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WORK TITLE: Commons Democracy
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BIRTHDATE: 7/20/1962
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https://as.vanderbilt.edu/english/bio/dana-nelson * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana_D._Nelson
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born July 20, 1962.
EDUCATION:Indiana University of Pennsylvania, B.A., 1984; Michigan State University, M.A., 1986, Ph.D., 1989.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Educator, writer. Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English and American studies, 2009-, English Department chair. Has also taught at University of Kentucky, Duke University, University of Washington, and Louisiana State University. J19: The Journal for Nineteenth-Century Americanists, coeditor.
AWARDS:Outstanding Academic Book of 1992-1993, Choice, for The Word in Black and White: Reading “Race” in American Literature, 1638-1867.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to professional journals.
SIDELIGHTS
Dana D. Nelson is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English and American studies at Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University. In addition to her academic work, Nelson is a well-known progressive advocate, promoting citizenship and democracy and questioning the increasing power placed in the American presidency. In her research, Nelson focuses on early American literature as it reflects and explores the responsibilities of citizenship and the basics of democracy.
Nelson is the author of four books on these topics: The Word in Black and White: Reading “Race” in American Literature, 1638-1867, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men, Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People, and Commons Democracy: Reading the Politics of Participation in the Early United States.
The World in Black and White
Nelson’s first book, the 1992 work The World in Black and White, deals with the issue of race as it is depicted in early American literature from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. She traces the roots of racism, beginning with the European story of white supremacy. Nelson argues that when the Copernican revolution replaced the earth with the sun as the center of our universe, the Europeans actually sought to replace that diminished role for humanity (taken as “white” men at the time) with the myth of white superiority, which in turn legitimized European colonialism in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific. Nelson examines texts of the late seventeenth century to show the importance of this notion in establishing a national identity in the American colonies. She goes on from there to examine frontier romances, again romanticizing the role of the white man in bringing civilization and further legitimizing the genocide of Native Americans. Nelson further discusses texts from authors such as Robert Montgomery Bird, James Fenimore Cooper, Cotton Mather, and Herman Melville, among others.
Reviewing The Word in Black and White in African American Review, Gary Ashwill noted: “Nelson notes perceptively that the presence of resisting voices among the Anglo American colonialists demonstrates that American racism is not ‘a practice already provided for by preexisting social, political, and economic institutions,’ but rather an ongoing, continual invention, structured to make itself seem prior and given. … The somewhat presentist assumptions underlying The Word in Black and White, which are related to Nelson’s grounding of the book as a response to contemporary racism, make the study interestingly, and courageously, self-reflexive.” Mississippi Quarterly reviewer Theresa M. Towner also had a positive assessment of the work, commenting: “I will say at the outset how impressed I am by the sheer scope of Nelson’s inquiry (1638-1867) and the detailed critical research that undergirds her thesis. Of course she does not purport to survey comprehensively; rather, she offers up sociological criticism as a uniquely sensitive tool with which to probe the evolving American definition of race. She is very good at reading the racial dynamics at work in individual texts. … Even her endnotes make interesting and informative reading; The Word in Black and White is uniformly ambitious and provocative.”
National Manhood
Nelson again questions the role of whites—in this case specifically white males—in the establishment of the groundwork for national belonging in the United States in her 1998 study, National Manhood. “Nelson confronts these questions by arguing that white manhood is a constitutive element of the U.S.’s central forms of social organization like representative democracy, presidentialism, and capitalism,” according to Mississippi Quarterly reviewer Mike Millner, who added: “One might understand National Manhood as a map of the nation’s homogenizing forces and the ways in which race, class, and gender were organized around a particular national imaginary.” Nelson looks at writings from Thomas Jefferson to the journals of Lewis and Clark and the novels of George Lippard and Herman Melville.
Reviewing National Manhood in Social History, Kristin Hoganson had praise, observing: “Given that Nelson identifies herself as a literary critic, it comes as no surprise that the greatest strengths of her book lie in its close readings, which are often imaginative and insightful. … Although Nelson casts her book as a contribution to literary and cultural studies, she has gone beyond literary and theoretical materials to read widely in historical scholarship.” Early American Literature reviewer Robert S. Levine also had praise, calling this an “ambitious” book and further commenting that “Nelson puts gender at the center of her revisionary study of national and racial genealogies in the Jeffersonian tradition.” Levine added: “[Nelson’s study] is a rich, deeply researched book, a model of interdisciplinary cultural studies that is for the most part highly successful in providing new ways of thinking about the place of race, gender, nation, and class in American literature and culture. It is also something more than an intelligent and challenging critical examination: it is a jeremiad of sorts that makes a passionate call for the revitalization of democratic citizenship.”
Bad for Democracy and Commons Democracy
In Bad for Democracy, Nelson notes that there has been a tradition in American politics from the beginnings of the nation to expand the powers of the president. This is in part due to the fact that the citizens of the country look to the president not only as the unifier of the nation but also as its protector. Such a tendency, Nelson argues, is deeply antidemocratic and dangerous to the health of the republic, devaluing the role of the citizen voter in the oversight of the government. Nelson examines such presidential reach in administrations from that of George Washington to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. “This work is interesting, if not an important addition to the literature on presidential power,” noted Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries critic J.R. Hedtke.
In her 2016 work, Commons Democracy, Nelson once again employs early American literature to examine the populism of the early republic. She looks at the works of writers such as Hugh Henry Brackenridge, James Fenimore Cooper, Robert Montgomery Bird, and Caroline Kirkland to inform a discussion of the role ordinary citizens took in the early years of the nation. She examines their participation in the making of state constitutions, but also their roles in resistance events such as the Whiskey Rebellion and the Anti-Rent War. Critiquing the book in the online Reviews in History, Mark Boonshoft commented: “Nelson’s Commons Democracy deserves the attention of a wide range of early republic scholars, especially those interested in literature, democracy, and the political practices of ordinary Americans. This vigorously argued book offers a coherent paradigm for understanding an important part of the early American democratic tradition. The field would do well to run with Nelson’s framework and explore the full range of commons democracy in the early republic.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
African American Review, summer, 1996, Gary Ashwill, review of The Word in Black and White: Reading “Race” in American Literature, 1638-1867, p. 286.
Artforum International, October, 2008 review of Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People, p. S5.
Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June, 2009, J.R. Hedtke, review of Bad for Democracy, p. 2026; June, 2016, E.J. Eisenach, review of Commons Democracy: Reading the Politics of Participation in the Early United States, p. 1546.
Early American Literature, winter, 2001, Robert S. Levine, review of National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men, p. 89.
Mississippi Quarterly, fall, 1993, Theresa M. Towner, review of The World in Black and White, p. 601; fall, 1999, Mike Millner, review of National Manhood, p. 716.
Reference & Research Book News, February, 2011, review of Bad for Democracy.
Social History, January, 2000, Kristin Hoganson, review of National Manhood, p. 110.
ONLINE
Reviews in History, http://www.history.ac.uk/ (October, 2016), Mark Boonshoft, review of Commons Democracy.
Vanderbilt University Web site, https://as.vanderbilt.edu/ (April 27, 2017), “Dana Nelson.”
Dana D. Nelson
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dana D. Nelson
Dana D Nelson.jpg
Born United States
Residence Nashville, Tennessee, United States
Citizenship United States
Fields English, American literature, Politics
Institutions Vanderbilt University
Alma mater Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Known for Bad for Democracy (2008)
Notable awards The Word in Black and White named Outstanding Academic Book of 1992–1993 by Choice
Dana D. Nelson is a professor of English[1] at Vanderbilt University and a prominent progressive advocate for citizenship[2] and democracy. She is notable for her criticism—in her books such as Bad for Democracy—of excessive presidential power and for exposing a tendency by Americans towards presidentialism, which she defines as the people's neglect of basic citizenship duties while hoping the president will solve most problems. Her scholarship focuses on early American literature relating to citizenship and democratic government.[2][3]
Contents [hide]
1 Academic career
2 Books, scholarship, activism
3 Publications
4 References
5 External links
Academic career[edit]
Nelson earned a bachelor's degree from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 1984[4] and master's (1986) and doctoral degrees (1989) from Michigan State University.[4][5] She was associate professor of English at the University of Kentucky in 1998.[6] Nelson's The Word in Black and White: Reading "Race" in American Literature, 1638–1867 was named the "an Outstanding Academic Book of 1992–1993 by Choice."[7] The book explored how eleven "Anglo-American authors constructed 'race'" including a study of The Last of the Mohicans and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and earned positive reviews.[7]
She taught at the University of Kentucky, Duke University, the University of Washington, and Louisiana State University.[7] In 2006, she co-edited with Russ Castronovo a collection of essays entitled Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics. One reviewer described the effort as an "ambitious, multi-disciplinary effort to make the subjective turn by warning against the danger of reducing democracy to 'an exclusively moral category that is no longer connected with political, economic, or social categories.'"[8] In 2007, she wrote an essay entitled "Democracy in Theory" in the journal of American Literary History.[3] She edited 19th century abolitionist Lydia Marie Child's A Romance of the Republic in 2003.[9]
In 2009, Dana D. Nelson is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt professor of English and American studies at Vanderbilt University.[10][11] She teaches U.S. literature,[12] history, and culture and courses that connect activism, volunteering, and citizenship.[10] She has lectured at colleges such as Purdue University[2] and the University of Kentucky.[13] She has published numerous books, essay collections, and articles on U.S. literature and the history of citizenship and democratic culture.[10] Nelson lives in Nashville where she is involved in a program that helps incarcerated women develop better decision-making skills and works with an innovative activist group fighting homelessness in the area.[10] Nelson is co-editor of the academic journal J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.[14]
Books, scholarship, activism[edit]
In her 2008 book Bad for Democracy,[2][15] Nelson criticizes presidentialism which she sees as worship of the presidency and federal politics to the exclusion of all else.[16][17] She believes the presidency has become too powerful.[16] She thinks the presidency has become a cult and is harmful for democracy.[18] One reviewer wrote that Nelson's conception was that presidentialism was a "result of the American citizenry's tendency to look to the sitting president as simultaneously a unifier of the citizenry and a protector from political threats."[12] Another reviewer wrote: "Bad for Democracy surveys the evolving role of the president in the national psyche, and examines how presidential powers have expanded far beyond the intentions of the Constitution's framers ... Nelson combines her analysis with a plea for a return to grassroots democracy and activism."[19]
Nelson explained in an interview: "My book argues that our habit of putting the president at the center of democracy and asking him to be its superhero works to deskill us for the work of democracy. And, it argues that the presidency itself has actually come to work against democracy."[10] She argues Americans tend to "super-size the presidency" and this is at odds with what the founding fathers might have wanted.[11] Newspaper columnist David Sirota wrote "this culture of 'presidentialism,' as Vanderbilt Professor Dana Nelson calls it, has justified the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretaps and a radical theory of the unitary executive that aims to provide a jurisprudential rationale for total White House supremacy over all government."[20] Nelson advocates a grassroots effort to restore democracy. She explained in 2009: "We stop waiting for someone else to do it for us. We organize together, using public spaces and the internet. We form blogs, we write letters to the editor, we show up at Congress, we protest, we call, we lobby, we boycott, we buycott, we email our representatives, we find supporters, we get them moving, we grow the movement. We ignore the idea that the right president will do it for us and find every way we can to do it ourselves. Great if the president will help but totally unnecessary."[10] Nelson has spoken on National Public Radio.[11]
She wrote an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times about the theory of the unitary executive. All presidents have striven to expand executive power but she cites Ronald Reagan who expanded unilateral powers and promised "undivided presidential control of the executive branch and its agencies" as well as adversarial relations with Congress.[21] Proponents of the unitary executive "want to expand the many existing uncheckable executive powers – such as executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements – that already allow presidents to enact a good deal of foreign and domestic policy without aid, interference or consent from Congress."[21] She added "each president since 1980 has used the theory to seize more and more power."[21]
She is writing Ugly Democracy which explores alternative notions of democracy and why they were lost from our "democratic archive for citizenship" and probes possible alternatives for today.[2]
Publications[edit]
2009, (pending; writing in progress), Ugly Democracy[2]
2008, Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People[5][15]
2007, "Democracy in Theory," American Literary History[3]
2005, AmBushed: On the Costs of Macht-Politik[5]
2003, (editor) A Romance of the Republic[9]
2002, (co-editor with Russ Castronovo), Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics[2][5][22]
2001, (co-edited with Houston Baker) Violence, the Body and The South
1998, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men[2][5][6]
1997, (editor) Lydia Maria Child, Romance of the Republic[5]
1994, Principles and Privilege: Two Women's Lives on a Georgia Plantation[5]
1993, Rebecca Rush, Kelroy[5][7]
1992, The Word in Black and White: Reading 'Race' in American Literature, 1638–1867[2][5]
Contact Information
Email
(615) 343-3185
332 Benson Science Hall
Office Hours
Tuesday and Thursday: by appointment.
Education
Ph.D. Michigan State University
Dana Nelson
Chair, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English
Co-Editor, J19: The Journal for Nineteenth Century Americanists
Representative publications
Books:
Commons Democracy: Reading the Politics of Participation in the Early United States. Fordham University Press, 2016.
Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People. Minnesota University Press, Fall 2008.
National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men. Duke University Press, 1998.
The Word in Black and White: Reading `Race' in American Literature, 1638-1867. Oxford Univ. Press, 1992.
Collections:
With Russ Castronovo. Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics. Duke Univ. Press, 2002.
Editions:
Lydia Maria Child, Romance of the Republic (1867). University Press of Kentucky, 1997.
Rebecca Rush, Kelroy, (1812). Oxford Univ. Press, 1993.
Dual edition of and Introduction to Frances Ann Kemble's Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation (1863) and her daughter Frances Butler Leigh's Residence on a Georgia Plantation (1883). Published as Principles and Privilege: Two Women's Lives on a Georgia Plantation. University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Journal:
Special issue. "AmBushed: On the Costs of Macht-Politik," South Atlantic Quarterly 15.1 (Jan. 2006), November 2005.
Special issue co-edited with Houston Baker. "Violence, the Body and The South," American Literature, 73.2 (June2001)
Nelson, Dana D.: Commons democracy: reading the politics of participation in the early United States
E.J. Eisenach
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.10 (June 2016): p1546.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
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Nelson, Dana D. Commons democracy: reading the politics of participation in the early United States. Fordham, 2015. 219p bibl index ISBN 9780823268382 cloth, $85.00; ISBN 9780823268399 pbk, $24.95; ISBN 9780823268429 ebook, contact publisher for price
53-4594
E310
MARC
Neo-populism is all the rage these days; Nelson (Vanderbilt) provides a nuanced historical and literary pedigree. The earliest settlers from England, having witnessed the destruction of common rights to forests, grazing lands, and game through enclosure, reestablished practices of "commoning" in America. These practices, whether inside (grazing, forests) or outside (squatting, rent-strikes, regulation, rebellion) the law, endorsed forms of democratic participation that integrated local values and economic practices with democratic political life. Fiction in the early 19th century captures the often tragic conflict between two sets of moral-political order represented by spontaneous back-country communal freedom and a new rational/individualist and capitalist/constitutional order. Fiction in the US often portrayed the former as benighted and semi-savage "white trash" awaiting the blessings of legal and rational enclosure. But the agents of progress, increasingly distant from their "holdings," were also portrayed as disguising their rapacity and the trails of their dislocated victims by celebrating a thin and abstract, representative democracy enshrined in the constitution. Missing in this analysis are the many utopian/religious experiments in this period and the reflections of Harold Bloom {The American Religion, 1992) and D. H. Lawrence (Studies in Classic American Literature, 1923). Summing Up: ** Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.--E. J. Eisenach, University of Tulsa
Bad for democracy; how the Presidency undermines the power of the people. (reprint, 2008)
Reference & Research Book News. 26.1 (Feb. 2011):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 Ringgold, Inc.
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9780816656783
Bad for democracy; how the Presidency undermines the power of the people. (reprint, 2008)
Nelson, Dana D.
U. of Minnesota Press
2010
263 pages
$18.95
Paperback
JK516
While many criticize the Bush administration and its followers and allies for an over-expansive vision of executive power, Nelson (English and American studies, Vanderbilt U.) argues that there has been a deep tradition of expanding presidential power that began in the age of George Washington. It is a result of the American citizenry's tendency to look to the sitting president as simultaneously a unifier of the citizenry and a protector from political threats. This "presidentialism" gives rise to antidemocratic tendencies that mislead us at those times when there are legitimate and pressing questions about the democratic ethics of presidential power or about the devaluation of citizen power within the government. She analyzes the course of "presidentialism" from Washington to Reagan, including the accumulation of war powers within the executive and the introduction of "unitary executive" powers in the Reagan era (later enthusiastically exercised by George W. Bush). This work was first published in hardback in 2008.
