Whither the Early Republic: A Forum on the Future of the Field

Questions, Suspicions, Speculations

Questions, Suspicions, Speculations DAVID S. SHIELDS Prognosticating our understanding of the culture of the early republic inevitably produces false prophecy. There is something baldly whiggish in assuming that inquiries will be fruitful and knowledge enriched , something equally presumptuous in delineating matters that will matter most in years to come. Certain types of knowing prosper; others falter. Our grasp of the myriad instantiations of gender waxes, theological literacy wanes. Will insight outpace amnesia? Will the portraits painted of classes of persons be any freer of disfigurement than those of earlier historians whose representations have been revised. Each age has its own myopia. The one certitude is that inquiry will continue as restlessly as ever. This moment is no less troubled by questions than those of former investigators. Perhaps the least arrogant thing one can do when speaking to ‘‘what’s next’’ is to capture certain of the emerging questions. How best to approach the future? With rules? Suppositions? Questions? Questions predispose, yet are open enough to permit the unanticipated finding. Suppositions may not. So—a prognosis in the form of questions. 1. Given the religious impetus of wars in the 21st century, will the inquiry into early American culture recover religion as a category of historical meaning as telling as race, gender, and class? Or will we continue to perform the characteristic gestures of the hermeneutics of suspicion, regarding religion as a mask for economic, political, or social interests? 2. Given the application by some scholars of postcolonial analysis David S. Shields is McClintock Professor of Southern Letters at the University of South Carolina. A historian of literary and learned culture, he edits the journal Early American Literature and is presently compiling the Library of America’s volume of early American poetry. 186 • DAVID SHIELDS upon the culture of the republic, and given their strong investment in its tropes of ‘‘national imaginary’’ and ‘‘national memory ,’’ will ‘‘recollection,’’ ‘‘circulation,’’ and ‘‘space’’ so supplant ‘‘event,’’ ‘‘change,’’ and ‘‘time’’ in their reflection that it ceases to be history? 3. As the internal, continental sensibility promoted by Alan Taylor vies with the global (transatlantic and transpacific) emphases of the recent generation of scholars, will this tension so dominate inquiry that other sorts of cultural and geographical framing disappear ? In particular, will the comparative hemispheric analysis of the culture of the Americas that burgeoned during the PanAmerican heyday after World War II recede into inattention? 4. As numbers of scholars take up Benedict Anderson’s national imaginary often to highlight the rhetorical character of the United States at a time when sections, parties, interests, classes, and sects fissured the body of the state, will there be a countervailing inquiry , ‘‘material nationality,’’ to explore the increasingly regularized and mechanized character of material, aesthetic, and social production during the early national period? Will such a counter inquiry come from historians of the market, or from cultural historians following Laura Rigal’s explorations of the ‘‘federalizing’’ of American material and institutional practices? 5. The present moment has seen cultural studies converge with material culture studies in reconstructions of ‘‘visual culture’’ and ‘‘the acoustic world’’ of times and places. Each of these inquiries emphasizes a mode of sensate apprehension, rather than an integral phenomenology of being or an aesthetics of the whole body. Visual culture, for instance, does so to explore the social construction of ‘‘the visual’’ and to explore how art and modes of visual representation destabilize epistemology. Has the concentration on the visual and the audible renovated the old Platonic privileging of the ‘‘spiritual’’ intangible senses over touch, smell, and taste. Is there a historical propriety to this privileging of sight and sound during the period of the early republic—is there some merit to the old claim that the eighteenth-century ear was supplanted by the nineteenth-century eye as the organ that most adduces meaning? What then are we to make of the increasingly somatic turn of aesthetics from sensibility in the eighteenth century to sensitivity in the early nineteenth century to sensation in QUESTIONS, SUSPICIONS, SPECULATIONS • 187 the mid nineteenth century? And what of eating? Wasn’t that sometime resident of the early republic, Brillat-Savarin, author of the Physiology of Taste, the truest prophet of the emerging world system of any among his generation when he said that the economy of the globe was being organized around consumption—that the belly spanned the globe? 6. Now that the public...