Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature

Abstract

Christopher P. Iannini's Fatal Revolutions is a significant contribution to the hemispheric turn taken by Ralph Bauer, Susan Scott Parrish, and others in recent studies of the relationship between natural history and literary culture in European colonies in the Americas. Through close readings of a seemingly “eclectic series of texts” (p. 8) Iannini makes a compelling argument for the role of depictions of the Caribbean region in the development of American letters, capaciously defined: From Mark Catesby's Natural History of Carolina through [John James] Audubon's Ornithological Biography and Birds of America, North American readers had been trained to regard the southern colonies (later, states) … as part of an extended Caribbean region that was both a primary source of national wealth and enlightened knowledge and a corrosive influence on national manners, borders, and beliefs. (pp. 282–83) Iannini's primary concern is the linkage between the development of the plantation economy in the Americas and “the rise of natural history as a new scientific discipline, intellectual obsession, and literary form” (p. 3). In effect, Fatal Revolutions traces the increasing role that the ethnography of slavery plays in works of natural history written between 1700 and the early nineteenth century.