([c]2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
QUOTE:
this work is interesting, if not an important addition to the literature on presidential power
Nelson, Dana D.: Bad for democracy: how the presidency undermines the power of the people
J.R. Hedtke
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 46.10 (June 2009): p2026.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
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46-5894
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2008-24047 CIP
Nelson, Dana D. Bad for democracy: how the presidency undermines the power of the people. Minnesota, 2008. 263p bibl index afp ISBN 9780816656776, $24.95
In recent years there have been a myriad of works examining the growth and abuse of presidential power. Authors, activists, and pundits have also decried the declining level of civic engagement by US citizenry. Nelson (English, Vanderbilt Univ.) has developed an interesting and provocative hypothesis that links the two concepts together. Nelson asserts that since the adoption of the Constitution, presidents have exponentially increased the prerogative power of the executive office. Presidents have become superheroes to whom the public turns in times of crisis. As a result, the people have ceded their sacred responsibility of self-governance to a unitary executive. Nelson argues that the stronger the presidency has become, the less civically engaged are US citizens. Nelson concludes that Congress and the courts cannot rein in presidential power. This can only be accomplished when the people rediscover their political voice and reclaim an active role in their own governance. The work has a few factual errors and does not contain footnotes. Despite these criticisms, this work is interesting, if not an important addition to the literature on presidential power. Summing Up: Recommended. ** All readership levels.--J. R. Hedtke, Cabrini College
Hedtke, J.R.
Bad for democracy: how the presidency undermines the power of the people
Artforum International. 47.2 (Oct. 2008): pS5.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.
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In BAD FOR DEMOCRACY: HOW THE PRESIDENCY UNDERMINES THE POWER OF THE PEOPLE (University of Minnesota Press, September), Vanderbilt professor Dana D. Nelson argues that US citizens shirk their democratic duties by investing too much importance in the president and should instead take a more active role in self-governance.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
QUOTE:
ambitious
Melson puts gender at the center of her revisionary study of national and racial genealogies in the Jeffersonian tradition,
Hers is a rich, deeply researched book, a model of interdisciplinary cultural studies that is for the most part highly successful in providing new ways of thinking about the place of race, gender, nation, and class in American literature and culture. It is also something more than an intelligent and challenging critical examination: it is a jeremiad of sorts that makes a passionate call for the revitalization of democratic citizenship.
National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men
ROBERT S. LEVINE
Early American Literature. 36.1 (Winter 2001): p89.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2001 University of North Carolina Press
http://uncpress.unc.edu
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National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men. DANA D. NELSON. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. xiv, 344 pp.
As readers of this journal surely know by now, the DNA results are in, and Thomas Jefferson has been determined almost certainly to be the father of at least one of his slave Sally Hemings's children (see Eugene A. Foster et al., "Jefferson Fathers Slave's Last Child," Nature, 5 November 1998: 27-28). What is the significance of these DNA findings, if any, for American literary studies? At a conference held at the University of Virginia on March 5 and 6, 1999, a group of distinguished historians and cultural critics met to address the significance of the findings for American historical and cultural studies, and the papers were published later that year in Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture, edited by Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf.
The collection is useful but, perhaps because it was rushed into print, somewhat troubling. Despite the fact that, as Annette Gordon-Reed demonstrated in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997), professional historians have regularly attacked the few who have asserted the existence of a Jefferson-Hemings sexual relationship, Lewis and Onuf assert rather glibly in their introduction that the Nature article was a "nonevent" (1), because "[f] or years, most of the students we have taught, as well as a good number of our colleagues, have believed that Jefferson was indeed the father of Sally Hemings's children" (1). If that is the case (and it should be pointed out that the claim that Jefferson was the father of all of Hemings's children goes even farther than Foster's claim), then that says much about the prudent ways of university-based Jeffersonians, though only Gordon-Reed, in a self-vindicating essay included in the volume, addresses the failure of most white historians to take black oral testimony seriously in this particular instance. Though the volume has a number of fine essays, including Philip D. Morgan's "Interracial Sex in the Chesapeake and the British Atlantic World, c. 1700-1820" which traces the complexity and variety of relationships between white men and black women during this period, and Joshua Rothman's "James Callender and Social Knowledge of Interracial Sex in Antebellum Virginia," which helps us better to understand why southerners chose to ignore Callender's accusations about Jefferson's sexual relationship with Hemings, it has to be said that the most thoughtful and fully realized essay on Jefferson in the volume is Jack N. Rakove's "Our Jefferson," which essentially argues that the results from the DNA testing should not change our view of Jefferson or the Jeffersonian tradition at all. As Rakove explains, we have always been aware of the contradictory status of Jefferson as egalitarian and slaveholder, Moreover, he defends Jefferson from charges that he was a proslavery advocate, reminding us that the concerns he expressed in Notes on the State of Virginia about a possible race war were meant to advance the cause of emancipation (albeit of a protocolonizationist variety). Rakove concludes his well-argued essay by warning historians against assuming "moral superiority" (227) in their attempts to undo an American (Jeffersonian) "narrative [that] hinges on the concept of equality, on both its promise and its denial, on the hopes it engenders and the disappointments it inevitably produces" (229).
But I would suggest that Rakove is leaving out something very important in his analysis, something that is touched on in this volume and more fully elaborated in the other six books under review in this essay: that narratives depend quite literally upon genealogies and that to disrupt, or reconceive, a genealogical line necessitates disrupting and reconceiving its concomitant narrative(s). Even as Lewis and Onuf make the claim for a "nonevent," which nonetheless generated a major conference and book, they assert that the now nearly certain knowledge of Jefferson's sexual relationship with Hemings should press historians to develop "new national stories" (7). Gordon S. Wood, in "The Ghosts of Monticello," cautions that such stories could pose a significant, even disorienting, threat to the nation's "popular heritage" (31), but perhaps that would be all for the good, particularly if the new stories placed black culture and perspectives more at the center of that heritage. And this points to another blind spot in Rakove's essay. Crucially, he fails to consider the place of Sally Hemings and her descendants in the national narrative that he would like to leave intact. Lucia Stanton and Dianne Swann-Wright's "Bonds of Memory: Identity and the Hemings Family" analyzes oral histories of Monticello's African Americans in an attempt to narrate the story of the Hemings family. But their essay does not consider larger national issues and narratives. In "Presidents, Race, and Sex," Werner Sollors addresses these issues head-on, and in the course of canvassing miscegenation themes in presidential politics from Jefferson to Theodore Roosevelt, he asks the question that takes full account of Hemings: "One wonders what stories will emerge once legitimizing national myths derive not only from Thomas Jefferson but also from Sally Hemings" (207).
In my discussion of the remaining six books under review, none of which mentions the Jefferson-Hemings relationship, I will be considering the challenges raised by the implications of our "new" understanding of Jefferson and Hemings for developing literary genealogies of American literary history from the Revolution to the Civil War. To some extent these books follow the lead of Russ Castronovo's excellent Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom (1995), though with a significant difference. In Fathering the Nation, Castronovo focuses most of his attention on antebellum writers such as William Wells Brown, whose 1853 Clotel; or the President's Daughter in fact told "new national stories" emerging from his understanding of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship. In the books under review, a far greater emphasis is placed on writers of the Revolutionary and early national period. In my considerations of these differing studies, I will be focusing on the critics' formulations of literary genealogies that have slavery and race at their interpretive centers, and because of the review's venue in Early American Literature, I will be attending in particular to the critics' chapters on the earlier writers and contexts. What makes these books somewhat different from many earlier efforts to develop literary narratives from the 1770s to the 1870s is that these early chapters really matter.
Though Teresa A. Goddu's Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation appeared two years before the DNA "revelations" of the Jefferson-Hemings sexual relationship, her book could be read as a proleptic response to the question of how to reconceive literary and cultural traditions in light of our revised understanding of Jefferson and Hemings. Challenging progressive models central to paradigms of American literary nationalism, Goddu argues that Americans of the early national and antebellum periods were haunted by a secret guilt over the contradictions and evils of slavery, and that this "haunting" (10), a term she borrows from Toni Morrison, was most powerfully expressed in what she calls "American gothic" (3). The gothic, after all, ever since Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), has traditionally been informed by repressed memories and histories. Tracing the gothic in American writings from Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer to Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Goddu underscores "the gothic's disruptive potential" (8) to expose "the cultural contradictions of national myth" (10), particularly with respect to slavery. As she remarks in her trenchant account of the South Carolina chapter in Letters: "Slavery is the contradiction that collapses James's mythic narrative of America" (18). At the same time, she argues, James remains committed to that narrative, and so when he confronts the dying slave caged by his master, he both describes the slave and walks away, thereby repressing "the scene of abjection that could destroy his national narrative" (21).
Goddu traces similar gothic disruptions and repressions in the works of a number of other early national and antebellum writers. Arguing that the "gothic also unveils the market forces that lie beneath the surface of the sentimental" (n), she reads Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn as a gothicized presentation of commerce that, in its accounts of slave rebellion in San Domingue and of black labor in the United States, displays a new nation that is "[h]aunted by the corruption at its core -- the specter of slavery" (49). Extending her conception of white guilt and corruption to the Indian, Goddu, in the most exciting chapter in Gothic America, examines John Neal's "wildest gothic experiment" (53), the approximately 800-page Logan (1822), in relation to Indian removal and the expansionism of the 1820s. (Are we in the midst of a John Neal revival? Dana Nelson's National Manhood also has an excellent chapter on Neal.) According to Goddu, Neal in Logan sought to participate in cultural projects of removal and expansion, portraying the Indian as a kind of fiend, but his "incoherent and excessive" (61) novel ultimately exposed the underlying contradictions of the very ideologies and projects he seemed to support. Goddu explains: "Instead of naturalizing a national narrative that assures the Indian's removal, Neal's gothic novel unveils the process of abjection that generates that narrative, and in so doing disrupts it. The novel's repeated massacre scenes and its structural interchangeability articulate a narrative of violence and degeneration rather than civilization and progress" (63).
Goddu's reading of Neal provides a powerful model, I would suggest, for reading gothic romances ranging from Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntley to Cooper's The Deerslayer. In Gothic America, she develops similar readings of key texts by Poe, and discusses Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott as writers who used the gothic to address connections between market capitalism and slavery. There is also an interesting, though somewhat predictable, Toni Morrison-inflected reading of Stowe, Harriet Jacobs, and Douglass as writers who in various ways showed how "the gothic shadows of slavery encompass the entire nation" (151).
Goddu concludes that the "gothic's focus on the terror of possession, the iconography of imprisonment, the fear of retribution, and the weight of sin provided a useful vocabulary and register of images by which to represent the scene of America's greatest guilt: slavery" (133). But I remain somewhat skeptical about the moral and ethical implications of Goddu's claims for the gothic's expression of guilt. Who are the Americans who actually feel guilty about slavery? Surely it is not the free and enslaved blacks, who, according to Goddu's analysis of Douglass and Jacobs, rightly feel angry about slavery. Do the slaveowners themselves feel guilt, as she suggests in her reading of Stowe and Jacobs? It's nice to think so, just as it's nice to think that Jefferson expressed his "guilt" about Sally Hemings by freeing the Hemings family in his will. But this concept of guilt seems to me an anachronistic projection onto early national and antebellum slave owners, who had a number of political, ideological, religious, and "scientific" ways of justifying, and avoiding feeling guilty about, white supremacy and slavery. (But for a compelling argument that the slaveholders felt guilty about objectifying and dispossessing African Americans, see Leonard Cassuto's The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature [1997]). Did Poe and Hawthorne feel guilty? Again, the evidence of Poe's southern nationalism and Hawthorne's post-Compromise of 1850 Democratic nationalism would suggest otherwise. True, Goddu shows how Crevecoeur places slavery at the contradictory center of the United States' emerging national identity, and she complements Julia Stern's arguments in The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (1997) in suggesting that Brockden Brown, too, posed a deliberate challenge to racial dehumanization and slavery. But I remain unconvinced that white Americans of the early national period were terribly wrought with guilt over slavery or the plight of the Indian; or, to put it another way, I remain unconvinced about the concept of a "national" guilt as unconsciously expressed via the gothic. The Constitution's three-fifths compromise, the increasing prestige of scientific racism, and the expansionistic energies set in motion by Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase allowed most white Americans to go on with their lives without experiencing the kind of abject guilt Goddu describes. That said, she is surely right about the centrality of race and slavery to many of the most powerful literary writings of the early national and antebellum period; her important book enlarges Richard Chase's romance theory of American literature by exploring "the racial roots of the romance's blackness" (7).
Whereas Goddu's Gothic America emphasizes white guilt and the haunting presence of blackness, Jared Gardner's Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature and Dana D. Nelson's National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men attend to early national and antebellum discourses of power. Guilt has little place in their analyses. Influenced by recent theoretical work on race, Gardner and Nelson are especially interested in studying the workings of the national discourses that privileged whiteness in U.S. culture. Because their focus is on reading nationalistic discourses of race as these discourses developed from the late eighteenth century, their books are particularly useful for rethinking literary traditions and genealogies that have their origins in Jefferson and his white contemporaries.
From the outset of his book, Gardner states his ambition to rethink American literary genealogies, declaring that he will be studying national discourses of race in "the early novel through the first years of the American Renaissance" (xii). Central to his overall thesis in Master Plots is the notion that a white "racial logic" (11) of national purity, which he adduces in Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia and other key writings of the 1780s, informs, provides the terms for, and to some extent governs the production of the American novel from the 1790s to the 1850s. As Gardner argues in the preface and introduction, Americans attempted to develop "a national narrative that aimed to secure to white Americans an identity that was unique (not European) but not alien (not black or Indian)" (xi). The novel played a crucial role in this project by "scripting stories of `origins' that imagined white Americans as a race apart, both from the Europeans without and the blacks and Indians within the new nation" (xi). Gardner develops this argument in an interdisciplinary, "new historicist" fashion by reading early American novels in relation to the racialized discourses generated by the political factionalism of the 1780s and 1790s. The Republicans warned Americans about the dangers of becoming political "slaves" to the Federalists and England; the Federalists warned Americans about the dangers of becoming political "savages" should an unchecked republicanism become the ideology of the new nation. What unites Federalist and Republican, Gardner maintains, is the "defense of a model of racial purity" (2) that helped to create the notion of "an American race" (a). The defense of that racial model in early American political discourses and novels is the "master plot" (2) that is explored in Gardner's lucid and absorbing book.
In an excellent chapter on Royall Tyler's The Algerine Captive (1797), Gardner reads Tyler's novel as participating in contemporary political debates on Algerian piracy. During the early to mid 1790s, Algerian pirates captured and enslaved numerous American sailors, whose freedom was brokered in 1795. In an illuminating analysis of U.S. press reports of Algerian piracy, Gardner shows that "the Algerian of the 1790s became a dark composite of the bogeyman threatening the young nation: Indian, African American, savage, slave master, British, and French" (33). Outraged by Algerian piracy, and committed to "the idea of a uniquely American identity" (27), Tyler sought to concretize that identity by portraying "the Algerian pirate as the composite of all the racial and national destinies he does not want for his country" (27). In his reading of The Algerine Captive, Gardner responds to the many critics who regard the local-color picaresque of volume I as having little relation to the Algerian setting of volume 2. In both volumes, Gardner asserts, Updike Underhill learns the lessons that allow "him to take his place in the new nation" (41). Gardner neatly links Underhill's education over the course of the novel to Tyler's patriotic project in early national culture: "Updike ... had to experience slavery at the hands of a dark and mysterious race to learn how to be an American citizen," and in proffering Underhill's narrative, "Tyler discover[ed] how to write an American novel" (50).
