Hybrids and Others

Abstract

Hybrids and Others Philip Gould (bio) The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of the Frontier Romance. Ezra Tawil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. ix, 244 pp. Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture, 1756–1830. Tim Fulford. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. viii, 318 pp. One would think, in light of the wealth of critical literature out there on literary representations of Native Americans in nineteenth-century literature, that new and original readings on this subject would be difficult to pull off. The figure of the "Indian" has a long critical history in early American and nineteenth-century American studies, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, studies of the racial politics of whites writing about Native Americans (real or imagined) registers dispositions in literary studies writ large. In the 1960s and 1970s, the most influential work in the field derived methodologically from the myth-and-symbol school that originated in postwar liberalism. This was certainly true of the seminal work by Roy Harvey Pearce and Richard Slotkin, both of which analyzed race and racial conflict as a way of uncovering national myths that lay at the heart of the "American Mind" (see Pearce, Slotkin, and Berkhofer). And it was no less true of the more avowedly radical race studies shaped by the antiwar movement and cultural politics of the Vietnam War era (see, for example, Barnett and, especially, Takaki). In the decades to follow, studies concerned with literary representations of Native Americans and frontier violence usually focused [End Page 611] more specifically on the historical context of westward expansion and the national ideologies legitimating the U.S. government's policies of Indian Removal. Dana Nelson, Eric Sundquist, Jared Gardner, and numerous other scholars employed in unique and creative ways the methods of (what was then called) the "new historicism" to engage in ideology critiques with an eye focused on particular historical contexts (i.e., the Pequot War, the Missouri Compromise, Jacksonian removal policies, Supreme Court decisions, the Mexican War, and so on). This work has done much to demystify the discourses of frontier violence, contextualize the literary deployments of the very category of race, and reveal literature's messy and animating relations with other kinds of writing. Sometimes, however, it has reduced literary works to mere repositories of ideology and read them symptomatically. The works under review testify to the ongoing importance in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century literary studies of the contexts and rhetoric of Native American representations. They register the importance of recent developments in racial studies, and, notwithstanding their awareness of transnational writings and histories, the continued importance of the "nation" as the crucial category that makes sense of the literatures of race and racial conflict. The traditionally "Americanist" perspective on the literary subject of Native Americans—and indeed on the life and writings of Native Americans themselves—is Fulford's point of departure. His book attempts to remedy this imbalance by reexamining the subject through a transatlantic lens, a move that supposedly produces new understandings of both Native American writing and the rise of British Romanticism. As he explains, "One ends up with a different view of the literature and culture of the period 1756–1830, on both sides of the Atlantic" (15). The book accordingly is structured as a tripartite analysis that (1) first sets out to re-contextualize the literary and historical sources for British Romantic writing about race; (2) goes on to read a wide range of British writers and genres, though focusing on canonical luminaries such as Wordsworth and Coleridge; and (3) concludes by considering the lives and writings of an eclectic array of Native Americans (some of whom have dubious origins). Its major theoretical premise throughout is the ongoing importance of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American frontier as a dynamic "contact zone" or "middle ground" where dynamic kinds of cultural [End Page 612] encounters and exchanges took place, hence destabilizing British assumptions about the opposition between savage and civilized cultures (see Pratt and White). This is a persuasive model for thinking about the limits of colonialism in the eighteenth century, though it became less tenable, as he admits, later on. But early discussions of British-Native...