American Self Research Articles

Wilderness and the Natural Environment: Margaret Atwood's Recycling of a Canadian Theme (review)

By these rules, too, Maxine Hong Kingston, a 'preeminent Asian American teller','recyclesalien storiesand resellsthem to Americanconsumers'(p. Io6). Amy Tan's storyin TheJoy LuckClubof how An-mei Hsu's mother cut, and cooked, her own flesh in hopes of curing her sickmother-in-law, amounts to shock-horror(not to say in-house) orientalism (p. 15). Further evidence, for Ma, includes literary representationsof pidgin English, the commodification of Asian food, and above all, perhaps, the inter-eroticizations of Asian and white bodies. Even Carlos Bulosan, for all the workerradicalismof his autobiography,American Is In TheHeart (1943;repr.Seattle:Universityof WashingtonPress, 1973)is accusinglyinvokedfor acknowledginga wish to write about Filipino-whitesexual relationship('interracial ethnicity'Ma callsit (p. 84)). In one senseyou do, or do not, go alongwith thiskindof critique:'representation' as all or nothing and up the mark or otherwise. Certainly it poses a whole slew of questions.What rightsof imaginingis the writerto be allowed?Is therealwayssome template, a quarryof sacrosanctAsian myth, which must be observed?If you read literatureas a kind of by-the-book ideological litmus test are you not in danger of forgettingall the otherfacetsof its inventing? Nor does Ma win confidenceby his own writing.He opens, dismayingly,with the following: 'In Asian American studies, few critics have engaged texts in order to construct immigrant subjectivities, which become the Other in the Manichean division to formulate the (Asian)American Self' (p. I). Is that what you do with texts?It soundslikecriticismby bottom-shelfsociologese. Barelya word is given to how Kingston, Tan, Hwang, or, among others,Bharati Mukherjee or Kazuo Ishiguro (damned, more or less, in Remains of TheDay, for depicting an end-of-empire, moribund England, as against some diasporicJapan), engage by theirfeats of imagination and voice. What would Ma make of the whole Asian American postmodern turn, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, say, or Jessica Hagedorn? Certainly Kingston's Trickmaster Monkey he reads by inflating selective (and to be sure sinophobic and debasing)images of the Asian body into the whole, yet with the barest acknowledgement of the irony, the self-irony, of Wittman Ah Sing as the viewpoint in play. These energies doubtlessmake a lesserfactorfor Ma than ideology. They should not. For they lie behind, and beyond, 'representation', Asian or otherwise, and whetherup to Ma's ideological measureor not. NIHON UNIVERSITY, TOKYO A. ROBERT LEE Wilderness andtheNaturalEnvironment: Margaret Atwood's Recycling ofa Canadian Theme. By VERENABUHLER ROTH. (Swiss Studies in English, I24) Tubingen and Basel:Francke. 1998. viii + 206 pp. DM 68. Wilderness,once the literaryemblem of Canada's distinctivenational identity, has disappearedfromMargaretAtwood's novels of the I99os, TheRobber BrideandAlias Grace.However, 'nothing has happened, really, that hasn't happened before' as Atwood remarkedin her short story 'WildernessTips' and as Verena Buhler Roth shows in her investigation of the returnof the wildernessmotif in Atwood's fiction from the mid I98os to the early I990S after an absence of over ten years. Her argumentis thatthisis a recyclabletheme and thatAtwood's emphaseshave shifted between I970 and I990 so that her representationsof wildernessin TheHandmaid's Tale,Cat'sEye,and Wilderness Tipsoutline a differentagenda and indeed signalsome seriouslate-twentieth-centuryanxietiesabout Canadian identity,genderissues,and ecological crises. Roth's focus is on textual representationsof wildernessas literary By these rules, too, Maxine Hong Kingston, a 'preeminent Asian American teller','recyclesalien storiesand resellsthem to Americanconsumers'(p. Io6). Amy Tan's storyin TheJoy LuckClubof how An-mei Hsu's mother cut, and cooked, her own flesh in hopes of curing her sickmother-in-law, amounts to shock-horror(not to say in-house) orientalism (p. 15). Further evidence, for Ma, includes literary representationsof pidgin English, the commodification of Asian food, and above all, perhaps, the inter-eroticizations of Asian and white bodies. Even Carlos Bulosan, for all the workerradicalismof his autobiography,American Is In TheHeart (1943;repr.Seattle:Universityof WashingtonPress, 1973)is accusinglyinvokedfor acknowledginga wish to write about Filipino-whitesexual relationship('interracial ethnicity'Ma callsit (p. 84)). In one senseyou do, or do not, go alongwith thiskindof critique:'representation' as all or nothing and up the mark or otherwise. Certainly it poses a whole slew of questions.What rightsof imaginingis the writerto be allowed?Is therealwayssome template, a quarryof sacrosanctAsian myth, which must be...