Gardner sees a fairly similar logic at work in Brown's Edgar Huntly and Cooper's The Prairie. The chapter on Cooper is particularly strong, for it limns both continuities and differences from Tyler and Brown. Situating the novel in relation to the debates on the Missouri Compromise, Gardner maintains that Cooper sought to remove race "as a crucial factor in American life" (84) by working with the culture's narrative "logic" (115) of vanishing races. In a nuanced, revisionary reading of The Prairie that attends to contemporaneous writings on Missouri and Cooper's own writings on race, Gardner shows how the novel fulfills Cooper's (and his white contemporaries') fantasies of racial purity: "In the Missouri Territory of 1804, Cooper stages a Missouri Crisis in miniature, in which Natty brings about a peaceful abolition of slavery, turns back the tide of immigration, and remains in the desert to watch over the vanishing of the Indians, the slave trader, and even the mule" (114). (Gardner persuasively argues that the doctor's mule, Assinus, is "Cooper's stand-in for the African American in this novel" [112].) In an equally rich chapter, which I imagine some readers will regard as a bit of a stretch, Gardner discusses Poe's writings in relation to Samuel Morton's notions of polygenesis, arguing that in the enigmatic ending of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Poe, like Morton, rejects the notion of a monogenetically pure racial origin, showing that "to flee racial difference, as Pym does at the novel's end, for a fantasy of an original perfect whiteness is to come to a place where writing cannot exist" (127). The sole unsurprising chapter in Master Plots is the concluding one on Frederick Douglass, which grants to Douglass the authority and knowledge granted to no other author in the book: the power to see the limits of American's racialized language of nation and to call for something more humane and inclusive.
But is Douglass the only writer here who understands the limits of the nation's Master Plot? Again and again Gardner claims that the culture's "racial logic" shapes the terms of the novels under consideration, but because he is such a fine reader and writer, Gardner's interpretive logic can seem even more powerfully shaping and limiting than the logic he has identified in early national and antebellum culture. The strengths and limits of his approach can be seen in his provocative chapter on Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly, which he reads in relation to the Alien and Sedition crisis of the late 1790s. As he shows, the Federalists' anti-alien discourse was at times a racialized discourse about the dangers of French Indian-like savagery. By linking the alien and the Indian, Gardner argues, Brown and his contemporaries racialized the alien, thereby making him distinguishable from the "true" white American. Gardner looks at how Brown makes similar rhetorical linkages in his alarmist writings of the early 1800s, particularly in his 1803 Address to the Government of the United States, on the Cession of Louisiana to the French, and to some extent Gardner uses the alarmism of that document to read what I regard as the ambiguous (or conflicted) politics and psychology of Edgar Huntly in terms of a relatively simple allegory of nation making. He states that "Brown's perception of the alien's equation with the savage ... allows Edgar to escape becoming an Indian himself" (75); and he concludes thusly: "Cleansing the nation of aliens becomes a form of Indian warfare, and in his proclivity for the hunt Edgar proves himself an American" (180).
But in Edgar's proclivity to hunt, doesn't he also prove himself to be a (French) savage? I don't see any evidence in Edgar Huntly that Brown achieves a stable vision of the differences between white and red, civilized and savage, American and alien; if anything, he collapses all of these binaries in a genuinely troubling vision of human instability. Gardner urges us to read Brown's political writings of the early 1800s on a continuum with the romances of the late 1790s, and as clearer expressions of the themes inscribed in the romances. But why privilege the tracts over the romances? Why not see the political writings as further efforts on Brown's part both to engage and confound his readers? The main point I would want to make is this: I sense there is nothing that Gardner discloses about the rhetoric of race and nation in Edgar Huntly that Brown himself did not already know, and yet in his book Gardner makes implied moral distinctions between himself, who, like Douglass, sees the limits of the Master Plot, and Brown, who is presented as upholding and promoting a national logic of white racial purity, either as a xenophobic patriot or as the hapless reproducer of a logic from which he, unlike Douglass, cannot escape. A relatively minor problem with Gardner's otherwise very powerful consensus reading of "an" American literature, then, is that he tends to present his selected writers as even blinder than they may have actually been. There are cultural relativistic moments in The Algerine Captive, Edgar Huntly, Pym, and even The Prairie that anticipate similar such ironically conceived moments in Melville's Typee and Moby-Dick; there are moments of disguise and masquerade in all of the novels under consideration that unsettle the racial categories that Douglass much more explicitly unsettled. I also wonder about the place of gender in national discourses of race, for Gardner says nothing about women writers' responses to the Master Plot. Did writers like Hannah Foster, Catharine Sedgwick, and Fanny Fern have insights into the limits of the nation's racial logic in ways that white male authors did not?
In National Manhood, Dana Nelson puts gender at the center of her revisionary study of national and racial genealogies in the Jeffersonian tradition, and in many ways hers is the most ambitious of all the books under consideration in this review (though she too has little to say about women writers). To give just a sense of the thesis of her complex book: She argues that "white manhood" (ix) was a central category "for inventing national unity" (7), and that the representative status of white manhood, particularly as embodied by the "powerfully homogenizing masculine ideal" (xi) incarnated in the presidency, worked to occlude class, racial, and gender differences, thwart democratic identifications, and channel masculine energies toward market competition. White male citizenship, though certainly privileged in comparison, say, to black chattel slavery, nevertheless finds its chief expression in an anxious, hierarchical, and competitive environment that demands self-management and subordination. As she nicely puts it, "national manhood embodied democracy in the competitive, self-subordinating individual" (22). She locates in various writings of the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary period, such as Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, a linkage of white manhood with the nation; and her book, which focuses on the 1780-1880 period, offers a series of readings and case studies that analyze the conditions and consequences of attaching whiteness to "national identity and then middle-class professional formation" (5). Self-consciously resisting disciplinary classification, Nelson looks at a range of materials and archives in the course of exploring connections between "political, literary, geographic, scientific, and medical projects" (24). Hers is a rich, deeply researched book, a model of interdisciplinary cultural studies that is for the most part highly successful in providing new ways of thinking about the place of race, gender, nation, and class in American literature and culture. It is also something more than an intelligent and challenging critical examination: it is a jeremiad of sorts that makes a passionate call for the revitalization of democratic citizenship.
The crucial chapter is the first, which examines the Federalist Papers, Crevecoeur's Letters, Jefferson's Notes, Benjamin Rush's "Negro Leprosy," and popular novels of the 1790s as part of a larger inquiry into the "experimental reorganization of national unity through white manhood" (26). Disturbed by aspects of the turn from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution, Nelson pursues the question of why those committed to the revolutionary and democratic energies of the 1770s and 1780s were prepared to accept "the virtualization of their democracy under the Constitution" (33). Her response is that "Publius" and other writers of the period developed "a reformulated ideal of `manhood' -- purified, vigorous, unified -- as a counterphobic ideal for the kinds of social diversity and disruption foregrounded in emergently radical democratic practices" (33). One might argue with the binary central to the chapter, unity/diversity; I would prefer unity/disunity, and would suggest that the genius of the Constitution makers was their ability to conceive of the concepts of unity and diversity as complementary terms. But what remains so brilliantly discomfiting about this chapter is Nelson's ability, through close reading, careful consideration of social and political theory, and surprising juxtapositions of texts and contexts, to trouble traditional understandings of the Constitution. Gender and race are crucial to her argument, as she suggestively shows how the Constitution makers "feminized" the Articles of Confederation by linking the Articles to "weakness and passion" (42). She identifies male managerial energies as central to a number of the Federalist Papers, and points to connections between nationhood and the emergent racial "science" of white supremacy that implicitly inform the Papers and key writings of Jefferson and Rush. Indeed, by the end of the chapter it is difficult to deny Nelson her thesis (which is similar to Gardner's): "Whiteness increasingly became the symbolic correlative for the fantasized wholeness of nation and of manhood" (60).
Subsequent chapters, all of which display an exemplary canonical revisionism and interdisciplinarity, work out the genealogical implications of the arguments of chapter 1. In my limited space I can offer only a quick summary of Nelson's engaging readings. Chapter 2 studies the Lewis and Clark expedition, focusing on Jefferson's and Lewis's writings and Nicholas Biddle's 1814 The History of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and then links those writings to John Neal's Logan. As Nelson shows, all of these writers worked with the notion of Indianness as an undisciplined, feminized other that demanded taming, managing, and control in the name of the expanding white nation. She remarks about the Lewis and Clark expedition in particular: "The abstracting identity of white/national manhood found one means for stabilizing its internal divisions and individual anxieties via imagined projections into, onto, and against Indian territories, Indian bodies, Indian identities" (67). Chapter 3 moves from native Americans as other to African Americans as other, and analyzes the scientific racist Samuel G. Morton's debate with John Bachman over polygenesis. Developing nuanced readings of Morton's Crania Americana (1839) and "Hybridity in Animals" (1847), James Kirke Paulding's Slavery in the United States (1836), and the South Carolinian John Bachman's late 1840s series of articles in the Charleston Observer defending monogenesis, Nelson concludes that there is "compelling evidence for seeing the antebellum period as one when national manhood braced itself in the mantle of professional authority, its sanction fueling the formation of a new, managerial class" (133).
Nelson's elaborations of how "whiteness works as a sociopolitical/scientific construct and a gendered domain" (113) makes for a nice transition into a chapter on the emergence of gynecology as the domain of professional white men. In this chapter Nelson develops dazzling readings of the various phobias about women and race informing George Lippard's 1845 gothic novel Quaker City and the Philadelphia gynecologist J. Marion Sims's autobiography The Story of My Life (1885). In the concluding chapter, "The Melancholy of White Manhood," Nelson brings together one of her large arguments -- that "the logic: of competitive manhood ... experientially destructured the imagined fraternity of national manhood" (131) -- by studying the promises of "egalitarian emotional exchange" (178) among men in popular voluntary associations, particularly Masonry. Nelson sees in the rituals of Masonic practice both "a longing for human interconnection and an identification with the very power that demands such renunciations" (197). In a fine reading of Melville's "Benito Cereno" as an anatomy of these longings and identifications, Nelson concludes that national manhood remains rife with an anxious melancholy, which is expressed in terms of nostalgia, "fraternal ritual's obsessive recourse to communion with dead men" (202). A brilliant reading of Poe's "Some Words with a Mummy" in the book's afterword brings this line of argumentation to an eerie close.
This is a powerfully argued book, at times, like Gardner's, too powerfully argued. In the introduction Nelson concedes that white manhood is not a unified or monolithic entity, and thus she asserts that her book should be read as a critique of a particular ideal of national manhood as much as a critique of a particular reality. But by the end of the introduction she asserts what I would term the more etiological aims of her study: "I am not concerned to uphold or vilify particular white men, but to begin asking how and under what conditions `white' manhood came to `stand' for nation, how it came to be idealized as a `representative' identity in the United States, and finally ... how that representatively unifying routing of identity conditions the ways we are able to think about democracy" (28). A notable achievement of National Manhood is precisely Nelson's ability to plumb sympathetically the discourses and attitudes of some very unappealing racists and misogynists, such as Morton and Sims. But I remain concerned about the way people like Morton and Sims and the other figures studied in National Manhood are themselves given representative status. There is very little consideration of traditions of dissent as they dialectically informed and challenged the model of national manhood Nelson describes, not a mention, for example, of William Lloyd Garrison. Arguably, Garrison was influenced by the discourses of freedom, temperance, reform, and representativeness that can be traced back to Jefferson and his contemporaries. One of the challenging aspects of rethinking Jeffersonian genealogies is that Jefferson himself (as Rakove reminds us) can be linked both to slavery and freedom, to the very racism that informs Nelson's notion of white manhood but also to a humanism, as expressed in Jefferson's famous letter to Benjamin Banneker and in the Declaration, that would pose a challenge to such racism.
I also had some concerns about Nelson's critique of presidentialism. In her account of the move from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution, Nelson suggests that the creation of the presidential office worked to buttress the formations that favor, protect, and nurture white manhood. In her overall book, Nelson develops an impassioned argument that presidentialism contains the energies of radical democracy. But as Gary Wills argues in his recent A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government (1999), the executive branch was not invested with the sort of power and significance that it would come to assume in our media-saturated age. Wills also raises questions about the romanticization of the local that can go hand in hand with nostalgia for the Articles, and it is worth emphasizing with respect to Jefferson that when he did embrace the local most passionately, in response to the debates on Missouri, he did so in order to defend the interests of Virginia's slaveholders. I share Nelson's desire to see a fuller expression of radical democratic energies in the United States, but I depart from her in remaining suspicious of the local. I see no evidence that the committees sponsored by the Articles of Confederation would have acted more quickly to address problems of slavery, racism, and sexism in the United States; I would also note that, from the Nullification debates of the 1820s and the 1830s to the creationism debates in Kansas of our own time, local politics has often been a majoritarian politics of anger and resentment. Congressionalism, too, would hardly seem to provide a healthy alternative to presidentialism. Unlike Nelson, then, I perhaps more cynically just throw up my hands in despair. And yet I admire her passions and hopes. And in a year that brings us the media circus surrounding Bush versus Gore, who is prepared to say that Nelson is wrong to raise concerns about the debilitating impact of presidentialism?
In the remaining three books under review, the focus shifts from white to black writers, as Zafar, Glaude, and Bassard work to develop literary and cultural genealogies that have African American perspectives at the center. There is hardly unanimity in their critical approaches. In We Wear the Mask: African Americans Write American Literature, 1760-1870, Rafia Zafar studies the ways in which black writers of the early national and antebellum periods skillfully appropriated and revised dominant "white" discourses as part of an effort "to write black selves into the mainstream of American literature" (88). In Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America, Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., similarly studies black writers' appropriations of dominant discourses as part of a quest for Americanization, though he places a much greater emphasis on blacks' strategic efforts to make use of those discourses within the black community. Katherine Clay Bassard offers a very different sense of African American literary and cultural traditions in Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women's Writing, for in her account black writers have little concern about reaching white readers or making accommodations to a racist and misogynistic nation.
Zafar's We Wear the Mask presents a genealogical line running from Phillis Wheatley to Elizabeth Keckley in which all of the African American writers under consideration worked with and against dominant "white" literary forms -- the elegy, the captivity narrative, the sentimental novel, the Franklinian self-help autobiography, and so on -- by strategically deploying "African American literary masks, mimicry, and invisibility" (9). Though Zafar emphasizes what she terms Wheatley's "remarkably unexceptional style" (16), her "mask of generic `whiteness'" (38), and her connections to contemporary elegists such as Joel Barlow and Ann Eliza Bleeker, Zafar also wishes to show that from within "a white, Western, largely male tradition" (19) Wheatley fashioned "an expressive `black' vehicle" (19) that at times conveyed a "disguised antislavery statement" (36). She similarly argues that when Britton Hammon and John Marrant appropriated the Puritan captivity narrative for their own spiritual narratives, they "adopted, adapted, and finally subverted the genre, first by seeming to endorse the white captivity's aim of exalting Christian civilization, then by taking the premise of captivity a step further to express outrage and sorrow at the hands of Christian captors" (42). In a subsequent chapter she nicely traces the importance of the captivity narrative to the slave narratives of Henry Bibb and William Wells Brown.
Zafar makes large claims for African Americans' Americanness -- "writers in this first century of African American literature were indisputably American" (8) -- even as she asserts that these writers were "American" on their own terms, with some retaining allegiances to "an African identity" (3). But despite this reference to Africanness, there is very little in We Wear the Mask about Africanity; instead, the focus is on how African American writers worked with the terms of the dominant culture. But how "American" are the writings of Wheatley, Hammon, and Marrant? In Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century (1996), Vincent Carretta notes that many black writers of the late eighteenth century aligned themselves with England, particularly in the wake of the 1772 Somerset case. Both Marrant and Hammon, according to Carretta, identified with the British during the Revolutionary War. Following the war, Marrant may well have preached to the slaves of the American South, but his 1785 A Narrative of the Lord's Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black was published in London, and his text concludes with his ordination as Anglican minister at Bath in Lady Huntingdon's Chapel. Though he subsequently moved to Boston and became chaplain to the Prince Hall Lodge of Masons, he returned to England in 1790 and continued his ministry in London and Islington until his death in 1791 at the age of 35.
Intent on tracing a native-based genealogical account of the concomitant rise of American and African American literatures, Zafar, to the detriment of the book's early chapters, chooses not to discuss larger Anglo-American contexts or to trouble the notion of Americanness. And yet her decision to focus on Frederick Douglass's appropriations of Ben Franklin leads to perhaps the best chapter in her book, an excellent rhetorical analysis of Douglass's efforts to insert blacks into the Franklinian paradigm of the self-made man. In a similar vein, she shows how Harriet Wilson and Harriet Jacobs appropriated and revised Stowe's domesticity and sentimentalism; and in the persuasive reading that concludes her book, she examines black masking and "invisibility" in Eliza Potter's A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life (1859) and Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes at the White House (1868), showing how both writers publicly exploited their obscurity to highlight the failings of white leaders and power structures.
