Retracing Our Steps; or, the Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference in the Age of Trump

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Retracing Our Steps; or, the Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference in the Age of Trump Shelby Johnson (bio) On March 15, 2017, Donald Trump toured the Hermitage and laid a wreath on the tomb of Andrew Jackson in Nashville, Tennessee. Occurring only a few miles from where I was completing my PhD at Vanderbilt University, the incident was of a piece with the grim spectacles of political theater, or what Michael J. Drexler called "residual forms of racist logic," that have shadowed Trump's presidency, as well as so many of our conversations at the Society for Early Americanists' Biennial Conference just the week before. Trump has drawn deeply from Jackson's populist political imaginary throughout the first months of his presidency, leading Politi-Fact's Louis Jacobson and Sarah Waychoff to cheekily describe his fascination [End Page 292] with Jackson as a "bromance across the centuries." While we might find little humor in the performative solemnity of walking the grounds at the Hermitage and laying a wreath on Jackson's grave, or in the historical weight of policy decisions that accompany comparisons of Trump's "bromance" with Jackson, Jacobson and Waychoff's signifier "across the centuries" does reflect a strange temporal recursivity that formed a part of so many of our conversations at the conference: a feeling that we had returned to another location in time or—perhaps more disconcerting—that the past had somehow returned to us. As we all know, Jackson of course presided over Indian Removal, a set of policies that oversaw the mass deportation of southeastern indigenous tribes—the long, overland route of the Trail of Tears—to the territory that now forms the state of Oklahoma. This historical moment echoed in both the geographical location of the conference in Tulsa and the successful vote to extend the time frame of the society's proceedings from 1800 to 1830, the year the Indian Removal Act was signed into law. The accumulation of all of these geographical and temporal points of contact offer a peculiarly tactile element to this sense of temporal recursivity. In a real sense, doing the work of early American scholarship in the Age of Trump (if you will forgive the portentousness of that moniker) seems to entail retracing our steps—within histories of racial violence encoded in policies such as the 1737 Walking Purchase, Indian Removal, and the Trail of Tears. It requires walking. Walking was the central narratological framework explored by Chadwick Allen in his plenary lecture, "Walking the Mounds: Reactivating America's Indigenous Earthworks Cities." Exploring a range of young adult novels about indigenous earthwork cities, especially Cahokia, Allen lingered with Phillip Carroll Morgan's Anompolichi: The Wordmaster (2014; White Dog Press, an imprint of the Chickasaw Nation Press), which initially describes the adventures of Robert Wilson, a fourteenth-century Scottish sailor cast ashore on an undiscovered America after a storm at sea. As the novel unfolds, however, it shifts to other narrators, including Iskifa Ahalopa, an anompolichi, or wordmaster. Allen argued that one of the innovations of this novel is the use of long passages describing characters' approaches to the earthworks, a history of walking tethered to indigenous sovereignty, community building, and trade networks—rather than that of the relatively more well known Jacksonian Removal. As Allen observed, [End Page 293] this tactile technique grounds a "prehistorical" narrative—a narrative that, as the Amazon blurb informs its potential buyers, occurs in "the New World long before history recorded its discovery." Allen's invitation to walk indigenous earthwork cities represented in Anompolichi was echoed more broadly in panels that retraced American performance histories and their racial legacies. Panels, roundtables, and plenaries addressed multiple forms of historical sedimentation, including "Assemblages in Public" (chaired by Kelly Wisecup), where Elizabeth Mad-dock Dillon, Toni Wall Jaudon, and Duncan Faherty explored, respectively, how repetitions in performance and costume, material objects, and print culture shaped configurations of public meaning making. Furthermore, the roundtable "Antiracist Early American Studies" (chaired by Brigitte Fielder), with presentations by Molly Farrell, Jason M. Payton, Jonathan Senchyne, Karen Woods Weierman, and Christine "Xine" Yao, considered the challenges of resisting racist logics that linger within the spaces that form the everyday...