Pedagogies of Self in American and Japanese Early Childhood Education: A Critical Conceptual Analysis

Recognizing that early childhood education in the United States has been influenced deeply by notions of developmentally appropriate practice, this critical conceptual analysis of early education discourse in the United States and Japan contrasts the cultural assumptions and views of self that inform early childhood education discourse in each context. Although early childhood education in Japan can be characterized as highly progressive and centered, at the same time it is not developmentalist and it envisions the self principally in terms of culturally valued qualities of personhood. In contrast, discourses on the self in the United States emphasize a construct of the individual defined with an emphasis on differences across discrete developmental domains, in which the whole child is essentially lost. The critique also considers how development expertise contributes to emotional impoverishment in teachers' relations with children as well as to inaccuracies of educators' self-percepti...

The End of Identity: Philip Roth's American Pastoral

With American Pastoral Roth completes the assimilation story his fiction has previously been telling by rendering judgment upon its naive hopefulness. In rewriting Zuckerman's story through the story of Swede Levov, Roth rewrites his Zuckerman œuvre to stage a reconciliation with the Jewish past his fiction has struggled to escape. Through his identification with Swede, Zuckerman at last surrenders to the demands of the Jewish father. When Swede dies we understand that Zuckerman in a sense has died too. Zuckerman's performing American self inhabits Swede's corpse to identify the Jew who remains.

