Persistent Futures of Bermudas Past: Genres of Geography and Race in Early America

Persistent Futures of Bermudas Past: Genres of Geography and Race in Early America re-historicizes the construction and contestation of colonial racialization processes in the Anglophone Americas from the perspective of Bermuda. This dissertation establishes the understudied archipelago as a literary and material gateway to the hemisphere that profoundly impacted how race and the future were imagined from North America to the Caribbean. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, writers and settlers positioned Bermuda as the enabling condition of their incessant revisions of whiteness, indigeneity, and historical rights of habitation in their projects of conquest and dispossession throughout America. Writers from John Smith to J. Hector St. John de Cr�vecoeur sustained a literary network of supposed English exceptionalism they believed was revealed by Bermuda’s uniqueness. Across colonial documents, sermons, poems, letters, early histories, proposals, and fiction, scores of writers proposed that Bermuda magnified this so-called English extraordinariness and opened colonial and religious futures never before imaginable. Ultimately, colonizers seized upon these aesthetic idealizations of Bermuda to consolidate their power and territorial control in the hemisphere, and, in turn, their narrative hold on who might inhabit America’s possible futures. While Persistent Futures of Bermudas Past is about Bermuda primarily, it is not about Bermuda exclusively. In the first two case studies, I employ comparative methodologies to re-center the archipelago in the histories of settlement and race in the English colonization of the hemisphere in the seventeenth century. In the latter half of the dissertation, I excavate how Bermuda’s colonial history impacted the development of racialized discourses in the early U.S. nation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this manner, Persistent Futures of Bermudas Past shifts the literary and geographic terrains of early American analyses to an understudied location to reject the teleologies of colonial and national triumphs in favor of an anticolonial approach that dismantles the fragile fictions of settler colonialism. This dissertation’s historical and methodological unsettlements magnify the glaring incompleteness of the so-called new world’s historical record and offer new opportunities for confronting the myths of occupation at the moments of their emergence in colonial and early national narratives