Evangeline, Hiawatha and a Jewish cemetery: Hi/stories of interconnected and multiple displacements

Abstract

This essay analyses some aspects of the complex relationship between the material reality of displacements in the hi/stories of three groups of people ‐ the Acadians, the Aboriginal people of North America, and the Jewish people ‐ and their discursive signification as found in the work of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. After discussing the relationships between these groups, the essay will give a postcolonial reading of Longfellow's work, focussing specifically on his “sentimental racism” (Brantlinger). It will argue that Longfellow's ‘orientalizing’ and apolitical representations contribute to the plight of these groups, despite his evident empathy with them. The short, proleptic elegy, “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport”, although less known and of lesser significance than the long narrative poems Evangeline (about the deportation of the Acadians) and The Song of Hiawatha (about a Native American mythical character) constructs a similar extinction discourse. This essay balances Longfellow's emphasis on the victimization of doomed peoples against exemplary voices of those “others” who survived to ‘write back’ to such authors who wrote for them.