National Narratives and the Colonial Politics of Historiography

Abstract

National Narratives and the Colonial Politics of Historiography Rochelle Raineri Zuck (bio) Old Canaan in a New World: Native Americans and the Lost Tribes of Israel elizabeth fenton New York University Press, 2020 272 pp. Mourning the Nation to Come: Creole Nativism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature jillian j. sayre Louisiana State University Press, 2019 264 pp. Colonizing the Past: Mythmaking and Pre-Columbian Whites in Nineteenth-Century American Writing edward watts University of Virginia Press, 2020 292 pp. Many scholars have highlighted the role that literature plays in the development and maintenance of collective national identities. Benedict Anderson famously defined the nation as an "imagined political community," the rise of which was linked to the development of print capitalism, which allowed disparate individuals, separated by space and time, to see themselves simultaneously as part of such an imagined community (6).1 Important work in literary studies has since focused on the development of "national narratives" (to borrow Jonathan Arac's term) and how such narratives allowed individuals in what had been loosely confederated colonies to imagine themselves as citizens of the United States.2 Key examples include Priscilla Wald's Constituting Americans (Duke UP, 1995), David Waldstreicher's In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes (UNC P, 2012), Robert [End Page 907] Levine's Dislocating Race and Nation (UNC P, 2009), and Jonathan Arac's The Emergence of the American Literary Narrative (Harvard UP, 2005). Waldstreicher in particular attunes us to the way the ascendance of certain national narratives is predicated on the collective forgetting or active suppression of other stories: "The nation' is never just an idea or a thing; it is also a story, an encompassing narrative or set of narratives with the potential to crowd out other narratives that may have rather different political implications" (142). Throughout the process of nation-making in the "New World," some stories have gained traction while others have been "crowd[ed] out" or suppressed. A trio of recently published works—Jillian J. Sayre's Mourning the Nation to Come (2019), Edward Watts's Colonizing the Past (2020), and Elizabeth Fenton's Old Canaan in a New World (2020)—attends to these national narratives and, through their engagement with issues of temporality, reminds us that such stories exist in time and, particularly in the context of settler colonialism, participate in the creation of an organizing temporal logic that positions readers as national citizens in time. These three impressive works of scholarship not only engage important currents in the field such as the transnational and temporal "turns" but also model a hermeneutic that reveals how some of the most trenchant national narratives positioned readers as participants in an unfolding national temporality informed by both sacred and secular understandings of history. Mourning the Nation to Come, Colonizing the Past, and Old Canaan in a New World explore the ways European colonists and their descendants crafted national narratives through the retelling or co-optation of histories (sacred and secular) so as to advance their colonial aims and subvert the territorial sovereignty of Indigenous Americans. They attend to the stories that gained prominence as settler nations were formed in the Americas and those that were ignored, reconfigured, and/or suppressed. All three of these works, to varying degrees, engage Anderson's work as part of their explorations of collective fantasies that sought to resolve the tensions between the settler status of Europeans in the Americas and their desire to claim territorial sovereignty by presenting themselves as somehow "indigenous" to the lands they sought to colonize. These works offer fresh perspectives on literary expressions of the Vanishing Indian trope by emphasizing that the ways narratives of Indigenous "vanishing" circulated alongside (and were informed by) recovery projects that sought to produce histories [End Page 908] that could be put in service of the colonial project. In addition to the Vanishing Indian trope, there are other points of connection between these works, and, to an extent, they consider some of the same primary source materials, including the "Lost Tribe" theory of American Indian origins, the Mound Builders, the Book of Mormon and other Church of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) writings, historical romances like those of James Fenimore Cooper, and...