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...