Zafar concludes that the "United States eventually produced what has come to be seen as two national literatures," and that this development was "inevitable" and "not necessarily ... undesirable" (190). I would challenge her conclusion by suggesting that a problem with We Wear a Mask is that it reifies the concepts of white American literature and African American literature as separate literatures, while at the same time arguing that one of these literatures, African American, operated "in and beyond the contexts of Anglophone American society" (190). Arguably, if one literature operated "in" another literature and culture, then one could develop an argument about the mutually constitutive aspects of literatures that perhaps more productively could be thought about in the context of an emerging, hybridized (or multicultural) national literature. Or to put it another way, if one literature operates "in" another, then perhaps it is a mistake to work with such a binaristic scheme, particularly as the literature operated within would have been "blackened," as Toni Morrison suggests, by the alternately disruptive and productive entry of black into white. (Another problem with the binary that I will just touch on here: it leaves out of consideration the impact of other racial and ethnic literary and cultural traditions on the dominant culture, such as Native American, Spanish American, and so on). I am also concerned about Zafar's notion that early black writing tended toward an "accommodation to the European-American literary mainstream" and was intended for "an essentially white audience" (3). In their respective books, Glaude and Bassard make compelling cases that one of the primary audiences for African American writings was African American readers.
Both Glaude's Exodus! and Bassard's Spiritual Interrogations represent important efforts to rethink African American literary and cultural traditions as inflected by African Americans' creative engagements with Christianity. To turn first to Glaude's book, which, it should be noted, is by a religious historian (and yet is of considerable value for literary historians): Glaude, like Zafar, studies African American appropriations of "white" discourses, specifically the Bible. But his approach emphasizes pragmatism over accommodationism, and he rejects binaristic notions of "white" and "black" texts. He presents the Bible as just as much a black as a white text, and thus shows not how blacks subvert or mimic but rather use the text to make claims for their Christian and American character. Focusing on writings by prominent African American men from around 1790 to 1850, Glaude traces the genealogical development in African American discourses of a particular trope (the Exodus story) and thematics (what he terms the "politics of respectability" [114]). His central argument, which he repeats a bit too often over the course of his relatively short book, is that African Americans of the early national and antebellum period, very much like the Puritans, developed a concept of "nation language" (3) from their understanding of Exodus history, which provided "a metaphorical framework for understanding the middle passage, enslavement, and quests for emancipation" (3). Drawing on the work of Michael Walzer, he suggests that Exodus also offered a model for resistance, a "salvific history" (4) that allowed blacks to conceive of their experiences in the United States in analogous (or typological) relationship to the Israelites in Egypt. As adopted and understood by African Americans, Christianity, Glaude argues, as Bassard also argues in Spiritual Interrogations, thus had an absolutely crucial place in the development of African American culture and tradition, helping blacks to develop their sense of chosenness, peoplehood, and destiny.
In his account of what he presents as a fairly seamless development of the Exodus tradition from the 1780s to the 1850s, Glaude begins with the rise of black Methodist churches in the late 1780s and 1790s. Under the leadership of Richard Allen, the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church emerged as a national organization that was devoted to sustaining "black cultural solidarity in the context of a racist culture" (21). Arguing for the importance of Exodus to the black church's efforts to generate "a distinctive sense of peoplehood" (45), Glaude describes the 1816 founding of the African Methodist Episcopal Church as "the first covenantal convening of the nation" (57), and he sees the black churches, and an Exodus metaphorics, as central to the emergence of the black convention movement of the 1830s: "The convention movement's call for black people to address their problems extended the covenantal convening of the nation that began with the emergence of the independent black church" (125). Glaude offers an especially helpful reading of the pragmatic emphases of the early black conventions' politics of black uplift, or what he terms the "politics of respectability," and a strong defense of the black leader William Whipper's seeming complicity with white dominant culture in rejecting the importance of "complexional distinctions" (128). Glaude is equally excellent on Henry Highland Garnet's famous "Address to the Slaves of the United States of America," which Garnet delivered at the National Negro Convention of 1843 in Buffalo. According to Glaude, Garnet's speech can be understood as an example of "political messianism" (144), a call to the black community, and the U.S. community at large, to live up to the promises of the Covenant.
Though the Exodus story could be read (as Harriet Beecher Stowe, too, would read it) as a story that spoke to the divine rightness of black emigration or colonization (after all, the Jews hardly wanted to remain in Egypt and many of the Puritans saw fit to leave England), Glaude develops an interpretation of Exodus that links African American nationalism to U.S. nationalism. In an illuminating discussion of African American freedom celebrations in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, Glaude argues that these celebrations drew not only on Exodus but also on the traditions of dissent and freedom deriving from Jefferson's Declaration. As he remarks, "the ideals of the American nation provided participants with a vocabulary of dissent. The idea of America, then, was critical to the construction of national black identity" (97). Convinced of the complementary relation of U.S. nationalism to an Exodus politics of black community, Glaude at times makes the writers under consideration a bit too much into U.S. nationalists. Rejecting the readings of Sterling Stuckey and others who see a black Africanity as central to Garnet's "Address," Glaude presents Garnet as somewhat similar to Whipper in sharing a pragmatic vision of how notions of uplift could inspire black community in the United States. Similarly, in his reading of David Walker's Appeal ... To the Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and very expressly, to Those of the United States (1829), he has little to say about Walker's references to Africa, or about the diasporic allegiances expressed in his title ("To the Colored Citizens of the World"), and instead argues that Walker helped African Americans to define themselves "as a distinct people who were distinctly American" (43).
If I have one large critique of his book, then, it is that Glaude tends to talk about African Americans in monolithic terms, downplaying debates between Christians and secularists, emigrationists and antiemigrationists, Africanists and U.S. Americanists, in favor of presenting a picture of early national black community as united in both its commitment to Exodus and the possibilities of U.S. nationalism. In the book's revealing epilogue, Glaude directly attacks contemporary black nationalists, whom he claims "understand American democracy as a modern form of tyranny, a nation consumed by white supremacy" (163). And he remarks that it would be "an egregious error to leave the talk of racial solidarity to persons who espouse black nationalism as their political project and predicate such actions on a rejection of America" (163). Over the course of Exodus!, he links Sterling Stuckey (among others) to this position, and calls for "a reading of nation language that simultaneously accents the idea of racial solidarity and identifies with America" (167). And yet Stuckey, who is hardly anti-American, argues in The Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972) that black nationalism in the United States can be usefully defined as a consciousness among African Americans "of a shared experience at the hands of white people" (6) and as a program that "emphasized the need for black people to rely primarily on themselves in vital areas of life" (1). This conception of black nationalism does not sound all that different from Glaude's notion of Exodus and the politics of respectability. What is different is Stuckey's capaciousness, for he argues in this and other of his works that black nationalism could embrace a range of sometimes competing and conflicting options-uplift, separatism, emigrationism, and so on -- and had to be constructed and reconstructed in response to different exigencies and contexts. Even in his more Africanist Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (1987), Stuckey considers a range of writings and political options, including William Whipper's noncomplexional politics of uplift, under the rubric of "black nationalism." Glaude's important study would have been even better had he not been so intent on scoring points against Stuckey and others by cutting off virtually all considerations of African genealogies and influences in his conception of a cultural politics of black Exodus.
In a particularly powerful moment of Garnet's "Address to the Slaves of the United States of America," Garnet proclaims: "Your dead fathers speak to you from their graves" (qtd. in Exodus! 158). There's a problematics of influence and tradition here that Glaude avoids confronting: Could not those dead fathers be conceived of as African fathers? The place of the dead in the construction of African American literary traditions is absolutely central to Katherine Bassard's Spiritual Interrogations, though instead of concerning herself with the dead fathers, she focuses on a dead mother, or foremother, Phillis Wheatley, whom she puts at the head of an African American womanist literary tradition. As we have seen in Zafar's We Wear the Mask, and as anyone taking even a cursory look at American and African American literary anthologies will note, Wheatley, ever since her revival by abolitionists during the 1830s, has regularly been placed at the beginnings of an African American literary tradition by virtue of the fact of her firstness: first African American to publish a volume of poetry. In a recent effort to challenge this literary genealogy, Robert Reid-Pharr maintains that Wheatley is "not concerned at all with announcing a Black American singularity ... Wheatley's work does little, then, to establish black specificity. Nor does it even attempt to address the inherently antihumanistic, antihuman nature of slavery." And so he concludes rather archly: "The simple fact that Phillis Wheatley was an author of African descent, that she existed within a purportedly black body, should not be enough to secure her status as the originator of the Black American literary tradition" (Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999], p. 4). Bassard's view of Wheatley couldn't be more different.
In her account of a black women's writing tradition, Bassard, contra Reid-Pharr, identifies the Christian Phillis Wheatley as the visionary founder of a relatively private community of African American women writers of the "pre-Emancipation period" (12). Focusing on Wheatley, the poet and essayist Anna Plato, the itinerant preacher Jarena Lee, and the Shaker eldress Rebecca Cox Jackson, Bassard, in this imaginatively reconceived canon of early African American writings, argues that these women writers are linked by their longing for a community that had been lost when they or their ancestors had been separated from their "African roots" (69). Revising Houston Baker's concept of a "blues matrix," Bassard proposes a "spirituals matrix" (16) that, particularly in the literary and religious writings of pre-Emancipation African American women, conveyed both that sense of loss of African community and the heroic effort to restore connections by "performing community" (9). As Bassard presents it in Spiritual Interrogations, that community is a fairly hermetic community that to a significant extent revolves around Wheatley. In her extended discussions of Wheatley, there is virtually no consideration of the poet's responses to American and British abolitionists, Samuel Occum, George Washington, contemporary elegists, or other nonblack figures. Instead, the focus is on her interaction with African American women of her own time and beyond. While I was initially frustrated by the hermeticism of this approach, Bassard's interpretive move increasingly seemed to me a brilliant stroke, providing a new way of thinking about intertextuality and African American literary genealogies, and thus at least one way of responding to Werner Sollors's question of what happens to national stories and genealogies when a black woman is placed at the center. In some respects Bassard's answer is that you no longer have a "national" story.
Bassard's starting point for reading Wheatley is not her famous volume, Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral (1773), but instead seven short letters she wrote to her black woman friend in Newport, Rhode Island, the slave Obour Tanner. In these letters, Wheatley describes her conversion to Christianity, calling that conversion, in a letter of 1772, "the saving change" (22). Building on the evidence of this letter exchange, Bassard argues that "conversion functions in early black women's literature both as an event and as a process for the revisioning of community" (23). Community needs to be revisioned because of blacks' displacement from Africa, and Bassard is excellent in describing what she terms Wheatley's "Poetics of Recovery" (28). Whereas some readers regard Wheatley as complicitous in accepting the Christianity of the white dominant culture, Bassard uses the letters to Tanner and some of Wheatley's lesser known poems to portray Wheatley as "a Middle Passage survivor" (35) who draws creatively on the Protestant Christianity of the "white northern Christian hegemony" (21-22) to attack white supremacist racial ideologies and the very "system of racialization in progress" (46) in late-eighteenth-century Anglo-American culture. Bassard offers an especially fine discussion of the 1767 variant of "To the University of Cambridge in New-England," showing how the 1773 book version sharpens considerations of the Middle Passage and slavery, and she uses this comparison to develop an excellent reading of diasporan subjectivity in "On Being Brought From Africa to America." Particularly impressive is Bassard's consideration of tropes of crossing and recovery, geography and climate, and broken networks in Wheatley's overlooked transatlantic poem, "To a Lady on Her Coming to North-America with Her Son for the Recovery of Her Health." Unlike Zafar, who reads Wheatley's elegies in relation to those of her white contemporaries, Bassard maintains that "we must recontextualize these poems within the frame of cultural memory and desire for community. The separation from her African roots becomes a kind of cultural `primal scene,' an originary site of desire that fuels the elegiac compulsion" (69). It is precisely the performative and Christian thematics of Wheatley's poetry, Bassard argues, that helped to give rise to "black women's writing community in the nineteenth century" (70).
In the remaining chapters of her book, Bassard traces the development of that writing community tradition by exploring Plato's, Lee's, and Cox's responses to Wheatley's Afro-Christian notions of personhood, spirituality, and African displacement. There are not always clear connections between Wheatley and these writers, though Ann Plato, author of Essays: Including Biographies and Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose and Poetry (1841), does quote from Wheatley in a poem in Essays. Bassard speculates that Plato became a poet precisely because of her reading of Wheatley, and in her chapter on Plato, Bassard seeks to recover, or perhaps more precisely, critically perform the dialogue between these two writers. That dialogue is a feminist dialogue in which Plato uses "generational tropes" (81) to link herself with Wheatley in order to develop "a gendered articulation of transgression against the constraints a rising black male patriarchy sought to construct" (83). Among those constraints, one can speculate, were the public politics of respectability delineated in Glaude's Exodus! In her reading of Plato's not very well known Essays, Bassard provides an especially illuminating analysis of the four short biographies of black women that were included in the book, biographies of women who, like Wheatley, died young and were thwarted by "the material difficulties of free black women's lives" (83). Bassard sees these biographies as central to Plato's efforts to create a communal history of African American women through "a language of (re)generation" (73).
Though pious, Plato became a schoolteacher and did not write spiritual narratives. The African Methodist Episcopal itinerant preacher Jarena Lee and the Shaker eldress Rebecca Cox Jackson both wrote important spiritual narratives, which Bassard examines in relation to Wheatley's spirituals matrix and performance of African American women's community. The focus of the chapter on Lee is on her 1849 Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee, which Bassard regards as Lee's defiant expansion and revision of her 1836 The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee -- defiant because she writes the 1849 text against the wishes of the book committee of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. In her subsequent reading of the journals of the Shaker Rebecca Cox Jackson, Bassard emphasizes intertextuality and (somewhat surprisingly) dissent, arguing that Jackson attempted to rewrite Lee's 1836 Life by underscoring the importance of the visionary and spiritual to African American fellowship. The intertextuality of her analyses of Lee and Jackson, though central to Bassard's conception of an African American women writers' tradition, adds to the sense of the book's hermeticism, for she chooses to leave black male writers out of the consideration. There are no mentions, for example, of David Walker or William Whipper. (To be fair, Glaude's Exodus! makes no mention of Wheatley, Plato, Lee, or Jackson.) I also thought Bassard may have overemphasized the importance of African survivals to her authors. She argues, for example, that Jackson's mystical visions of thunder and lightning, which Bassard links to the Yoruba thunder god Shango, convey "neo-African conceptions of humanity and divinity" (116). But a quick check of a concordance to the King James Bible reveals numerous references to thunder and lightning; Jackson's mysticism could just as easily be linked to her interest in Christianity.
What is fascinating about Bassard's book, particularly when read in relation to other American literary histories of the period roughly between the Revolution and the Civil War, is that rather than move in Whiggish fashion toward a telos, the book begins with the telos, the poetic writings of Phillis Wheatley, which in Bassard's account ultimately give added force and meaning to the more obscure religious writings of Plato, Lee, and Cox. For within the somewhat odd (or creatively imagined and performed) intertextual world of Bassard's study, Plato, Lee, and Jackson are conceived of as writers who were to some extent theorized and "created" by Wheatley. Time will tell whether Bassard's boldly conceived rethinking of African literary genealogies will lead to an upsurge of interest in Plato, Lee, and Cox, and to the creation of different sorts of narratives tracing their influences forward to the important African American writers of the post-Emancipation period. This much is certain: Bassard's book provides a challenging and provocative model for writing a genealogical literary narrative that has early American writings (and an African American woman) at its center.
Considered as a group, the books that I have discussed in this essay represent a major contribution to early American and African American literary and cultural studies. The books are characterized by creative interpretive strategies, an exemplary canonical revisionism, and a productive tension between the exigencies of our own historical moment and those of the historical period under consideration. Interestingly, with the exception of Bassard's, the books are also characterized, as suggested by such key paradigmatic terms as "National Manhood," "American Gothic," and "an American Literature," by an exceptionalist notion of American difference or distinctiveness. These studies suggest that if there is something distinctive about early national American literature, it is precisely the contradictory fact underscored by Sydney Smith in the 1820 Edinburgh Review when he caustically noted that America's avowedly republican literature emerged from a society in which "every sixth man [is] a Slave, whom his fellow-creatures may buy and sell and torture." The books under review, like the Jefferson DNA findings, press us to address that ugly contradiction by continuing the process of revising and rethinking American literary genealogies. Gardner suggests the great value of this revisionary project in the eloquent closing paragraphs of Master Plots, and I am pleased to give him this review's closing words: "We have the opportunity to reconsider the meaning we ascribe to racial and ethnic difference in our definitions of national identity, and our national literature. The power to be better readers remains, as [Frederick] Douglass reminds us, in our hands" (185).
