Something Else: The Politics of Early American Literature

Abstract

Early American literature is as dry as it is dusty, arcane as it is archival. sThese cruel prejudices have meant that intellectual interest in aesthetics has often been ceded to later periods such as modernist studies and postmodern culture, each with its own eponymous journal, where likes Marcel Duchamp overturned urinals along with conventional ideas about what was beautiful and functional. Aesthetes were to be found strolling along avenues European capitals, not struggling for subsistence in backwaters New World. Americanists, and especially early Americanists, might be forgiven for thinking that aesthetic concerns were merely ornamental matters when they already had such meaty issues as mercantilism and colonialism on their plates. On those rare occasions when literary historians ventured to discuss aesthetic concerns, discussion seemed invariably to include apologies for deadening couplets iambic pentameter or turgidity neoclassical prose. Few introductory courses in American literature wade into dense sea allusions found in Mercy Otis Warren's poetry. Although something an exaggeration, this portrait has given critics permission to ignore frilly distractions and concentrate directly on that have been part a New World landscape ever since Columbus first sent a postcard back to Ferdinand and Isabella and reported that natives West Indies seemed docile enough to make good slaves. By this account field, steadfast commitment to historicity early American literature has been a fortunate necessity. The consequence, however, has been to push aesthetics to wings, and in process a looser notion politics, one intimately bound up with aesthetics, has been overlooked. This looser consists neither legislative governmental acts nor other means governing, such as war. Phrased in more positive terms, this more porous but harder-to-detect encompasses a wide range human activity, including but not limited to matters popular culture, sexuality, feeling, race, bios, and, course, aesthetics. These concerns take shape as the of, a phrase indicating diverse zones inquiry that might seem only marginally related to empirical or theoretical work conducted in departments political science (Chuh 194). Ancillary perhaps but all same: of entails more than Max Weber's definition as legitimation state violence, since focus on cultural and not just state opens out onto formations power that often only become visible within aesthetic representation. Visual spectacle, sexual seduction, imagination, and stylistic matters, just to name a few instantiations aesthetics examined in this special issue, exemplify importance widening to cultural politics. But if, as Edward Cahill argues, aesthetics are both a type political discourse and something separate from politics (12), it also has been case that second half this statement has exercised more influence over practitioners early American studies. When conceived as strawman arguments that equate beautiful and other sensate categories with excuses for class hierarchy and depoliticization, aesthetics are crudely dismissed as a political dodge. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon challenges this view by conceiving aesthetics as a material repository that creates shared pleasure and recognition (387) even among antagonists as sharply opposed as a British colonial officer and a Native American Pontiac's army. Her effort extends beyond politicizing what had been depoliticized by previous generations academic readers; instead, like her colleagues here, Dillon looks to repoliticize aesthetics, expanding its register to include cultural practices such as bibliomancy and gift exchange. Other essays complement this trajectory, using aesthetics as wedge to enlarge zone political to encompass theatergoing (as in Wendy Bellion's essay), moral calculations freedom (as in Abram van Engen's essay), and imaginative speculation (as in Christopher Castiglia's essay). …