Race and the Yankee: Woodworth's The Forest Rose

Race and the Yankee: Woodworth's The Forest Rose Jeffrey H. Richards Samuel Woodworth's musical play, TTie Forest Rose (1825), was one of the most successful American dramas on stage before Uncle Tom's Cabin, ana, according to Richard Moody,the country's first"hit."1 For at least forty years, TheForestRose held the boards and provided a number of actors with a star vehicle for its Yankee part, Jonathan Ploughboy. So popular did it prove, in fact,that a run ofover 100 performances in London was recorded with the famed American Yankee actor, Joshua Silsbee.2 Based on a type exploited successfully by Royall Tyler in The Contrast (1787) and used in other works, Jonathan in Woodworth's play would seem to be constructed ofthe same elements that make Tyler's Jonathan a loveable character: naivete, countrydialect, ineptitude, and a good heart. The stage success of The Forest Rose helped revitalize the male Yankee type, and the play's continued appearance in theaters coincided with the reign ofYankee characters in England and the United States.3 Unfortunately, however, some change has occurred between Tyler and Woodworth—or some latent tendencies brought forward—that reorients the familiar features into what seems now a less lovable character than Colonel Manly's waiter in The Contrast. Jonathan Ploughboy is an inept lover, but he is also a shrewd shopkeeper; a blunderer, yet a clever plotter. For David Grimsted, these post-Coriírasí developments of the type only confirm the Yankee's "essential pure-heartedness and his innate good sense."4 Like later Yankees, Ploughboy escapes opprobrium 33 34Comparative Drama on stage for his foibles by the "geniality" of his "calculating acquisitiveness ."5 Yet one development cannot be explained easily away in the notion of a simple, ultimately harmless, if "sharp" rustic. For above all, Woodworth's Jonathan is an out-and-out racist, whose signature comic line,"I would not serve a negro so,"has grim consequences for the literal Negro he does "serve so," Lid Rose. Indeed, Woodworth's comedy ofinnocent rural lovers threatened by the schemes of a low-minded urban aristocrat is built on a racial conception that illustrates how, only a few years after its premiere, minstrel shows would find a welcome home on the American stage. Although minstrel shows have received significant scholarly attention ,6 the presence of black characters in other pre-twentieth century American drama has not. When discussed at all, early drama is seen to exemplify some generic type, establish a character, or serve a national theme. The "stage darky" is, ofcourse, a recognized stereotype, but little has been done to examine the complexities of interaction the presence of such a character sometimes calls forth.7 The problem is stated most eloquentlybyToni Morrison in Playingin the Dark. Not content simply to mark texts by white writers as racist, she queries the whole literary critical enterprise for the way itlooks at—that is, does not see—what she calls "Africanism" in American works. As she defines the term, Africanism is the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed and powerful; not history-less, but historical; not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of destiny .8 In other words,Africanism, the marked but usually unnoted presence of a dark other, serves often to define whiteness in its desired characteristics . At the same time, however, as Morrison shows with works such as Willa Cather's Sapphira and theSlave Girlor Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, the narrative attempt to elide black characters often has unintended or surprising consequences. As Mark Twain recounts the process of writing Pudd'nhead Wilson, another troubled book on race, the mulatto character Roxy, a minor presence in the extended joke tale, "Those Extraordinary Twins," forced her way into the story so far as to JeffreyH. Richards35 compel the author to start over with a "tragedy," Pudd'nhead Wilson.9 Given Morrison's challenge, it seems well worth visiting a source ofmany Africanist characters, earlyAmerican drama, in order to explore the formation of a key white type, the stage...

Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship

Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and Trial of American Authorship. By Nancy Ruttenberg. (Stanford University Press,1998. Pp. x, 537. Cloth, $65.00; paper, $19.95.) Writing and Postcolonialism in Early Republic. By Edward Watts. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997. Pp. x, 225. $37.50.) In past decade, prompted in part by appearance of Gordon Wood's magisterial The Radicalism of American Revolution, recent historiography surrounding developing early republic has begun to reexamine efforts of a republican elite to create a distinctive American identity. While more scholarly attention has been focused on how seeds of democratization planted by Revolution would come to full fruit in years after 1800, and in process slowly create a distinctive American literary identity, most notably in Cathy Davidson's Revolution and Word (1986), Richard Brown's Knowledge is Power (1989), and Larzer Ziff s Writing in New Nation ( 1991), less attention has been paid to what Henry Adams called the literary class of United States. That class, and struggle to create a distinctive national literature, are twin subjects of Edward Watts and Nancy Ruttenberg in their recent studies of American literature and culture. Ruttenberg's work is more sophisticated and illuminating. Democratic Personality examines psychosocial realm, literary and social representation of what she terms impulse. Focusing on public speech and a developing independent American voice, Ruttenberg examines Salem Witch Trials and finds that concept of individual action not only created a crisis of credibility for ministry but had been laid by Protestant Reformation. Ruttenberg contends that democratization of American self is further in evidence during upheaval caused by George Whitefield and Great Awakening. Examining expanded sense of individuality in such writers as Charles Brockden Brown, J. Hector St. John Crevecouer, James Fenimore Cooper, and Herman Melville, Ruttenberg posits that personality critically influenced development and rise of a truly national literature. The connection between that emerging voice and advent of a truly democratic voice in our early national literature gradually develops in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, creating an American aesthetic of innocence, a fictional representation of that personality that sought to reconcile powerful tensions involved in struggle to create a national literature. Of course, like many other scholars, Ruttenberg finds our national literature scattered with characters who resist incorporation, figures whose expanded sense of individuality and sense of self led them into a world that can be at once both terrifying and liberating. The heroic backwoodsman Natty Bumppo, as Leslie Fiedler reminded us many years ago, is seminal figure in our early fiction, and his character is transfer point, asserts Ruttenberg, between dying republican elite culture and ascendant democratic one. …