ROBERT LEVINE, professor of English at the University of Maryland, is author of Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity and Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville. His editorial projects include "Stand Still and See the Salvation": A Martin R. Delany Reader (North Carolina, forthcoming 2002); The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville (Cambridge, 1998); "Cultural Edition" of William Wells Brown, Clotel (Bedford, 2000); and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred (Penguin, 2000).
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Nelson confronts these questions by arguing that white manhood is a constitutive element of the U.S.'s central forms of social organization like representative democracy, presidentialism, and capitalism.
One might understand National Manhood as a map of the nation's homogenizing forces and the ways in which race, class, and gender were organized around a particular national imaginary.
National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men
MIKE MILLNER
The Mississippi Quarterly. 52.4 (Fall 1999): p716.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1999 Mississippi State University
http://www.missq.msstate.edu/
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National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men, by Dana D. Nelson. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.
DANA D. NELSON ARGUES IN HER EXTENSIVELY RESEARCHED and theoretically sophisticated book that an ideology of white manhood has worked powerfully and, for many, destructively to establish the terms of United States national belonging. She maintains that the deployment of this "national manhood" linked fraternal feeling and civic identity to serve as an ideal and guarantee of national unity. National manhood's power rests in its abstracting and universalizing potential: whiteness and maleness, for reasons that Nelson and many others have investigated, become the unmarked and representative identity categories that stand in for the whole and, in this instance, the nation. Nelson outlines the multiple ways "white" and "male" shored up their positions as universal signifiers and became attached to "nation" in the early national and antebellum periods. National Manhood traces this consolidation through a diverse collection of texts including the Federalist and Anti-Federalist authors, Benjamin Rush and Crevecoeur, Jefferson's writings on race, Lewis and Clark's journals, Nicholas Biddle's History of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1814), John Neal's 1822 novel Logan, and Melville and Poe. Most groundbreaking about Nelson's history is her argument concerning the important role middle-class professionalism, especially the emerging scientific and medical disciplines, came to play in the reinforcement of national manhood. Nelson's readings of texts from the burgeoning fields of mid-nineteenth-century ,gynecology, ethnology (especially its interest in polygenesis and racial categorization), anthropology, and archeology investigate the ways in which a scientific standpoint--a universalized, abstract, and occluded authority--was increasingly adapted as a method of articulating white manhood and as a tool for managing the race, class, and gender differences that always haunt national manhood's unifying desires. Nelson writes passionately about the cost of national/white manhood to those who remain at its margins, but she is simultaneously sensitive to the self-regulation and foreclosed possibilities this ideology's fetishizing of sameness and unity requires of white men.
A skeptical reader might suggest that a critical study that takes white manhood as its subject seems redundant, old news, in a nation which has so often and so obviously constructed its public sphere and its incessant patriotic routines around that white manhood. The same reader might wonder why we need a more complex understanding of the ways national white manhood consolidated its reign: isn't it simply the case that those in the majority and with societal and technological power greedily took control and secured that control? Isn't the solution raised consciousness and better laws protecting those for whom national manhood is a mode of domination rather than a conduit to national belonging? Nelson confronts these questions by arguing that white manhood is a constitutive element of the U.S.'s central forms of social organization like representative democracy, presidentialism, and capitalism. For example, Nelson posits that national manhood conditions individuals for economic competition by identifying social and economic failure as private rather than structural. Men are promised by national manhood "a space where [they] can step out of competitive, hierarchically ordered relations and experience rich emotional mutuality and fraternal sameness" (p. 19). This promise, Nelson emphasizes, is in fact a mode of control--the golden ring is always just out of reach and to fail is always to fail individually. In one of her most striking critiques, Nelson argues that national manhood creates an "institutionally productive melancholia" (p. 205) in which individuals are constantly led on by partial payments and future promises of unity and wholeness in the national sphere. In this manner, the inner workings of national manhood are systemic and difficult to see; Nelson provides a much needed and sophisticated examination of this mode of social organization which emerged in the nation's first seventy years and remains in many respects dominant today.
"Nation" as an identity category and a vehicle of analysis has been under attack as of late in some critical circles. Many scholars have invested their critical energies in more local cultural analysis, finding the category of nation too homogenizing--too grand a narrative--to serve as an adequate lens for cultural understanding. One might understand National Manhood as a map of the nation's homogenizing forces and the ways in which race, class, and gender were organized around a particular national imaginary. In offering such a map Nelson has reinvigorated "nation" as an analytic category and provided the terms and background for future work on various local identities---for example, urban working class, artisan, Southern, and so on--and their interaction with, resistance to, and in many cases appropriation by national white manhood.
MIKE MILLNER University of Virginia
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Nelson notes perceptively that the presence of resisting voices among the Anglo American colonialists demonstrates that American racism is not "a practice already provided for by preexisting social, political, and economic institutions," but rather an ongoing, continual invention, structured to make itself seem prior and given
The somewhat presentist assumptions underlying The Word in Black and White, which are related to Nelson's grounding of the book as a response to contemporary racism, make the study interestingly, and courageously, self-reflexive.
The Word in Black and White: Reading 'Race' in American Literature, 1638-1867
Gary Ashwill
African American Review. 30.2 (Summer 1996): p286.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1996 African American Review
http://aar.slu.edu/
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Dana Nelson presents her important and engaging study of "race" in selected Anglo American texts as an answer to Toni Morrison's questioning of the attitude that white racism is somehow a black problem: "Why ask the victim to explain the torturer?" Nelson concludes that "Morrison might be right: Americans concerned about racism could begin by looking at the 'white' historical record on race" (vii). And this is what Nelson, "motivated by ... contemporary concerns over continuing racism" (ix), sets out to do in The Word in Black and White. She traces a history of Anglo American representations of race from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries (though, she is careful to note, hers is not a progressive or teleological history). She begins with the origins of what she calls the European "superiority story" that emerged from the Copernican revolution's displacement of Earth, thus (white) man, from the center of the universe. In response to this crisis, "European action and representation sought new frontiers to confirm and assert the old - the same superior sense of Self" (9), as explorers, conquerors, and colonists moved into the Pacific, Africa, Asia, and the Americas.
Nelson surveys a broad range of texts that variously embody and resist this "superior sense of [the European] Self," from John Underhill's pamphlet Newes from America (1638) to Lydia Maria Child's novel Romance of the Republic (1867). She approaches these texts from a (somewhat undeveloped) sociological perspective, seeing literature as "symbolic action with reference to a real world," which "should not be abstracted from its material and cultural contexts" (ix). She makes great claims for the social role of literature, which, she believes, "plays a formative role in shaping material and social reality" (131). Given Nelson's framing of the study as a response to contemporary racism, her sociological perspective deserves more space and development. The concept of "literature," especially considered as colonialist cultural work, deserves further interrogation, and attention could have been paid to particular social contexts (e.g., reader responses). She occasionally mentions contemporary reader responses, but a fuller, more systematic treatment of the sociology of these texts would help to clarify exactly what kind of cultural work they actually performed.
Nelson follows Michael Omi and Howard Winant in analyzing "race" as arbitrary, socially constructed, and historically contingent, "a remarkably resilient, persistent, and flexible formation," "ever-changing and adaptive" (viii). She treats race as a kind of fiction with real consequences, and treats each of her texts as a particular reading of "race," rather than as a manifestation of some overarching metadiscourse (though certain patterns in the book's reading do become apparent). Anti-essentialist assumptions inform the study, together with what Nelson calls "disruptive, adversarial reading strategies" (x).
Nelson notes perceptively that the presence of resisting voices among the Anglo American colonialists demonstrates that American racism is not "a practice already provided for by preexisting social, political, and economic institutions," but rather an ongoing, continual invention, structured to make itself seem prior and given (22). In the chapter on early frontier romances, for example, we see how Robert Montgomery Bird's Nick of the Woods (1837), James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826), and William Gilmore Simms's The Yemassee (1835) all work to obscure and mystify the bloody work of conquest. The genocide of Native America becomes displaced onto the past (these are all, like most early frontier romances, historical novels) and understood as an inevitable, historically ordained process. Responsibility for such contemporary policies as Indian Removal is thus diffused, deferred, and accepted "as though [these policies] were 'natural' and already graven in (tomb)stone" (41).
Still, Nelson argues that the heteroglossic quality of novels causes them ironically to foreground what they attempt to conceal. Nathan Slaughter, the title character of Nick of the Woods, in seeking to exterminate the "savage" Native Americans, only comes to resemble the savage of his imagination all the more (62-63). The ideology of "race," then, tends to deconstruct itself, at least when embodied in novels. Yet Nelson gives this Bakhtinian reading one more twist: The multivoiced nature of novels, deriving as it does from "folklore roots," lends more cultural power to these frontier romances and their "monologized vision of 'white' Americans versus Indian savages" (60, 63).
Even those texts whose intentionality seems avowedly "liberal" or "progressive" with regard to race - such as Catherine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie (1827), Child's Romance of the Republic (1867), or Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno" (1855) - fail, in Nelson's terms, to outline genuinely alternative social visions. Child, for example, despite her intention to battle post-Civil War racial prejudice, remains trapped by "middle-class Anglo values," and "complacently accepts" capitalism (88-89). Melville's story of mutiny aboard a slave ship, though it "incisively dismantles" colonialist constructions of racial oppression (110), remains mired in "an overwhelming sense of entrapment in the ruthless will to power of the racist system" (127). Sedgwick's frontier novel finally resembles the romances of Cooper, Simms, and Bird in that it "allows the Indians to fade peacefully from the vision of [the] text" (75).
In fact, despite her assertion that she is more interested in the differences among the texts than in their similarities (xii), Nelson's study tends, "inevitably" (to use a word that appears several times in this book), to find "conservative" tendencies lurking in even the most "liberal" texts. This should certainly not be surprising to any student of pre-twentieth-century writing, though (perhaps inevitably) a few distortions creep in. Her reading of The Last of the Mohicans, for example, includes an interpretation of Natty Bumppo's refusal, at the funeral of Uncas and Cora Munro, to tell Delawares that racial distinctions will be eliminated in the afterlife: "To tell them this would be to tell them that the snows come not in the winter" (qtd. in Nelson 56). Nelson writes that "'white' skin, like white snow, must retain its integrity. Natty's remarks hold the white line on the frontier" (56). Of course, this is a statement by Natty that, while revealing much about the novel's racial separatism and affirmation of "white unity," does so by characterizing Native American culture as similarly separatist. It is a key moment in Cooper's vexed and racist version of cultural relativism, a key moment that should not be reduced to merely more evidence of the novel's conservatism. There is a similar moment in Nelson's reading of Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), when she relies on a simplistic reading of the overdetermined whiteness of the Antarctic as figuring "the white colonist's right - physically and metaphysically - to the South Sea" (97), thus overlooking the intense fear and ambivalence with which the text presents what Nelson calls this "litany of 'white'" (106).
Nelson's glib use of the terms liberal, progressive, and conservative, with all their twentieth-century connotations, deserves further discussion. She writes that Cotton Mather's "The Negro Christianized" (1710) "explicitly sponsors a liberal, humane reading of 'blackness' while implicitly proposing a very conservative, commodified figuration" (26). The process of commodification, however, would not have been understood in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as "conservative" in any sense of the word. The use of the term conservative in this fashion tends to obscure the self-consciously "liberal" and "progressive" nature of many of the forces promoting and instituting racism (overtly or covertly), from capitalism itself to the eugenics movement.
The somewhat presentist assumptions underlying The Word in Black and White, which are related to Nelson's grounding of the book as a response to contemporary racism, make the study interestingly, and courageously, self-reflexive. While an expose of the racist elements in pre-twentieth-century literature might seem, from a 1990s perspective, rather like shooting fish in a barrel, Nelson's admission in the preface of her own complicity in American racism invites a critique of her own book that resembles her critique of previous "white" writers. In this way she largely avoids one of the dangers of (white) writing about racism in the past, which often tends to adopt the viewpoint of an enlightened, morally superior present. Nelson makes it clear that she herself is compromised by the same forces that compromised Melville, Child, and the other writers in her study. She consistently hammers home the point that, no matter how "liberal" the white writer on race, he or she is always compromised by "the very system she or he is critiquing" (127-28). It is possible to interpret many of her statements about other writers as meta-references to her own text. For example, Nelson castigates several writers (Child, Sedgwick, Melville) for not having the imagination to create "an alternative social vision" (67). One might, then, legitimately ask, Where is the alternative social vision in The Word in Black and White? And one might answer that there is none, that, like Child, Nelson is unable to transcend the "middle-class Anglo values" embodied by the academy that privileges her writing.
As I say, one might answer in such a manner, for it is precisely the self-reflexiveness of Nelson's book that explicitly invites such critiques - a quality that decisively differentiates it from the texts it discusses, and that elevates it somewhat above the realm of normally unself-conscious "middle-class Anglo values." Of course, not all of the critiques invited by the book are so easily defused. Nelson describes her own implication in racist systems with the rather loaded phrase (borrowed from Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse) condemned to power. She thus grants herself the luxury of being on both ends of power, so to speak: both exercising power and appropriating the moral leverage of being oppressed by it. Her own comment on the conveniences of "ambivalence for the colonizer who refuses" might be appropriate here:"... it can also be ... a privileged stasis, a position which replaces real confrontation with moral outrage" (23).
Another charge she makes against "white" texts can also be leveled against her own. Witness the modulation of the word we in the preface, which sheds its quotation marks at a crucial point: "We should accept that neither our guilt nor good intentions will free us from this fact" (xiii). It almost seems as though the book is addressed by a "white" author to "white" readers, which adds a certain power (or irony) to the final assessment Nelson makes of her "white" texts: that their one common failure is their insular, "white only" posture, the "rhetorical positioning" of "'white' author to 'white' reader" which "seems to lead to an ineluctable cultural conservatism - or even protectionism" (132).
Nelson is then obliged - by the force of her own argument - to adopt the curious strategy of responding to Toni Morrison's challenge by seemingly doing in the last chapter what Morrison criticizes: turning to an African American voice, that of Harriet Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), to explain "white" racism. The final lesson of the book, its social medicine, is that "there must be a direct dialogue with the heretofore objectified Other - a move which immediately collapses his/her status as Other" (132). I would argue, on the contrary, that "direct dialogue" is no guarantee that anyone's status as Other will collapse: It all depends on how the dialogue is conducted, who is involved, whether or not the discourse is one-sided and in what fashion, and so on. Nelson, however, leaves it up to the oppressor: Her "radical vision," like that of Harriet Jacobs, "depend[s] on the willingness of its audience to listen and to accept the challenge of self-critique" (145). In Nelson's view, it has been the failure of "whites" to occupy a more humble position, and seek out the voices and experiences of the victim/object of American racial history and representation that "has been the problem from the very start" (132). A better example of a failure to transcend "middle-class Anglo values" could not be hoped for: The long history of "white" crimes - slavery, genocide, lynching, Jim Crow - against those considered "Other" and inferior can hardly be reduced to a simple failure to listen, a matter of individual conscience. There are, as Nelson herself demonstrates so forcefully, more complex and more disconcerting (to "whites," anyway) explanations: sadism and avarice, both enforcing and enforced by networks of economic and political oppression. The failure to listen is, I would argue, merely an epiphenomenon, a corollary to what can only be characterized, using a word with a long and dishonorable history in racist discourse, as socially ratified savagery.
Reviewed by Gary Ashwill Duke University
QUOTE:
I will say at the outset how impressed I am by the sheer scope of Nelson's inquiry (1638-1867) and the detailed critical research that undergirds her thesis. Of course she does not purport to survey comprehensively; rather, she offers up sociological criticism as a uniquely sensitive tool with which to probe the evolving American definition of race. She is very good at reading the racial dynamics at work in individual texts.
Even her endnotes make interesting and informative reading; The Word in Black and White is uniformly ambitious and provocative.
The World in Black and White: Rereading "Race" in American Literature, 1638-1867
Theresa M. Towner
The Mississippi Quarterly. 46.4 (Fall 1993): p601.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1993 Mississippi State University
http://www.missq.msstate.edu/
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Full Text:
The Word in Black and While: Reading "Race" in American Literature, 1638-1867, by Dana D. Nelson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. 189 pp.;
"A classic in any culture, one might say, is a place in which the Spirit works," Houston Baker claims in his recent book, having first defined the terms place, spirit, and work precisely enough to make that statement ring, in context, with all the economy and authority of epigraph. Even out of context, as it appears here, it provides a clue to the mystery of why the heart leaps up (or the mind reels or the eyes grow misty) in the presence of some artifacts of human inventiveness. In those relics we can see both spirit and work, soul and effort, and we are moved by each as much as by their powerful combination. Yet Baker would quite rightly object were we to translate that strong emotion and sense of awed respect with which we greet a "classic" into a theory of "universals" -- "universal" elements of beauty, for example, or "universal" standards of behavior, judgment, and values. To do so would eliminate the original, personal, individual spirit at work. That spirit, contained in and expressed through a physical body of a certain age, creed, gender, class, and race, can never be "universalized" without being reduced to an abstract essence, stripped of its complexity, marginalized, and silenced.
