Unsettling the nation: anti-colonial nationalism and narratives of the non-western world in U.S. literature and culture, 1783-1860

2011-07-29In Unsettling the Nation, I explore the uneven construction of a non-Western imaginary in U.S. literature and culture, focusing my attention upon early narrative representations of U.S. citizens who represent their presence and actions within the non-Western world as a response to Anglo-European imperialism. In these realist narratives of cultural contact, national characteristics are drawn out of the imaginative comparison of national protagonists and their Western and non-Western cultural Others. I argue that the literary portrayal of U.S. citizens in the non-Western world contributed important factual and imagined articulations of U.S. identity and nationality for a highly literate public that was already primed by the political writing of the period to reject their inherited colonial identities, and the works I discuss here present readers with representative Americans who are imaginatively portrayed in contrast to both Anglo-European foils engaged in colonial ventures in the non-Western world, and the non-Western people who inhabit that desirable geography. The representative U.S. citizens in these works act out national conflicts upon foreign landscapes imaginatively constructed as “neutral ground” – to use Hawthorne’s popular literary term for the space imaginatively conceived of as the setting for the American Romance genre – to produce, promote and disseminate U.S.-centric geopolitical narratives about a world of undeveloped nations threatened by Anglo-European colonial occupation, and in need of U.S. political intervention. ❧ John Ledyard asked for and received the first legal copyright for a literary work in the newly formed U.S. nation in 1783. The inaugural U.S. critique of British Imperial hubris that emerges in his Journal of the Final Voyage of Captain Cook (1783) is soon after echoed by U.S. Navy Captain David Porter in support of his own contrasting act of colonial occupation of Nuku Hiva during the War of 1812; like Ledyard’s journal of service with Cook, Porter’s A Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific (1822) contrasts U.S. actions in the non-Western world to those of Britain and the European empires. I revisit this very same geopolitical terrain in my chapter on Herman Melville’s quasi-fictional novel, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), set on the same island of Nuku Hiva that was identified and claimed for the U.S. by Porter in his Journal. Collectively, these works present nuanced descriptions of the characteristic “American” approach to the valuable territory and indigenous cultures of the Pacific, while condemning the contrasting Anglo-European colonial approach to those same people and places, documenting new and varied possibilities for a U.S. presence in the non-Western world. ❧ The non-Western world of the Pacific may hold symbolic significance in U.S. literary history and U.S. political history for the actions documented and described in these two popular memoirs, but the more significant contributions to the “geopolitical” character of U.S. identity emerged from the imaginative interactions staged between U.S. citizens and the North Africans of the “Barbary States” that were presented to readers during the Barbary Crisis of the late-18th century. I outline the slippage between domestic and global politics that is reflected in both Susanna Haswell Rowson’s play “Slaves in Algiers” (1794), and Royall Tyler’s novel, The Algerine Captive (1797). I conclude by tracing elements of the non-Western imaginary in U.S. literature and culture that are outlined in these U.S. works set in Africa and the Pacific to that which is presented by the mid-19th century U.S. filibuster, William Walker, in his celebrated memoir of invasion and conquest in Latin America, The War in Nicaragua (1860)