Transoceanic America: Risk, Writing, and Revolution in the Global Pacific by Michelle Burnham (review)

At the outset of her brilliant and transformative Transoceanic America: Risk, Writing, and Revolution in the Global Pacific, Michelle Burnham describes herself as an arithmophobe, bad at balancing her checkbook and worse at helping her children with their algebra homework. It is a charming moment—not least for the way she seamlessly blends the genres of personal acknowledgments and argumentative preface, an innovation that might open all academic monographs to a new kind of openness and conceptual clarity. In this same first-person spirit, I was immediately on board, ready to share my own dislike of math, curiously deepened after so many years away from it. I practically revel in not being good at it in those rare moments when it comes up in a classroom. These moments are almost always about time, or the number of years between events (which I ask the students to calculate for me if the answer isn't obvious). But Burnham's book has made me think more closely about this habit, for she makes a persuasive argument that literary scholars and humanists more broadly should not cede numbers—or at least the narratives that we tell about numbers—to those in quantitative fields, and particularly not to those representatives who shape the dominant stories about finance in the US. As she puts it, "Numbers appear to be disinterested and abstract; they absolutely are not" (viii).

Even pausing to reflect on when and why I seek numbers in the literature classroom reveals an interest: a dedication to chronology, a preference for linear time—both of which, as it happens, Burnham urges us to examine more carefully in this book. On the other hand, I tend to skim past numbers when they are mentioned in texts. Only numbers less than ten, or in multiples of ten, are easy to remember; large numbers are just large, and whether something is in the thousands or the millions I often treat as beside the point. Here, too, it is worth pausing to consider when and why such numbers come up in reading and teaching literature: what are those larger quantities that slide so easily from my memory? Often they are numbers of victims, of deaths. And while I might explain my failure to pay attention to the actual numbers at hand by insisting that they are meaningless in and of themselves—without individual stories, the subject of fiction, to give them life—Burnham would ask me to reconsider: for in the confrontation with suffering and death, she argues, imaginative fiction does its work "not despite numbers or in opposition to them, but rather in concealed collaboration" with their abstractions.

Burnham's early chapters bear out this premise in fascinating ways that also reformulate basic ideas about genre. She shows how early Pacific travel writing relies on a logic of calculation and an emergent understanding of numbers—a "fundamentally mathematical mentality"—that also comes to shape the rise of the novel. Meanwhile, eighteenth-century novels turn out to have much in common with contemporaneous math textbooks and accounting and insurance manuals; these early fictions provide a sentimental education in managing prediction and calculating risk in a global, transoceanic world of Atlantic-Pacific exchange. Mathematical logic simplified and compressed the enormity and complexity of this world, but numbers also helped to elide the violence and suffering wrought by each new imperial formation. At the same time, Transoceanic America asks us to rethink both the geography and the form of the critical stories we tell about American literature and the Atlantic more broadly. Burnham's book demonstrates forcefully that our "Atlantic" Age of Revolutions was always inextricably connected to the Pacific, despite our broad "forgetting of Asia" in literary studies of this period. But Burnham's intervention goes beyond asking us to restore a neglected geography to our literary critical maps. She wants us to understand why we have overlooked connections that are obviously there—and answer turns out to be linked...