Traditional liberal humanist literary critics will wince at the above string of apparent buzzwords that seems to challenge the existence of what William Faulkner called, in a phrase dear to many, "the eternal verities of the human heart." To these readers, an "essence" is not by definition a bad thing. As the "heart" of a character or textual issue, it seems like a good thing to be able to discern and discuss. But contemporary literary studies have shown us that to essentialize is often to dismiss on the grounds of difference or to remake the difference in the image of the accepted standard. In a recent analysis of race and literary criticism, Toni Morrison describes how such dismissal and remaking are functions of superficially kind but deeply misguided intentions:
... in matters of race, silence and evasion have historically ruled literary discourse.
Evasion has fostered another, substitute language in which the issues are encoded,
foreclosing open debate. The situation is aggravated by the tremor that breaks into
discourse on race. It is further complicated by the fact that the habit of ignoring
race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture. To notice is to
recognize an already discredited difference. To enforce its invisibility through silence
is to allow the black body a shadowless participation in the dominant cultural
body. According to this logic, every well-bred instinct argues against noticing and
forecloses adult discourse.(1)
"To notice is to recognize an already discredited difference": practically speaking, this means that (a white) one does not discuss (discredited) blackness with one's (different) black colleagues; that (marginalized) black critics work on black writers (who write about blackness) in the attempt to reformulate the (centralized white) canon; that everyone usually remains relatively polite in this business,(2) even the embattled traditionalist critics, who sometimes feel as though the discussion of race and gender has occluded the literary front with a frivolous political one.
Our writers, however, have always noticed difference, whether discredited or accredited, and built their works in ways to make us notice it, too. The best works of African-American writers, Robert Stepto has argued, offer readers the "great gift" of their "historical and linguistic portrait of a culture -- once imprisoned by a forced illiteracy -- questing for, finding, and relishing the written word."(3) In these works we can observe both the reflection of individual desire to know the written word and the progress, in spite of enormous cultural and linguistic obstacles, of a whole people toward the same goal. In short, the African-American writer reminds us of the wondrousness and power of literacy. In his or her performance, we can virtually learn to read all over again.
This relearning is what I understand to be the ultimate function of what Houston Baker calls in Afro-American Poetics the "personal, racially derived, and theoretically motivated chord" in his own evolving poetics that resonates through such writers as Jean Toomer and Countee Cullen and should resonate through criticism of their work.(4) If DuBois, for instance, could learn to read white language and cultural symbols and so "sit with Shakespeare" and "move in arm with Balzac and Dumas"; if in fact the African-American's unique double-consciousness requires that he learn to read, speak, and think in two nearly exclusive ways -- that is, in the master language and the vernacular; if language itself "is always the very site of the split subject" and one can measure the success of a poetics by how completely it transforms the perspective and behavior of another (Workings, pp. 63, 158): then contemporary critics of African-American literature and culture offer readers a vital epistemological opportunity. In learning how to read again, (the white) one can learn how to think again, in another, previously unrecognized way and, having done so, speak out in a fuller critical voice.
In this way, readers can move away from "the universalist dilemma"(5) and refuse in effect to "think imperialistically: to appropriate the other in the name of a national propriety that conceives itself as universal, as absolutely proper."(6) But we still must face the problem of how to evaluate, how to judge, the products of inventiveness that appear. It is not enough to invoke their "spirit" or attempt to measure depths of soul. That approach, as Henry Louis Gates has pointed out, ignores the literariness of the literature: "Literary images, even black ones, are combinations of words, not of absolute or fixed things .... [W]e must begin to understand the nature of intertextuality, that is, the nonthematic manner by which texts -- poems and novels -- respond to other texts. All cats may be black at night, but not to other cats."(7) All four of the books under primary consideration in this essay attempt to describe the evils of universalism and the ways in which both white writers and writers of color reflect and challenge pervasive and paradigmatic social conditions. Analytic description can take a critic only so far, though. Sooner or later readers will want to know whether the tour of this burgeoning literary landscape is worth the price of the ticket and, not incidentally, something about the person telling them how to spend their money.
The five volumes of Maya Angelou's serial autobiography have achieved a worldwide readership, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings has proven especially popular for its accessibility as well as its emotional honesty. Eleanor W. Traylor's introductory praise for Dolly McPherson's Order Out of Chaos: The Autobiographical Works of Maya Angelou quite rightly locates much of Caged Birds power in "the conditions and figure of silence" that spring literarily from "the proto-image" of Olaudah Equiano, "the muzzled mouth of the African enslaved in the new world." Moreover, Traylor says, Angelou attempts in each of her autobiographies to negotiate "the forms that the discourse of self-portraiture [as a genre] has assumed" (p. xii). A work of criticism on Angelou's autobiographies would thus seem to speak to a wide audience; and according to Traylor, McPherson's effort brings the study of Maya Angelou, bestselling writer, into the realm of "honest scholarship" (p. xi).
Had Eleanor Traylor written the study she introduces, we might have had a good book on a middling author. As matters stand, however, even a reader patient with the way Maya Angelou's self-promotion masquerades as artistic self-scrutiny (obviously, I am not) would object to Order Out of Chaos on at least three counts. First, what Angelou says goes double for McPherson. Second, McPherson sees her critical task as one of re-presenting rather than analyzing what Angelou says. Third -- and, almost of course, consequently -- the resulting book amounts to a fairly straightforward exercise in plot-summarizing heroine-worship. McPherson had access to Angelou's youthful journals, and she has obviously read the five books of the autobiography carefully and with great attention to their details; but at few points in her book does her sheer command of information support an analysis of how Angelou's serial autobiography works and how, in places, it does not work. Probably the clearest example of this failure occurs in McPherson's treatment of the episode in All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes in which Angelou, in Berlin in the early Sixties, impulsively invites a brand-new Jewish acquaintance to the home of a German family (whom she correctly suspects of Nazism) and then becomes physically ill when the two ideologies collide at breakfast. A similar incident occurs with the Senegalese in Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas: she knew of the potential of a violent conflict, courted that conflict, and then acted surprised when it erupted. McPherson doesn't notice this much, though. She merely calls the episode from Traveling Shoes a "most compelling scene" (p. 113); she summarizes and quotes when she should analyze and probe.
Here, in order, are the moments at which McPherson comes closest to challenging Angelou at any level: she points out that "the adult Angelou" the autobiographer, that is) never explores her youthful guilt regarding her son, s illegitimacy (p. 65); she notes that "humor and self-mockery become, at times, a substitute for a deeper look, a closer examination of behavior, motivation, attitude" (p. 72); she allows that the name-dropping Singin' and Swingin' "is certainly a praisesong to Porgy and Bess" (p. 89); and in the "Conversation with Maya Angelou" that serves as the book's conclusion, she catches her subject in virtual ignorance of the history of the form in which she writes (pp. 140-141). That "Conversation" represents in miniature the almost uniformly worshipful tone of the entire book, and when Angelou says that she left "a lot of unkindness" out of all of her books (p. 139), I can practically hear McPherson responding, "So then shall I."
There are, of course, some dangers in writing studies of single authors -- especially of those whom one admires greatly. Much of my own work focuses on the later novels of William Faulkner, and unlike most critics I find those novels wonderfully readable as well as intellectually challenging. So I understand the risks of single-author study well: the temptation to gloss over less-appealing elements of the works; the wish to convert others to my way of thinking about the work and the writer; the chance that my description of a text might just rewrite it to make it better than it really is. Moreover, in single-author study one compares the author to her- or himself before extending the comparison to other writers (if one ever does). There is thus always the danger of critical myopia, a collapsing of judgment that comes of staking so much of oneself on Writer X's reputation that one finds other writers inferior mainly because they are not Writer X. McPherson so prizes what she calls Angelou's "celebration and transcendence" of life that she cannot recognize other, primarily more cynical narrative stances and strategies in African-American autobiography for what they are -- strategies that shape the myriad details of a life into a pattern designed to show an unknown reader the quality of that life. McPherson practically dismisses that crucial live-in-my-skin-for-a-while element of autobiography, unless that element is cheery, and if it is not, she judges the work inferior: "Unlike Angelou, whose innocence is somehow renewed with each bitter or bittersweet experience, by the end of Coming of age, [Anne] Moody is stripped of both innocence and faith .... Unlike the personal narratives of Wright, Moody, and [Mary] Mebane, Angelou's autobiography affirms life itself, despite its difficulties, and celebrates the power of the individual to meet its challenges" (pp. 127-128).(8) In McPherson's script, then, the spirit should smile even as the body trudges through Egypt.
Trudier Harris's Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison far more successfully negotiates its subject's narrative sources and strategies. As Robert Hemenway has pointed out, the literary critic used to assume that "folklore" was simply another name for "bad literature." Recent developments in the field stress that folklore, far from a "corpse-like text, fixed by the collector" is "dynamic, changing through time and space"; and "both writers and tale tellers organize their performances around certain expectations of the community and culture they serve" Reconstruction, pp. 128-129). Harris claims that Morrison goes further, creating a specifically "literary folklore" that combines her own inventions with recognizable bits of known folklore to saturate every level of her novels: "Morrison replicates the dynamic of folk communities by showing how people interact with each other to shape tales, legends, rumors, and folk beliefs" (p. 11). Harris argues this thesis forcefully and with strong documentations from lore and from Morrison's novels. She is particularly convincing in her analysis of the lore of the nonhuman community in Tar Baby -- the yelling trees and brokenhearted rivers, for instance -- and in that novel's adaptation of the racial and sexual dynamics of the tar baby and trickster stories (pp. 125-127, 140). Too, her analysis of the act of storytelling in Beloved persuasively demonstrates its "power literally to heal or to kill"; narrative there is both organizing principle and overriding theme, as well as a prime shaper of character (pp. 166-167).
Harris manages to avoid the temptation to lionize Morrison. Indeed, she may perhaps go too far the other way. In her consistent attempt to bring Morrison into the field of specifically political feminist writers, Harris often overlooks the sexual complexity of Morrison's work. Let me take Harris's example of the myth of woman as demon and nurturer, as manifested in Beloved, to illustrate my objection. Harris sketches out that myth and even seems to accept that woman must be one or the other, source of death or life. Morrison, on the other hand, never accepts such a division. She recognizes that woman can be both at once; so can man be both killer and provider. Jadine and Son can both be right and both be wrong, their union both gorgeously fulfilling and ultimately hopeless. Such characters spring from the troubled core of Morrison's novels, the bloody loam of conflicting desire and experience that she refuses to sentimentalize or render into dogma.
Harris sees this refusal as a weakness. She wants a fictional universe of "independent, self-determining wom[e]n" and believes that Morrison equates such women with a pretentious masculinity that Harris finds distasteful. She claims that "Morrison's works seem to continue the use and abuse of black women characters by making them victims in the traditional folkloric patterns -- generally devalued by males, to be seen and not heard, to submit to masculine will in reality if not in spirit" (p. 188). In other words, she stands her own thesis regarding Morrison's masterful creation of "literary folklore" on its head and judges Morrison's novels adversely because they do not serve the agenda that Harris wishes them to serve. It is true, as Harris points out in her final lines, that one of Morrison's strengths is "believ[ing] that black people can indeed go about their lives without thinking about white people for at least twenty-four hours at a time" (p. 192). I wish that Harris could see that Morrison has an equally powerful vision about sexual relationships and sexual politics that springs directly from her belief that women can go about their lives without thinking about men for twenty-four hours at a time, too.(9) Or, at least, we might sometimes be better off psychically, if we could. Listen, for example, to Nel keening belatedly for Sula: the haunting cry of "girl, girl, girlgirlgirl" moving out of the novel in "circles and circles of sorrow." Think about Pecola underneath Cholly, or about Geraldine faking orgasm to get out from underneath her husband. Four females, four different kinds of femaleness: and as the list expands, so does the spectrum of difference. Recall, finally, probably the biggest monster in the fiction Harris considers -- Margaret Street of Tar Baby, who stuck pins and burning cigarettes into her baby son "because I could," because he wasn't big enough "to tell" and so stop her. I cannot think offhand of a scene anywhere in fiction that so chillingly and concisely represents both absolute power and the fear of eventual resistance and reprisal that power contains and must repress. I am grateful rather than insulted that Toni Morrison's women speak in so many tongues, that their spirits write so diversely and (to borrow Alice Walker's phrase) so womanishly.(10)
Both Dana D. Nelson, in The Word in Black and White. and Baker in Workings of the Spirit make unapologetically urgent calls for readers to begin to read racial difference in American literature (and Morrison would remind us here that race is always central to American literature) in specific theoretical ways. Nelson calls for "a sociological criticism of literature" that "assumes that literature is always already implicated and interfering in the social" -- that is, indivisible from its historical "site of origin" and thus, I take it, bound temporally. The task of such a criticism is "to interpret the processes by which our (always multiple) understandings of |race,'and concomitantly |white' privilege, are deployed" throughout American literature, in texts by and about "black," "white," and "red" persons male and female (p. 21). By foregrounding the concept of "race" as both a fact of cultural life and a fiction "invented, described, promulgated, and legislated by those who would benefit as a group from the concept," Nelson stakes out a space within which to describe just how destructive rhetorical strategies can be in real life and how cruelly they persist through time (pp. vii-xii). She views writers as readers first-readers of "race" who repeat or modify, consciously or subconsciously, contemporary racial concepts in their writing.
I will say at the outset how impressed I am by the sheer scope of Nelson's inquiry (1638-1867) and the detailed critical research that undergirds her thesis. Of course she does not purport to survey comprehensively; rather, she offers up sociological criticism as a uniquely sensitive tool with which to probe the evolving American definition of race. She is very good at reading the racial dynamics at work in individual texts. I am particularly persuaded by her readings of the contradictory social impulses in Hope Leslie and A Romance of the Republic and the murderously encoded white gaze in "Benito Cereno" and particularly pleased that she includes Native as well as African Americans in her conceptual framework. Even her endnotes make interesting and informative reading; The Word in Black and White is uniformly ambitious and provocative.
Yet I must say in nearly the same breath that I am not persuaded by most categorically delineated criticism of any kind. I do not believe that writers -- good writers, anyway -- are readers first: not readers of culture, or gender, or aesthetics, or politics, or social trends. Good writers are producers, movers, shakers, doers; they may observe, reflect, woolgather, ponder, and read, but their central concern is the obsessive, active mucking about with words in order to make something personally satisfying. A broadly defined "sociological criticism" cannot do the writer I have defined any justice at all, for such a criticism does not even recognize what Eliot called the individual talent, never mind allow that talent to factor in a consideration of how issues of race and gender are figured and refigured in literature.(11) This seems to me to be the debilitating flaw in a sociological criticism: it is best suited to writers of fictionalized sociology (as some would describe writers like Childs and Harriet Beecher Stowe). As Gates reminds us, we cannot afford to treat works of literature as though they were only thematic exercises or temporal expressions. Literature, and especially the literature of the dispossessed in the Americas, is heavily intertextual. Books are made by other books, traditions by other traditions. (The backgrounding of intertextuality probably accounts for what seems like a weird omission from a book that surrounds Puritanism chronologically and studies Mather, Winthrop, Cooper, Simms, and Melville in detail: captivity narratives. Nelson doesn't mention them, but they were a vital influence on the aforementioned writers as well as on developing American genres as diverse as the jeremiad and the frontier romance novel.(12))
According to a similar logic, Nelson's reliance on deconstructionist readings as the sole basis for sociological reconstruction seems odd. She stands in the rather contradictory position of using literary models to define the sociological attributes of her literary models. To make my case briefly, I would point to her summary of the racial Othering in Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Pym "is not solely about absence of meaning, but about the impulses -- social, political, economic -- that undergird the construction of any system of meaning," she argues (p. 108). The deconstructionist model reveals the absence of meaning while the sociological approach reveals the presence of meaningful constructions that construct meaning. Such analysis is ideological tail-chasing conducted at dizzying speed; for not only would the strict application of deconstructionist theory radically unpack the assumptions and destabilize the foundations of sociological criticism, but Nelson's combination of the two also requires a pretty energetic suspension of disbelief in its attempt to keep literature strapped down to the quotidian.
