Encountering "the Other": American Intellectuals and Indians in the 1790s

Abstract

F EW activities reveal as much about a developing-culture as its construction and representation of the Other. In recent years, post-structuralist and feminist theorists in disciplines as varied as philosophy, psychology, literary criticism, art history, anthropology, and political science have begun to study the process of Othering. They suggest that, particularly in periods of uncertainty or crisis and most particularly in imperial discourses, the identities or subjectivities of individuals within a dominant social group are constructed in opposition to a culturally different Other. As one leading scholar explains, we are dealing with the formation of cultural identities understood not as essentializations (although part of their enduring appeal is that they seem and are considered to be like essentializations) but as contrapuntal ensembles, for it is the case that no identity can ever exist by itself and without an array of opposites, negatives, oppositions: Greeks always require barbarians, and Europeans Africans, Orientals and so on.I The Other may be marked by difference in race, gender, class, religion, nationality, or a combination of social categories. These categories of identity are constituted through popular and learned discourses of encounter. A central role in the process of Othering belongs to narrative, for are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world.... The main battle in imperialism is over land, of course; but when it came to who owned the land, who had the right to settle and work on it, who kept it going, who won it back, and who now plans its future-these issues were reflected, contested, and even for a time decided in narrative. As one critic has suggested, nations themselves are narrations. Inscribed and reinscribed iii popular and elite culture, these stories attain the indisputability of myth.2