Edward Watts Research Articles

Messy Beginnings: Postcoloniality and Early American Studies (review)

Reviewed by: Messy Beginnings: Postcoloniality and Early American Studies Stephen Shapiro Messy Beginnings: Postcoloniality and Early American Studies. Edited by Malini Johar Schueller and Edward Watts. New Brunswick, New Jersy: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Schueller and Watts choose their title well. The collection of essays “messes about” with the pre-1830 U.S. national imaginary by charting the “complex series of political negotiations, machinations, violent encounters, and legal maneuvers that attempted to define differences among various groups: the Puritan clergy, the emergent bourgeoisie, the white backwoodsmen, the mixed-bloods, American Indians, and African Americans” (5). Bringing together a dazzling group of mainly literary and cultural studies scholars (Laura Donaldson, Kristina Bross, Anna Mae Duane, Jennifer Rae Greeson, Geoffrey Sanborn, Michelle Burnham, Michael Drexler, Jim Egan, David S. Shields, Joanna Brooks, and the editors), Messy Beginnings also attempts to create a meeting ground wherein Early American Studies and Postcolonialist Studies, understood mainly through colonial discourse theory, can exchange theoretical and evidentiary insights with something less of the rancor and power inequities in the encounter between the historical agents of their respective objects of study. Schueller and Watts recognize the difficulty in this project given the imputation of bad faith on Americanists by those within Postcolonial Studies as simply another exercise of U.S. appropriation of the conceptual fruits of another field’s labor. Do studies about the experiences of settler nations’ agents deserve to be included within colonial studies? The contributors answer affirmatively by thoughtfully considering disciplinary questions through the prism of robust archival work and admirable reflection on their conceptual apparatus. With foci on Puritan Imperialism and First Peoples’ resistances; intraracial colonialisms around who may be included within whiteness; the co-implication of race and gender on nationalism; and transnational identifications, Messy Beginnings acts as the visiting card of a potential turn toward non-celebratory investigations into the pressures and limits of colonialism in the regions later nominated as the United States. As such, it ultimately highlights a constitutive paradox within the currently dominant mode of postcolonialist criticism. Early American Studies often appears as incompletely theorized and less immediately progressive in comparison to its contemporaneous humanities sub-fields. The fault lies not in the scholars attracted to the field, but the greater ideological and institutional restrictions placed upon them. Pre-nineteenth-century European studies have not been policed by the same degree as its U.S. peers because the hegemonic national imaginaries of other Western nation-states do not require these historical moments to so heavily legitimize the current regime, as is the case with the American fetish of an auratic Constitution and myth of consensualism. Whig history still does very well here. It was not always the case. A generation of progressivist historians had laid the foundations for a more analytical foundation. This scholarly habitus was contained by Cold War apologists for the American Century, often informed by Hannah Arendt’s claim that the American Revolution avoided the French Revolution’s “terror” as the early American political elite sagely choose not to inscribe the ideals of economic justice in the Constitution. In a moment when the “U.S.” once again connotes civilian bombing, torture of Geneva Rights conventions, and foreign policy by fantasy projection, it comes as no surprise that the wagons are being re-circled, and yet another round of Founding Father print and curatorial hagiographies is currently being prescribed to sedate any disturbance of public memory. I recite this capsule history mainly to contextualize the intellectual daring of Schueller, Watts, and their contributors under renewed conditions of adversity in an actively contested field in which scholars face the disadvantage of asymmetric corporate financing. The larger interest of Messy Beginnings for scholars outside of Early American Studies is how its essays wrestle with conceptual terminology to locate an often unarticulated problematic within postcolonialism and indicate a Kuhnian event horizon wherein existing theoretical paradigms can no longer bring coherence to new evidence. The points of pressure come most explicitly with the interlinked terms “postcolonial” and “hybridity.” While Schueller and Watts’ introduction adroitly charts out different strands in postcolonial studies, the general tendency within the collection is to veer toward Homi Bhabha’s work as the defining model, where discursive...