I admit to a certain weariness, not unlike Roquentin's nausea, on the subject of much avowedly "theoretical" criticism, the widespread and slapdash application of which occasions my wonder. Is this all there is for the future of literary studies, whether "canonical" or "marginal"? Does the onset of new, allegedly redemptive interpretive strategies mean that the literary baby needs must be tossed out with the old hermeneutic bath water? (I'm sure the philologists felt some similar shivers at the onset of the New Criticism, and the academy has nonetheless survived.) In Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing, Houston Baker cheers me up with his rollicking call for and explanation of a phenomenological theory of black women's "expressivity." He combines Bachelard's concept of space as comprised of imagistic fields (which contain representations of cultural values) with "culturally specific" imaginative fields (such as Alice Walker's mother's garden) in order to define the task of poetics in general: "to operate a universal category or imagistic field through a culturally specific field in order to enhance both" (p. 61). African-American women's writing, he continues, teems with "felicitous" images, by which he means "well chosen, apt, comprehensive" and opposed to "aversive" or "exploitatively melodramatic or sensationalistic image[s] in the service of a profitable ideology of shock" (p. 67). This writing continually not only remakes the world and the self anew through the image (p. 52) but also remakes the now, or time itself (pp. 192, 202). This whole process, magical as it is for all writers, finds its particular roots, its metaphoric power and currency, and its future place in the spirit worker's conjure:
To seek a habitation beyond alienation and ancient disharmonies in a land where
Africans have been scarred and battered, shackled in long rows on toilsome levees,
is the motion of such cultural work. The home that marks the journey's end or theoretical
return is the poetic image conceived as a classical space in which one institutes
the type of locational pause that Bachelard might have called eulogized place -- a
revered site of culturally specific interests and values. Conjure is. to borrow a title
adopted for his nationalistic work by Amiri Baraka, the Spirit House of black women's
creativity. Its efficacy does not consist in its material presence nor in its genteel
reconciliation of opposites such as form and content, context and meaning.
Rather, it is an improvisational pause, a riff in a mighty orchestration, a nonce solo
in which notes or objects at hand are combined to turn the trick on identifiable
adversaries. (pp. 98-99) In conjure, in black women's writing, the spirit works, and the script glows with effort.
And in Houston Baker's view, the critic works, too. Far from merely adopting the language of phenomenology or deconstruction, Baker carefully examines the reflexiveness and potentially mutual exclusiveness of those theoretical positions and calls for nothing less than rewriting the terms of critical discourse. He does not want to "appropriat[e] black women's expressivity through a colonizing gaze" (p. 67) -- like that of his theoretical models, one assumes -- but to "extrapolate from |theory' what is actionally and autobiographically necessary and useful for us" (p. 45). He puts his authorial power where his theoretical mouth is, too: "the nonphilosophically disposed reader should know that he or she can avoid my [discussion of phenomenology and poststructuralist theory] in this and the next section without losing the thread of my general argument," he writes at one point. When was the last time you read a critic who admitted that some of his or her "questions do not arise with equal interest to all" readers without at least implicitly condescending to those readers (p. 53)?(13)
The writers Baker reads are working souls, capable of doing much and showing us how. The critic's task is to find the intellectual energy and mental rigor to keep up with them -- to bring them home, so to speak. Of the four scholars under consideration here, Baker goes furthest to keep the phrase "critical imagination" out of the realm of oxymoron. He writes with amazing energy and grace, and he remakes critical vocabulary consistently throughout the book in order to reflect the dynamic quality of the poetics he describes. That effort at rewriting discourse produces what some readers will call a quirky if not altogether impenetrable style: what, they will demand upon looking at the table of contents, does "the iterability of ONE" mean, and why the capital letters?
I contend that the crankiest reader will, upon finishing Baker's book, not only know what that phrase means but will have a hard time contesting its centrality in any poetics of African-American women's writing. Yet what I find even more appealing than the flexing of critical parameters or the articulation of a poetics is the way that Baker never loses sight of, and never fails to express appreciation for, the individual texts and writers who inspired his efforts.(14) He loves this writing, prizes these writers. Listen to the way he extrapolates from Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road to his argument on conjure: "We live in conjure when we are warmed by such words [as Hurston's]. Combining the various meanings of |conjure,' black women creators have thrust oppressive kings from state, exercised potently magical and occult influence, and performed liberating |tricks' with words. Their acts, surely, have fanned a quintessentially African spirit down dark lanes of time" (p. 101). Words, songs, spells cast on the way to writing: spirit scripts, indeed, interpreted by a critic who knows a little something about conjure himself.
For all its conjuring, Workings of the Spirit begins and ends with the black female body. The poetics depends upon a realization of the abuse and objectification of that body throughout recent history; and the text itself begins, continues alongside, and ends with photographs of African-American women of all classes and ages. Assembled by Elizabeth Alexander and Patricia Redmond, this wonderful series lives up to Baker's description of it as a "phototext," a "visualizaton of an Afro-American woman's poetics" that "offers felicitous images in motion" (p. 212). Between the covers of this book, there are really three analyses at work -- Baker's prose, the phototext, and the suggestive interplay between word and image that emerges from their combination. Spirit in this book thus hovers ever near the flesh through which it finds expression.
It would appear, then, that I have been persuaded by Baker's argument that we are never outside the realm of the "theoretical" or the "personal." Nor should we try to be: "for a theorist to acknowledge autobiography as a driving force is for him or her to do no more than tell the truth" and admit that whatever reading one offers is a function of personal training, experience, desire, and inclination and not some transcendent reflection of ultimate righteousness (pp. 48-50). We should try to stand outside of bad theories, and try to avoid sappy inward forrays that in no way advance our readers' understanding of whatever it is we purport to say.
This call to restore the I to literary criticism is going to be a hard one for sensitive white readers of writers of color to heed. (The white male critic's voice has been the voice of the academy for so long that his I runs a very real risk of being drowned by shouts of derision and covered in rotten vegetables.(15)) If it is difficult to learn the master language, it is also difficult to unlearn; for, aside from making it difficult to see for yourself, having your daddy's eyes can cause you a heap of worry and embarrassment. Baker says that a non-African-American who "honestly engages his or her own autobiographical implication in a brutal past is as likely as an Afro-American" to provide strong readings of the "nuances and resonances of an-other's story" -- in other words, to write good criticism of this literature (p. 48). The white female writing this essay was happy to hear that, because when I began my study of African-American writers I could not shake the uncomfortable sense that, read as carefully and as widely as I could, I just might not have the right to write here. By doing so I might unconsciously continue all abhorrent tradition of appropriation and thievery, and do so not from behind the language and with the apparent sanction of the academy but as an identifiable human being with a ZIP code.
I like the risk inherent in this call to recognize, and so of course to celebrate, the autobiographical presence in criticism, and I think it must be answered wholeheartedly in the affirmative. If I feel locked out of African-American literary study, I can remind myself of what it was like to come to Faulkner for the first time, as a tenth-grader to "The Bear" out of its novelistic context, in fact, and feel absolutely locked out because I didn't know all the words and there weren't very many punctuation marks. I can try to imagine what it must be like to have to teach yourself how to read, in secret, and with sure and certain knowledge of the whip if anyone finds out. I can sit on the porch with Ernest Gaines's old men and a shotgun. I can help John Washington burn his notecards in Chaneysville, and I can cry at the sight of Sethe's husband's face in the clabber. Nobody starts out knowing anything, including the very idea of "difference," and if we must fall into the various charnel houses of history then at least there are writers to show us the way through them.
With spirit. (1) Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp, 9-10. (2) Usually, but not always, as the heated exchange between Joyce A. Joyce, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Houston A. Baker, Jr., in the pages of New Literary History demonstrates. See Joyce, "The Black Canon: Reconstructing Black American Literary Criticism," New Literary History, 18 (Winter 1987), 335-344 and "|Who the Cap Fit': Unconsciousness and Unconscionableness in the Criticism of Houston A. Baker, Jr. and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.," New Literary History, 18 (Winter 1987), 371-384; Gates, "|What's Love Got to Do With It': Critical Theory, Integrity, and the Black Idiom," New Literary History, 18 (Winter 1987), 345-362; Baker, "In Dubious Battle," New Literary History, 18 (Winter 1987), 363-389; and, in evenhanded response to these essays, Theodore O. Mason, Jr., "Between the Populist and the Scientist: Ideology and Power in Recent Afro-American Literary Criticism or, |The Dozens' as Scholarship," Callaloo, 11 (Summer 1988), 606-615. (3) "Teaching Afro-American Literature: Survey or Tradition," in Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction, ed. Robert Stepto and Dexter Fisher (New York: Modern Language Association, 1979), p. 23. (4) Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), pp. 91, 98. (5) 5See Robert Hemenway, "Are You a Flying Lark or a Setting Dove?" in The Reconstruction of Instruction, p. 128. (6) Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from "The Tempest" to "Tarzan" (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 141. (7) "Preface to Blackness: Text and Pretext," in The Reconstruction of Instruction, p. 68. (8) She refers to Richard Wright's Black Boy, Anne Moody's Coming of Age in Mississippi, and Mary E. Mebane's Mary. (9) Barbara Christian succinctly locates Morrison's work among the works of other black female writers of the past thirty years. The writers of the late Seventies and early Eighties, she says, "look at ways in which the quality of black women's lives is affected by the interrelation of sexism and racism. ... Morrison's novels, of those of the major writers, have moved furthest away from the rebellious-woman stance of the mid-seventies, for she has focused [in Song of Solomon and Tar Baby] on men as much as women. ... Morrison sees no practical way out of the morass of sexism, racism, and class privilege in the Western world, as it is presently constructed, for anyone, black or white, female or male." See "Trajectories of Self-Definition: Placing Contemporary Afro-American Women's Fiction," in Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, ed. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 242-243. (10) There is some irony in using Alice Walker to speak favorably about Toni Morrison, for Walker is usually invoked as Morrison's (superior) philosophical opposite. However, I think the irony reveals the deeper truth of these two women's kinship as working writers. See especially the third and fourth definitions of womanist foregrounded in In Search of Our Mother's Gardens: "Loves the Spirit ... Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. ... Womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender" (New York: Harcourt, 1983), p. xii (11) Gates has recently addressed the problem of treating an author as (in John Guillory's words) "the representative of a social identity" and the concomitant "suspension of literary or aesthetic judgment": "the sort of conversation and contestation that normally surround literary and cultural assessments, however contingent, can be a valuable part of literary pedagogy. Once a text by, say, Alice Walker becomes essentialized as the Eternal Black Feminine, though, this kind of conversation can no longer take place, because then you are not longer debating the value of a work but of a genus of person." See "Pluralism and Its Discontents," Profession 92 (New York: Modern Language Association, 1992), pp. 35-38. (12) For an excellent overview of these narratives and their place in American literature, see "Cups of Common Calamity: Puritan Captivity Narratives as Literature and History," the Editors' Preface to Puritans Among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption, 1676-1724, ed. Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 1-28. William L. Andrews describes the connection between captivity narratives and African-American women's autobiography in his introduction to Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women's Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 1-22. (13) Of course, even the "nonphilosophically disposed" might not want to admit such a disposition and forge ahead anyway, perhaps tantalized by Baker's characterization of the two sections as "indispensable." (14) This enthusiasm extends to the theorists who might not appeal to all his readers. (15) John Callahan eloquently negotiates this territory in his description of the formation of his own various "identities," racial, social, and spiritual. See In the African-American Crain: The Pursuit of Voice in Twentieth-Century Black Fiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 1-14.
Hoganson, Kristin. Social History. Jan2000, Vol. 25 Issue 1, p110. 2p.
Subjects: NATIONAL Manhood (Book)
Dana D. Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (1998), xiv + 344 (Duke University Press, Durham, $49.95, paperback $17.95).
As the title suggests, this is not a book about the local. Not only does it address an imagined sense of identification with the nation, but the texts it unpacks are wide-ranging. Nelson starts with The Federalist's call for a unified manhood and ends with a critique of modern presidentialism that draws on two recent films, Air Force One and Contact. In between, she interprets an assortment of texts (mostly from the 1780s to 1850s) on westward expansion, polygenesis and gynaecology.
In juxtaposing these texts, Nelson aims to elucidate something that she labels 'national manhood', which, in her words, represents 'an ideology that has worked powerfully since the Constitutional era to link a fraternal articulation of white manhood to civic identity' (ix). She sketches out the origins of this ideology in her first chapter, based on federalist writings in favour of the constitution, Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer, Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia and Benjamin Rush's essay 'Negro Leprosy'. Rather than tracing the subsequent evolution of this ideology, she shifts her attention to the 'alignment of geographic and psychic territories' (xi) in the Lewis and Clark journals, Nicholas Biddle's 1814 history of their expedition and John Neal's novel Logan, A Family History. She then cuts to the efforts of professionals to claim objectivity and managerial expertise, focusing on the essays of ethnologists Samuel George Morton and John Bachman, Lydia Maria Child's An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans, Charles Meigs's 'Lecture on Some of the Distinctive Characteristics of the Female', George Lippard's novel Quaker City and J. Marion Sims's gynaecological and autobiographical writings. Professionalization leads to the topic of fraternity and its failure to materialize, especially in Benjamin Rush's 'Paradise of Negro Slaves' and Herman Melville's 'Benito Cereno'.
This assortment of texts leads Nelson to draw two major conclusions about 'national manhood': 'first, that the process of identifying with national manhood blocks white men from being able efficiently to identify socio-economic inequality as structural rather than individual failure, thereby conditioning them for market and professional competition; second and more importantly, that it entails a series of affective foreclosures that block those men's more heterogeneous democratic identifications and energies' (ix). As this summary implies, Nelson calls attention to the losses that white men incurred as a result of the national manhood ideology. This is not to say that she is oblivious to the benefits it conferred on those included under its rubric or the costs it held for those -- she pays particular attention to Indians and white women -- excluded from it. But along with acknowledging what white men got out of the ideology, she makes a case for what they failed to get. Besides having to live with the fear that failure would be seen as a reflection of individual inadequacy, white men suffered from an inability to build meaningful relationships with their peers. Some of her most perceptive readings address the theme of fraternity. Nelson finds that even while the men she studies tried to build a sense of race-based fraternity by juxtaposing white men to people of colour and women, they constantly fretted about their position relative to their supposed brothers, that is, relative to other white men. 'Over and over national manhood's competitive individualism and hollowing logic of representivity vitiates the anticipated pleasure of fraternal exchange.' Only with dead or imagined men could white men 'achieve the equalitarian reassurance of unmediated brotherhood' (x) --a phenomenon that Nelson wittily refers to as 'esprit de corpse'. The tragedy of national manhood for white men was that it promised something-an emotionally satisfying fraternity -- that it never delivered. White men were supposed to identify with the nation, but not collectively, and the result was a failure to achieve a satisfying sense of collectivity.
Given that Nelson identifies herself as a literary critic, it comes as no surprise that the greatest strengths of her book lie in its close readings, which are often imaginative and insightful. Her interpretation of Melville's 'Benito Cereno' serves as a case in point. Whereas in her first book, The Word in Black and White: Reading Race in American Literature, 1638-1867 (Oxford, 1992), she uses 'Benito Cereno' to cast light on racism, here she reads it as an account of the frustrated fraternity between white men, set against a backdrop of racial and gender otherness. (Curiously, though, given her focus on nationalism, Nelson does not elaborate on the international dimension to the story: one captain is a Yankee, the other a Spaniard. What are the implications of that pairing for national manhood?)
Although Nelson casts her book as a contribution to literary and cultural studies, she has gone beyond literary and theoretical materials to read widely in historical scholarship. But the contexts in which she situates her characters tend to be broadly sketched. Capitalism, a major causal force in the account, seems particularly static. Localism is only alluded to in passing. As the book jumped from Jefferson to Neal to Meigs I found myself wondering, why these texts? These authors? The book is much more successful in illuminating texts than time periods.
In comparison to another book on race, manhood and imagined community-Gail Bederman's Manliness and Civilization (Chicago, 1995), which investigates the discursive construction of civilized manhood --Nelson's account seems determinate; the ideology of national manhood, relatively fixed. After her initial exploration of national manhood, Nelson assumes that its existence is sufficiently established for her to move on to some of its implications. 'National manhood' shifts from the object of enquiry to the subject: Nelson writes of 'national manhood's racial archive' (57), its 'altero-referentiality' (26) and its operative structure (181). The problem with reifying the concept is that it seems too slippery to be decisively pinned down, and too nebulous to exercise agency. Indeed, Nelson often conflates it with 'white manhood', and she also refers to 'national (white) manhood' (60) and 'white/national manhood' (67). In forming these categories, less lumping and more splitting seems to be in order.
