French Connection II

Abstract

Two books, each representing a distinct geographical location and intellectual tradition, provide dramatically different points of departure for evaluating French literary and cultural influence in the American hemisphere. The first, Richard Slotkin's Regeneration through Violence (1973), is a signal example of the post-Vietnam War critique of American literary and cultural history that used the tragic confluence of French and US military actions in Southeast Asia as an occasion to rewrite hoary Americanist conceits of the noble savage, the vanishing frontier, and the irresistible march of progress as mandates for imperial, genocidal conquest. Though it turned Americanist inquiries inexorably westward, Slotkins's work, like Richard Drinnon's similarly themed Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (1980), introduced a recursive, transatlantic coordinate into its critical narrative that made France's ideal of civilization at once the ideological origin and the logical end of a nationalist tradition whose manifest destiny lay in Southeast Asia.