Interpreting the Self: Two Hundred Years of American Autobiography

In this ambitious study, Diane explores the historical nature of self-narrative. Examining over 100 American autobiographers published in the last two centuries, she discusses not only well-known autobiographies such as Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie but also many obscure ones such as a traveling book peddler, a minstrel, a hotel proprietress, an itinerant preacher, a West Point cadet, and a hoopskirt wire manufacturer. draws on the colorful stories of these autobiographers to show how their historical epoch shapes their understandings of A refreshingly welcome approach to this intriguing topic. . . . [Bjorklund's] extensive and systematic approach to her source material is impressive and enriches our understanding of this essential subject. Virginia Quarterly Review Bjorklund studies both famous and obscure writers, and her clear prose style and copious quotations provide insight into the many aspects of the changing American self. Library Journal

Prejudice: The Target's Perspective

J.K. Swim and C. Stangor, Introduction. Encountering Prejudice: L.F. Barrett and J.K. Swim, Appraisals of Prejudice and Discrimination. J.K. Swim, L.L. Cohen, and L.L. Hyers, Experiencing Everyday Prejudice and Discrimination. M. LaFrance and J.A. Woodzicka, No Laughing Matter: Women's Verbal and Nonverbal Reactions to Sexist Humor. Consequences of Prejudice: J. Aronson, D.M. Quinn, and S.J. Spencer, Stereotype Threat and the Academic Underperformance of Minorities and Women. C. Stangor and G.B. Sechrist, Conceptualizing the Determinants of Academic Choice and Task Performance Across Social Groups. D.M. Quinn and J. Crocker, Vulnerability to the Affective Consequences of the Stigma of Overweight. K.W. Allison, Stress and Oppressed Social Category Membership. K. Truax, D.I. Cordova, A. Wood, E. Wright, and F. Crosby, Undermined? Affirmative Action From the Targets' Point of View. Coping With Prejudice: C.T. Miller and A.M. Myers, Compensating for Prejudice: How Heavyweight People (And Others) Control Outcomes Despite Prejudice. B. Major and T. Schmader, Coping With Stigma Through Psychological Disengagement. N.R. Branscombe and N. Ellemers, Coping with Group-Based Discrimination: Individualistic Versus Group-Level Strategies. W.E. Cross, Jr., and L. Strauss, The Everyday Functions of African American Identity. D. Oyserman and K. Harrison, Implications of Cultural Context: African American Identity and Possible Selves. K. Deaux and K.A. Ethier, Negotiating Social Identity. Index.

