto the west coast,” combined with the gold rush and San Francisco’s emergence as a globally significant port, Sugden writes, “a previously dynamic, fluid, and vibrant ecosystem hardened into a more ossified form” (41). He is interested in what forms of possibility (whether political, imaginative, or individual) exist within these spaces, in which the teleology of US westward expansion was not a given. Within the “chaotic Pacific,” we narrow to focus on a literary form Sugden identifies as the “Pacific elegy” (a coinage that rings sterling to me as a scholar of maritime narratives). In these narratives, capitalistic voyage plans go awry, whether because of storm, mutiny, or disordered captaincy; in the aftermath, an alternative but unsustainable political reality emerges in concentrated, localized form. Inevitably, “the standardizing energies of global capitalism, the nation-state, and imperialism” impose themselves on this transitional world of possibility, and the Pacific elegy ends with the collapse of chaotic potentiality into “the mute, indifferent ocean” (73). In their literary form, Pacific elegies such as James Fenimore Cooper’s The Crater “archived this early Pacific world in the hope that it might one day be resurrected” (43).

From the chaotic Pacific to the Pacific elegy, Sugden’s analysis narrows still further to the figure of the “queer migrant” in this ocean. The queer migrant is appealingly described as a character who is “antischematic, irreverent toward authority, transformative, self-sacrificial, blithe, friendly, trusting, ephemeral, migratory, and doomed” (79). We see queer migrants in the paired figures of Queequeg and Ishmael, and Ahab and Pip, Sugden writes. The queerness of these relationships is not a new critical insight, but their relationship to Pacific forms of mobility, contingency, and loss very much is. The tragedy of the queer migrants found in Pacific elegiac tales within a chaotic Pacific is that the new order their characters exemplify can only be identified in their loss or death. Queequeg’s tattoos—unreadable to the character himself—narrate “a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth,” as Melville writes (qtd. in Sugden 82). As Sugden concludes from this example, “[T]he potential worlds that the early Pacific invoked were complete and self-sustaining, yet, in spite of this fact, not only basically unreadable with the codification of Pacific space but also doomed to be lost, as that oceanic world, predicated on change, was consequently every bit as ephemeral as human skin” (82).

Emergent Worlds is characterized by such inventive categorical...