Finally, a note on style. Nelson's highly abstract writing is the kind that makes my restless undergraduates cranky. Historians with a theoretical bent will find her discussions of manhood, citizenship, whiteness and fraternity illuminating, but those who like their narratives more readily digestible will have to brace themselves for the denser passages.
~~~~~~~~
By Kristin Hoganson, Harvard University
QUOTE:
Nelson’s Commons Democracy deserves the attention of a wide range of early republic scholars, especially those interested in literature, democracy, and the political practices of ordinary Americans. This vigorously argued book offers a coherent paradigm for understanding an important part of the early American democratic tradition. The field would do well to run with Nelson’ framework and explore the full range of commons democracy in the early republic.
Given that Nelson identifies herself as a literary critic, it comes as no surprise that the greatest strengths of her book lie in its close readings, which are often imaginative and insightful.
Although Nelson casts her book as a contribution to literary and cultural studies, she has gone beyond literary and theoretical materials to read widely in historical scholarship.
Commons Democracy: Reading the Politics of Participation in the Early United StatesPrinter-friendly versionPDF version
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Book:
Commons Democracy: Reading the Politics of Participation in the Early United States
Dana Nelson
Bronx, NY, Fordham University Press, 2015, ISBN: 9780823268382; 232pp.; Price: £50.40
Reviewer:
Dr Mark Boonshoft
New York Public Library
Citation:
Dr Mark Boonshoft, review of Commons Democracy: Reading the Politics of Participation in the Early United States, (review no. 2012)
DOI: 10.14296/RiH/2014/2012
Date accessed: 11 May, 2017
See Author's Response
In Commons Democracy, literary scholar Dana Nelson offers an alternative history of democracy in Revolutionary America. Nelson challenges the comforting narrative Americans like to tell themselves about the ‘Founders’ high-minded ideals and their careful crafting of the sage framework for democracy – a representative republican government’ (p. 3). This ‘consensus’ story of the founding ‘omits the challenges offered and the contributions made by non-elite citizens’ (p. 10). Nelson wants scholars – and Americans – to take more seriously what she calls ‘commons democracy’ or ‘vernacular democracy’. Based on this book, we certainly should.
The choice of the word commons is deliberate. Commoning emerged in reaction to practices of enclosure – of turning common land into private property – in early modern England. It quickly made its way to British North America. Nelson picks up the story around the American Revolution, and traces the long life of commons democracy in the decades before the Civil War. Crafted by ordinary, poor, white people, commons democracy was ‘not experienced via the representative institutions we formally associate with U.S. democracy’ (p. 7). It was instead ‘robustly participatory, insistently local, roughly equalitarian, and grounded in varieties of exclusion’ (pp. 7, 10). Commons democracy ‘insisted on sufficiency for the many rather than accumulation for the few’ through an economy governed by ordinary members of a community. This democratic tradition spoke ‘for (in today’s parlance) the 99 percent’ (p. 11). Americans, in sum, tend to associate democracy with liberal individualism and representative government. Commons democracy, to the contrary, was grounded in a deeply held sense of community.
Nelson relies on two distinct streams of analysis and evidence. First, Nelson draws on the insights of a growing historical literature on the social, economic, legal, and political practices of ordinary white Americans, especially along the Western frontier. Nelson’s explication of this work brings conceptual coherence to a wide ranging and still developing literature. Yet Nelson also moves beyond the existing scholarship. Indeed she makes a signal contribution to it by bringing to bear her training as a literary scholar. Nelson turns to novels in order to find further evidence about commoning and the reactions against it. Commons democracy, it turns out, lived a longer life than we usually assume.
The critical first chapter of Commons Democracy does not include any novels. Relying on existing historical scholarship, Nelson traces a tradition of grassroots democratic practices from the Carolina Regulators of the 1760s through the Massachusetts Shaysites in the 1780s. Nelson also shows how this ‘corporate self-governing democratic power’ with its emphasis on equality and fairness, ‘soon became an object of concern for the Framers, who aimed to contain its effects in the architecture of representative government’ (pp. 51–2). In so doing, Nelson disputes the notion that the founders created popular sovereignty with the Constitution. The rise of state-based liberal democracy – characterized by representative institutions, individualism, and legal formalism – which the framers supported, actually worked to tame commons democracy. Here Nelson endorses a long progressive and neo-progressive literature. Following Terry Bouton, Barbara Clark Smith, Woody Holton, and Alan Taylor, among others, Nelson centers ordinary people in this neo-progressive framework. The challenge of bringing non-elites to the fore reveals the extent to which the founders’ succeeded in obscuring commons democracy. They received an assist, Nelson maintains, from historians. In writing histories of early American democracy from the founders’ vantage, ‘consensus’ historians further obscured grassroots democratic traditions. Together, these developments conspired across the centuries to make commons democracy seem unnatural, perhaps antithetical, to American democratic practice.
Literary analysis moves to the fore in chapter two, which focuses on the Whiskey Rebellion. Federalist writers cast the event as a moment of civilization confronting savagery. But the objections of farmers in western Pennsylvania to the federal excise on Whiskey was, Nelson argues, firmly in the tradition of regulation that she traced in chapter one. Nelson reads Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s multivolume novel, Modern Chivalry (published 1792–1816) – along with writings by other leading Pennsylvania Jeffersonian Republicans, William Findley and Albert Gallatin – as a defense of the rebels. ‘Modern Chivalry’, she writes, ‘posits vernacular democracy as a vital partner to formal democratic institutions’. This ‘middle way’ rejected the Federalists’ Manichean view of a contest between vernacular democracy and representative government (p. 53). The whiskey rebels were not hostile to the republic. They merely sought to force distant government agents to compromise with them. In essence, vernacular practices remained important and necessary in American government, according to Brackenridge, because American representative government threatened to become ‘abstractly thin’ at the national level (p. 83). Over the course of the book, Nelson comes to endorse Brackenridge’s view.
Chapter three turns to James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers. Published in 1823, but set in the 1790s, the classic novel provides a vehicle for Nelson to examine the nature of vernacular democracy’s legal practices. Lawyers, judges, and courts hardly imposed their preferred legal regime on a lawless landscape. Rather, these actors and institutions confronted an existing set of communal legal norms centered on maintaining the ‘people’s peace’. Ultimately, the intertwined forces of state-based liberal law and capital accumulation in central New York overawed these vernacular legal practices. The commoners in Cooper’s tale faced a stark choice. They could either stay and accept the structures of self-government imposed by landowners, or move on. For Nelson, the novel matters because it allows historians to witness ‘the enclosure of the civic commons in progress’ (p. 104). Unlike Brackenridge, Cooper saw no place for vernacular democracy in representative government. The Pioneers reinforces how the establishment of legal formalism, a main component of representative democracy, meant to replace vernacular democracy.
In chapter four, Nelson argues that the stark declension narrative in Cooper’s Pioneers was premature. Vernacular democratic practices survived in the west and remained a trope in novels into the late 1830s. Robert Montgomery Bird’s Nick of the Woods (1837), William Gilmore Simms’s Richard Hurdis (1838), and Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll follow? (1839), all reveal the persistence of equalitarian democracy, and the anxieties it induced, on the frontier. The authors ‘equate’ this democratic tradition ‘with political regression’ (p. 116). Bird and Simms’s novels are set in the South (Kentucky and Alabama respectively). Nelson uses this opportunity to answer a critique she frequently faced: ‘”Why should we care about people who were poor white trash? I mean, they were just a bunch of racists, working on behalf of a racist empire”’ (p. 18). As Nelson reads Bird and Simms, commons democracy presented a challenge to the expansion of slavery into the West. While elites who allied with the state pushed to move slavery west, commoners actually forged interethnic bonds. But, as Nelson writes, this group of novels also ‘documents the success of the consensus narrative’s insistence that such notions of communal self-determination ultimately belonged beyond the national pale’ (p. 132). Pushing out alternative democratic ideals was critical for protecting slavery and racialized citizenship.
Through chapter four, Nelson’s use of literary evidence pays dividends. That similar tropes recur in American novels through 1840 allows Nelson to stretch the story of commons democracy well beyond the founding moment. If vernacular democracy remained a worrying presence into the antebellum period, perhaps the founders’ attempts to tame democracy were not as successful as most neo-progressive scholarship might lead us to believe. Moreover, Nelson’s literary approach helps overcome the paucity of sources left by squatters and other commoners. Historians have made fantastic use of what is extant. Yet I am convinced by Nelson’s argument that ‘fictional portraits of common folk in the early nation may both be a little less anchored to specific facts, and nevertheless a littler more fully human, more dimensional’ (p. 13). Nelson grapples with the fact that most of the novels she uses were written by elites hostile to alternative democratic traditions. She parses the authors’ biases carefully, in order to paint a sympathetic portrait of commons democracy.
In the final chapter, though, Nelson confronts the limits of her literary source base. Nelson returns to James Fenimore Cooper, and examines the Littlepage Trilogy – Satanstoe (1845), The Chainbearer (1845), and The Redskins (1846). Cooper wrote the novels against the backdrop of New York’s Anti-Rent wars, a tenant revolt in the upper Hudson River Valley that emanated out from the Manor of Rensselaerswyck. Nelson uses the novels to show how formal law in tandem with expanding capitalism replaced the system of negotiation and accommodation that had long structured relations between landlord and tenant. Like in the prior chapter, Nelson stridently maintains that ‘the forces that aimed at state capture also encouraged racialization’ (p. 164).
Nelson believes these (by now) familiar themes take on new significance because of where she finds them. Cooper’s trilogy reveals the persistence of commoining not in the west, ‘but in the heart of the well-settled New York state’ (p. 133). But the fact that commons democracy lingered on upper-Hudson manors does not mean it persisted anywhere else in ‘well-settled New York State’. The upper-Hudson manor system was unusual, unique even. So too were the anti-rent wars. (Nelson raises, though she doesn’t develop, similarities between anti-rent protests and the Dorr Rebellion in Rhode Island.) This was a place where the fabric of representative political institutions was remarkably thin, precisely because of the continued power of the manors. That manorial life differed from most everything around it, though, probably explains why Cooper found his muse there. He could invoke tropes that usually only appeared in stories about places we might call frontiers or a borderlands, the setting of most of the novels Nelson studies. Even though it takes place along the Hudson, then, the chapter on anti-rent wars reinforces the frontier focus of all the novels Nelson studies.
More broadly, I would suggest that following novelists helped Nelson uncover one variant of commons democracy. It seems that Frontier commoning intrigued 19th-century novelists and, in turn, Nelson. Which raises the question: Has Nelsons’ source base clouded out other forms of commons democracy? For example, the often urban, immigrant radicals who populate Seth Cotlar’s Tom Paine’s America advocated for participatory politics and espoused equalitarian ideas about property distribution. Moving forward through time and outside of cities, I wonder about the similarities between commons democracy as Nelson describes it and Jacksonian-era utopian communities in the Burned-Over district. There are many other examples of ordinary people forming and enacting their own communal visions for democracy. Is there something fundamentally different between these groups and those that Nelson focuses on in Commons Democracy, besides that the former were not fodder for novels? Or can we define commons democracy more broadly so as to include them?
Thinking very broadly about commons democracy seems important because Nelson concludes in the epilogue that commons democracy is a necessary ingredient in American democracy. ‘I’m persuaded by Brackenridge’s advocacy for “the middle way”’, Nelson writes. It can both help ‘overcome local tyrannies’ and shield localities from bureaucratic abuses (p. 178). For Nelson, ‘the vernacular daily ordinariness of commons democracy was neither an obstacle to the cultivation of the Framers’ liberal, representative democracy nor a misunderstanding of it. Rather, it was the cultural, practiced ground on which the United States’ fabled democracy took root and held’ (p. 176). Yet in Nelson’s book, we rarely see commoners contributing to ‘wise administration’ (p. 178). We rarely see the ‘middle way’ in action, which makes it difficult to envision how to achieve it. Perhaps, though, we can find the ‘middle way’ in action elsewhere.
Nelson’s Commons Democracy deserves the attention of a wide range of early republic scholars, especially those interested in literature, democracy, and the political practices of ordinary Americans. This vigorously argued book offers a coherent paradigm for understanding an important part of the early American democratic tradition. The field would do well to run with Nelson’ framework and explore the full range of commons democracy in the early republic.
October 2016
Author's Response
Dana Nelson
Posted: Thu, 27/10/2016 - 10:55
I first want to thank Dr. Boonshoft for his careful reading of and response to my book. Everyone hopes for readers who engage a book thoughtfully on its own terms, and I’m most grateful to have my work reviewed in that spirit.
Above all, I thank Dr. Boonshoft for his willingness to accept the premise I hazard, that political fiction from the early nation might actually help us limn a clearer picture of the historical practices of commons or vernacular democracy than archives have thus far enabled us to see. I accept his point that in chapter five, I reach the limit of my fictional sources by using Cooper’s Littlepage trilogy to suggest if not persuasively to argue that civic and resource communing were still manifest closer to the metropole. The Upper Hudson region of upstate New York was, as Boonschoft rightly observes, anomalous, where as he puts it ‘the fabric of representative political institutions was remarkably thin precisely because of the continued power of the manors’, leaving this neighborhood more like the frontier than the districts that bordered it. My accompanying gesture toward the Dorr’s Rebellion was insufficient to suffice in this respect.
There’s probably a project left undone in every book, and just so, there’s often a vestigial trace of what got left on the cutting board. I can trace the very gesture Boonshoft highlights as inadequate, my attempt to get readers to think about how vernacular practices of civic communing lived on past the advance of the frontier and the imposition of state and federal law and representative institutions, exactly to my early sense that there could be many ways – and locales from which –to trace the historical evaporation of significant vernacular sensibilities and practices from our collective historical memory. As I was reading books like Andrew Shankman’s Crucible of American Democracy, which compellingly describes how ordinary folk in Philadelphia understood democracy through terms of both economic and political equalitarianism, and how developing practices of capitalism ultimately pressured and squeezed out those the egalitarian principles, I realized there could surely be ways trace the evolution and fate of commons democracy in urban centers. I spent no small amount of time thinking my way down urban paths. And I pursued questions about how these practices might have been manifested, borrowed or adopted in the various strains of utopian communities (like Nashoba, the Ruskins, Brook Farm, Oneida, etc.), informed by various political and religious idealisms. But ultimately I decided that what I was trying to flesh out here was dicey enough without overcomplicating things by trying to show my readers the various paths by which vernacular ideals of equalitarianism were changed into and/or borrowed by other modes of practice (and retained in other forms). In other words, since I was attempting to, as Boonshoft puts it, both bring ‘conceptual coherence to a wide-ranging and still developing picture’ and to advance a larger argument about that picture, I concluded it would be most strategic to start with the simplest, most coherent account of commons democracy. So I decided to focus readers on what I thought was probably its most distinct genealogical and geographic trajectory and modes of practice.
For those reasons, I heartily agree with Boonshaft that it would make sense to look for other variants, both urban and rural, and to think about ideological fellow-travellers that might have informed and hybridized these energies – developing modes of capitalism, religious enthusiasms and also, as Boonshoft suggests, of 18th-century European radicalism, which had particular impact in urban centers in the early republic, as well as 19th-century European political idealism which moved from cities across rural areas in the 19th century. I hope others will try to tell these stories with commons democracy and its vernacular modes of expression in mind.
Finally, a quick note about Boonshoft’s point that we ‘seldom see commoners contributing to “wise administration” ... [or] the “middle way” in action, which makes it difficult to envision how to achieve it’. But my novels do show at least the “wise administration” part of the equation: over and again in these novels, writers show us how local communities did self-administrate – often wisely. Because these novels by and large stage the show-down between state-administered systems and local practices, the drama of the novel depends more generally on the conflict and not the cooperation of those two scales of self-government. Still, it’s not as though we can’t see such a middle way in history and today, as the work of Elinor Ostrom and her scholarly fellow-travellers have shown – we just have to look across yet another disciplinary divide to see abundant examples of successful commons studied by political economists. As Ostrom and her teams have amply demonstrated, it’s exactly by finding that middle way in practice, where local actors and governing institutions at state, regional and federal levels, find ways to cooperate, that civic and resource commons have succeeded historically and do succeed today. There is a long record of such achievement in these accounts. Finding more ways to investigate at that scale – the in-between as opposed to the top-down or bottom-up (and here I would hazard that books like Bethel Saler’s The Settlers’ Empire point us in that direction) will be key for those invested in US history.