Magawisca's Body of Knowledge: Nation-Building in Hope Leslie

Magawisca’s Body of Knowledge: Nation-Building in Hope Leslie Gustavus Stadler (bio) It has now become something of a critical commonplace in American cultural and literary studies to argue that the conceptual division between public and private spheres—a paradigm which has been particularly influential in work on the antebellum era—is artificial, ideological, and largely designed to enforce a social hierarchy between the genders. It has even been persuasively argued that the repeated critique of this binarism by feminist and other critics has unintentionally helped to maintain its authority. 1 But before doing away with this dualism as a frame of analysis, we might be wise to attend to our writers’ and critics’ continuing preoccupation with it (and with its deconstruction), one which I believe dates back to the earliest decades of the nation. By “preoccupation” I mean to emphasize the service these categories have provided for a rhetoric of fantasy, of imaginations of the self and its ability (or lack of ability) to act and to speak as a citizen, as an American self, in an American nation and culture. A particular branch of this genealogy of fantasy, usually found in work by liberal Euro-American writers, constructs people of color as mediating, critical figures in the always already problematic schema of public and private life. 2 For a liberal, white writer, such a figure is embedded with deconstructive force, because he or she appears to wear the social on his or her skin—his or her very body is infused with a degree of cultural conflict which threatens the distinction between politics and the personal before s/he has uttered a word. Within this tradition, these characters of color, by means of the sensations and particularities that make up their selfhood, become the means of the author’s general critique of the national configuration of public and private. This usually means, more nearly, framing an issue as confined to the private sphere of individual deliberation—a sphere which masks the fact that certain individuals’ deliberations are taken more seriously than others—and demanding the interposition of a public debate, a public conscience. Thus, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the horrific spectacle of whipped black bodies, especially Uncle Tom’s, is meant to dramatize the inappropriateness of leaving the slavery question up to individuals, individual families, or individual regions of the nation. Catherine Sedgwick’s 1827 novel Hope Leslie is a still earlier instance of a slightly different take on the private/public dualism. By investing remarkable narrative authority in an Indian woman, Magawisca, this historical novel of early New England dramatizes public issues, primarily the colony’s relations with native people, as foundational for the actualization of a model of private subjectivity suited to the proto-United States. The novel tells a revisionary history of the nation to its antebellum readership, one in [End Page 41] which the privacy of Americans was secured through fascination with, and attacks on, the bodies of Indians. It thus attempts to ensure a place for corporeality, for embodied struggle, in the history of the nation. Sedgwick, the daughter of one-time Speaker of the House of Representatives Theodore Sedgwick, was intimate with the public life of the young nation, and grew up in a house which offered her many more opportunities for cultural growth than most families and schools of the time. 3 Influenced like many of her contemporaries by the writings of Maria Edgeworth, her first two novels followed the parameters of “literary domesticity,” a phrase coined by Mary Kelley to describe the interest of many antebellum female writers in fiction set in the home, often telling the story of a young girl’s rise into virtuous womanhood. 4 In 1826, perhaps buoyed by readings of Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok (1824) and the early volumes of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, Sedgwick set out to write a novel of early America turning on the presence of native characters. While the novel is set in the colonial era that many writers of the antebellum era found so appealing, it also alludes implicitly to the debates taking place in her time over forced Indian removal, especially of the Cherokees...