An American colony: regionalism and the roots of midwestern culture

The Old Northwest - the region now known as the Midwest - has been largely overlooked in American cultural history, represented as a place smoothly assimilated into the expanding, Manifestly Destined nation. An American Colony: Regionalism and the Roots of Midwestern Culture studies the primary texts and principal conflicts of the settlement of the Old Northwest to reveal that its entry into the nation's culture was not without problems. In fact, Edward Watts argues that it is best understood as a colony of the United States, just as the eastern states were colonies of the British Empire. Reconsidered as a colony, the Old Northwest becomes a crucible revealing the complex entanglement of local, indigenous, and regional interests with the coercions of racism, nationalism, and imperialism. This conflicted setting, like those of all settlement colonies, was beset by competing views of local identity, especially as they came to contradict writers from the eastern seaboard. Using postcolonial theories developed to describe other settlement colonies, An American Colony identifies the Old Northwest as a colony and its culture as less than fully participating in either the nation's or its own writing and identity. This embedded sense of cultural inferiority, Watts argues, haunts Midwestern culture even today.

America's Troubled Postcoloniality: Some Reflections from Abroad

America's Troubled Postcoloniality:Some Reflections from Abroad Gesa Mackenthun (bio) Until quite recently, postcolonial ideas have largely remained absent from American Studies. The opposite is also true: the United States, in spite of the fact that by far the most chairs for postcolonial studies are harbored by U.S. universities, has remained conspicuously absent from postcolonial studies readers and essay collections. This situation is beginning to change, and I want to spend the next few pages reflecting on the critical potential of postcolonial theory for the study of United States culture and history. There is hardly an agreement within scholarship as to the postcolonial qualities of United States culture. The authors of The Empire Writes Back notoriously raised the United States to a postcolonial model country, dating its postcoloniality to the revolutionary period (Ashcroft, Griffiths, Tiffin 2 and 16). American Studies scholars Lawrence Buell and Edward Watts followed suit in stressing a series of analogies between antebellum literature and the literature of recently decolonized countries in Africa and the Caribbean (Buell, "American"; Buell, "Melville"), or in deducing the "postcoloniality" of early American novels striving for a national form from their similarity with the narrative modes of recent postcolonial novels (Watts). Most monographies of postcolonial theory, however—like those by Elleke Boehmer, Ania Loomba, or Bart Moore-Gilbert, exclude the United States from their study of postcolonial literature, referring, as Boehmer does, to the fact that America "won [End Page 34] independence long before other colonial places, and its literature has therefore followed a very different trajectory" (Boehmer 4). One possibility to deal with the situation is to ignore the "different trajectory" of U.S. history and establish transhistorical analogies between the literary texts of recently decolonized countries in Africa, India, and the Caribbean and the early national literature of the United States. But Lawrence Buell, who juxtaposes classic U.S. writers such as Cooper, Thoreau and Emerson with "third world" writers like Achebe, Rushdie and Ngugi, would seem to tread difficult ground, both historically and morally. In his essay "American Literary Emergence as a Postcolonial Phenomenon," Buell accordingly raises doubts about his own method. Referring to the "link between American postcolonialism and American imperialism," he concludes that Cooper, for example "played the postcolonial to the extent that he deferred to Scott's plot forms, but he played the imperialist to the extent that his own narratives reflected and perpetuated the romance of American expansionism" (Buell, "American" 435). With a more sobering, and less theatrical, view of the ideological function of "romance," Eric Cheyfitz, in his contribution to Cultures of United States Imperialism (ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease), reads The Pioneers's discourse on property and removal alongside the imperialist logic of the Supreme Court ruling Johnson vs. McIntosh that inaugurated the Jacksonian removal policy. He concentrates on Cooper's "romantic" translation of a colonial property conflict between Native Americans and the United States into a post-revolutionary inter-European conflict to which the Indians serve as mere spectators (Cheyfitz 118). Cheyfitz's essay alerts us to the fact that Buell's analogy between the postcolonial United States and postcolonial Africa, in indigenizing the European immigrants, denies the previous and ongoing existence of indigenous cultures in America. Buell's Emersonian reading of Melville's writings, moreover (he reads Redburn as a mental act of decolonization from the cultural dominance of England), reduces Melville's transnational anti-imperialist vision to a tête-à-tête with the mother country and ignores the text's references to slavery, the middle passage, and Indian dispossession (Buell, "Melville"). And finally, his choice of contemporary African literature in constructing a transhistorical comparison with early America's struggle for cultural independence symptomatically effaces the historical importance of Africa and African people in the constitution of early American society, culture, and literature (for a reading of the Africanist presence in Redburn, see Karcher). In casting the postcoloniality of the United States in purely bilateral terms, Buell thus downplays his own insight, stated more [End Page 35] systematically by Peter Hulme, that the Early Republic, in combining a postrevolutionary political consciousness with a heightened effort to continue the European project of imperial expansion, was "postcolonial and colonizing...

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. …