Her Wild American Self

Her Wild American Self

Beloved: Ideologies in Conflict, Improvised Subjects

My father, by his nature, as well as by the habit of transacting business as a skil[l]ful mechanic, had more of the feelings of a freeman than is common among slaves. My brother was a spirited boy; being brought up under such influences, he early detested the name of master mistress. One day, when his father his mistress happened to call him at the same time, he hesitated between the two[,] being perplexed to know which had the strongest claim upon his obedience. He finally concluded to go to his mistress. When my father reproved him for it, he said, You both me, I didn't know which I ought to go to first. You are my child, replied our father, and when I call you, you should come immediately, if you have to pass through fire water. (Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl 9) Introduction This excerpt from Harriet Jacobs's narrative is a striking depiction of dual interpellation under the slave system. Under North American Caribbean slavery, slaves were being called by at least two competing systems: European American, white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy the broken system of communal West African(1) cultural beliefs practices. Slave traders slave masters were attempting to re-interpellate as slaves the already interpellated subjects of West African social, political, religious systems - in other words, to transform subjects into slaves. At the same time, they were attempting to interpellate from birth those of African descent born into slavery. In both cases, West African cultural mores practices also operated, fostering a culture of resistance within the black community. By reading the conflict of interpellating systems in Toni Morrison's Beloved, I hope to show how the novel intervenes in current debates about black subjectivity, helping to define a position for the black subject between essentialism postmodern fragmentation. Because Morrison is explicitly concerned with the formation of black subjectivity, both individual communal, it is appropriate to compare her representation of this process to contemporary theoretical writings about subject formation. If one examines Morrison's representation of subjectivity-in-process in this context, it is clear that her work bears a resemblance to Louis Althusser's influential theory of ideology interpellation, but it also challenges two significant assumptions which underlie Althusser's theory: the assumption of cultural homogeneity the belief in most subjects' tacit consent to ideology's demands. Morrison's representation of slave/black subjectivity-in-process shines a light through the cracks that appear in Althusser's theory as soon as it is applied to an actual social formation. Thus, after discussing Beloved, I close this essay with a critique of Althusser's Ideology Ideological State Apparatuses a discussion of improvisation as a model for human agency-in-resistance.(2) In Beloved, the capitalist, racial-caste system of American slavery operates by dismembering, both figuratively literally, the body spirit of the slave. The subjugated system of West African beliefs practices, in which family members who have died are kept alive in memory through ritual observances in which nature is an aspect of the Divine,(3) continues in its claim upon kidnaped Africans also reaches out to their enslaved descendants. The sites at which these two systems come into conflict are the sites at which black identities are formed, maintained, transformed. It is through improvisation, a common element of West African verbal musical styles infused into black New World culture by African captives their descendants,(4) that the characters in Beloved integrate themselves as whole beings in the face of the white-supremacist, capitalist system which threatens to pull them apart. Morrison invokes the practices of verbal musical improvisation as signs expressions of African American selfhood agency. …

Sarah kemble knight and the construction of the American self

(1998). Sarah kemble knight and the construction of the American self. Women's Studies: Vol. 28, Early American Woman Writers: The Gendering of Nationality Identity, pp. 7-27.

Political fiction and the American self

Examining political novels that have achieved (or been denied) canonical status, John Whalen-Bridge demonstrates how Herman Melville, Jack London, Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Margaret Atwood have grappled with the problem of balancing radicalism and art. He shows that some books are more political than others, that some political novelists are more skillful than others, and that readers must allow for basic working distinctions between politics and aesthetics if we are to make useful judgments about which political novels to read - and why.

Is There An American Self?

Making the Self, the title of Daniel Walker Howe's new book, is potentially misleading. Seeing it on display at a recent Studies Association convention, I expected a work influenced by cultural studies and the linguistic turn in intellectual history-a work focusing on the construction of identities and of race, class, gender, and ethnicity. I assumed that the American Self referred to in the title was ironic, and that Howe's book would be devoted to debunking the notion that such a thing has ever existed or, at the very least, revealing it to be a discursive fiction that has obscured the many ways Americans have constructed their identities in the past. But Howe has written a very different kind of book. Rejecting the analytic tools and ironic posture of postmodernism, he has produced a lucid, elegant example of conventional intellectual history. His title is meant to be taken literally. It refers to a model of autonomous selfhood that was widely shared by Americans during the early national and antebellum eras-so widely shared, in his view, that it merits being called the American Self. At a time when most scholars organize their work around differences, conflict, or dissent, Howe's focus on shared values and ideals is unusual. In many ways, this is a book reminiscent of consensus history, playing down the differences among the figures he has chosen to examine and scrupulously omitting voices who might have given it a more cacophonous air. This approach will leave many historians-especially social historians-dissatisfied. But there are also virtues to his approach that make the book important and extremely suggestive.

Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln

Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln

Book Reviews

Sandra Whitworth Feminism and International RelationsArthur H. Miller and Bruce E. Gronbeck (eds.) Presidential Campaigns and American Self ImagesAlbert Somit and Steven A. Peterson (eds.) Research in BiopoliticsRonald A. Heifetz Leadership Without Easy Answers

Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln

Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln

Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln

Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln

Making the American self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln

Journal of the History of the Behavioral SciencesVolume 34, Issue 3 p. 321-322 Book Review Making the American self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln Norma Basch, Corresponding Author Norma Basch Rutgers University, Newark, Conklin Hall, Newark NJ 07102Rutgers University, Newark, Conklin Hall, Newark NJ 07102Search for more papers by this author Norma Basch, Corresponding Author Norma Basch Rutgers University, Newark, Conklin Hall, Newark NJ 07102Rutgers University, Newark, Conklin Hall, Newark NJ 07102Search for more papers by this author First published: 07 December 1998 https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1520-6696(199822)34:3<321::AID-JHBS30>3.0.CO;2-TAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume34, Issue3Summer 1998Pages 321-322 RelatedInformation

Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln

Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln

Another Version: Michael S. Harper, William Clark, and the Problem of Historical Blindness

F. Jay Haynes, GREAT FALLS OF THE MISSOURI RIVER, 1880. Courtesy Montana Historical Society. A n o t h e r V e r s i o n : Mic h a e l S. Ha r p e r , Willia m C la r k , a n d t h e Pr o b lem o f H is t o r ic a l Bl in d n e s s E l i z a b e t h D o d d In the many literary versions of the American West, “facts”— historical events— may seem to stand out as famous landmarks, like stone outcroppings along the Oregon Trail. As perspective changes, historical facts reflect the midday sun or are bathed in late-light sub­ tlety; they are both the lone tree along the Platte that everybody sees and the elusive city of gold that no one can find. Black poet Michael S. Harper has maintained a keen interest in American history throughout the three decades of his publishing career, ranging from events in the Civil Rights Era-South to Colonial New England to Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase. In the living body of his poems, his­ torical events are often the hard, sharp irritants which, as in the freshwater mussel, induce layer after layer of response. Writing of Harper’s latest collection, Honorable Amendments, Judith Kitchen identifies this demand for response as a challenge for readers to change our lives. Kitchen says, “We do not know what we need to know to read these poems, and somehow our not knowing is a part of the way they open up the world. First, we are asked to realize how little we know of what has shaped this country; second, we are treated to what we do know from another perspective; third, we are asked— no, required— to alter our own perceptions to encom­ pass those of the poems” (399). Not only in the poems themselves do we find the “requirement” that Harper makes of readers; in an interview, Harper once said, “I think the important thing about Americans is that they’re not very good historians. And Americans are really bad historians when it comes to moral ideas because they can’t keep them in their heads very long.. . . [0]ne of the things you ought to realize is that my vantage point on American letters is a bit askew because the dualism I bring to it is one, I think, any ethnic who is fairly conscious brings to a reading of mainstream America” (“Interview” 119). W A L 3 3 (1 ) S p r in g 1 9 9 8 While Harper clearly invokes DuBois, perhaps most obviously in two poems published in the 1970s, chanting refrains like “doubleconscious brother in the veil” and “double-conscious sister in the veil,” he goes on to fully embrace the question of how “the question of the color line” has shaped American history and shadows its future.1 Harper suggests that in order to enter our own history, American readers— white and minority alike— must not only look behind the veil of race but learn to look from behind it— that is, through it. Double-consciousness may be necessary, Harper implies, to achieve full consciousness, what he also calls “conscientiousness” (“Man/ Woman” 60). Harper describes himself as “an initiate of subjective correlative; that is, a slant affinity to modernism as practiced by the innovators. I am immersed in redefinitions and refinements of ‘an American self’” (Rowell 785). While much of Harper’s work is centered in the East, where he has lived for nearly three decades, often treating African and Native American figures, he has also extended his redefinitions to address the nation’s myth of the West. Though he has touched on the ideas of political and geographic expansion elsewhere, a single, brief, per­ plexing poem deserves close attention from students of western American literature and history.2 Examining the famous Meriwether Lewis and William Clark exploration in a poem titled “Clark’s Way West: Another Version,” Harper presents his “askew” vision of Jeffer­ sonian America’s dream of empire. From the center of his first book, Dear John...