Benito Cereno: Why the Historian Should Bother to Read Novels

In his critique of the way historians handle literature, Dominck LaCapra says, “Literature becomes redundant when it tells us what can be gleaned from other documentary sources. In this sense, literature is paradoxically most superfluous when it seems to provide us with the most ‘useful’ and ‘reputable’ information, for it must simply replicate or confirm what can be found in more literal documents such as police reports” (126). This view of literature is clearly contradicted in Melville’s Benito Cereno, in which the first part of the story is told as a narrative from Captain Delano’s point of view and the second part is framed as a legal deposition in a trial. Rather than the narrative and the “documentary source” mutually supporting each other, which would indeed make literature seem “redundant,” the literary narrative contradicts the (fictitious) documentary legal deposition. The narrative thus proves to be extremely important in showing how an American’s racist assumptions make him misread the situation he is in.

Prior to discovering the truth about the slave revolt, Captain Delano interprets the interactions between Don Benito Cereno and Babo as those between a master and his faithful, devoted slave: “As master and man stood before him, the black upholding the white, Captain Delano could not but bethink him of the beauty of that relationship which could present such a spectacle of fidelity on the one hand and confidence on the other” (136). Captain Delano buys into racist assumptions of Africans as willingly servile and inferior. He continuously compares the blacks to animals, and he believes they as a race have a “docility arising from the unaspiring contentment of a limited mind and that susceptibility of blind attachment sometimes inhering in indisputable inferiors” (201). Delano’s racial stereotyping is not limited to the Africans. When he starts to be suspicious that there is a secret plot to murder him, he blames the Spaniard Benito Cereno, thinking, “these Spaniards are all an odd set; the very word Spaniard has a curious, conspirator, Guy-Fawkish twang to it” (189-90). He oscillates back and forth between the belief that there is a conspiracy to murder him and the belief that he is being ridiculous. At one point, he thinks, “could then Don Benito be any way in complicity with the blacks? But they were too stupid. Besides, who ever heard of a white so far a renegade as to apostatize from his very species almost, by leaguing in against it with negroes?” (181). Because of his racial stereotyping and the belief in the superiority of all whites, even sneaky Spaniards, Delano cannot imagine Benito Cereno actually plotting against him.

 

Captain Delano ultimately does discover that the Africans were in control of Don Benito and the other Spaniards the whole time, and he helps defeat them and capture Babo. The depositions for Babo’s trial tell a completely different story about the situation on the San Dominick than what Captain Delano believed. I found one very interesting contradiction between Delano’s perceptions of the “negresses” and the description of them in the deposition. Delano watches a black woman with her child and thinks, “There’s naked nature, now; pure tenderness and love” (176).  Pleased with what he sees, “This incident prompted him to remark the other negresses more particularly than before. He was gratified with their manners: like most uncivilized women, they seemed at once tender of heart and tough of constitution” (176). The deposition, on the other hand, paints the black women as bloodthirsty and cruel: “the negresses, of age, were knowing to the revolt, and testified themselves satisfied at the death of their master, Don Alexandro; that, had the negroes not restrained them, they would have tortured to death, instead of simply killing, the Spaniards slain by the command of the negro Babo” (260-1). Delano’s racial stereotypes of the black women are too limited; he doesn’t view the black women holistically. However, the deposition, while it seems strictly factual and objective, is also overly limited. It only provides one perspective on the black women, and it doesn’t look into the motivations behind their actions or thoughts. The comparison of the clearly biased narrative with the more subtly biased deposition shows why literature is so important and why historians need to pay attention to it for more than merely content and facts. Literature can provide multiple perspectives on historical situations and shows the limitations inherent in human perceptions. Benito Cereno is a fictitious example of the ways literary narratives and documentary sources can come together. LaCapra would approve of these “variable uses of language that come to terms with—or “inscribe”—contexts in various ways” (127).

 

By the end of Melville’s text, we get to hear the story from the perspective of the American Delano and the Spaniard Benito Cereno; however, we never really get to hear the story from the perspective of one of the Africans. LaCapra argues that we should read novels differently to alert ourselves “to the contestatory voices and counter-discourses of the past” (132). While Benito Cereno gives us a “contestatory voice” from Don Benito, we do not get the true “counter-discourse” that the enslaved Africans could provide. At one point, Babo pities himself, saying, “but poor Babo here, in his own land, was only a poor slave; a black man’s slave was Babo, who now is the white’s” (150). Later on, Captain Delano even pities Babo, exclaiming, “this slavery breeds ugly passions in man.—Poor fellow!” (212). The text undercuts all this pity when we learn that Babo led a brutal revolt and was no longer a slave, but we do not get to see how Babo perceived or justified his own actions. A historian would need to find other literature to provide the missing voice of slaves who revolt, but we can still read Babo’s actions. Homi Bhabha says,

The aim of cultural difference is to re-articulate the sum of knowledge from the perspective of the signifying singularity of the ‘other’ that resists totalization – the repetition that will not return as the same, the minus-in-origin that results in political and discursive strategies where adding-to does not add-up but serves to disturb the calculation of power and knowledge, producing other spaces of subaltern signification. (312)

Although I find Benito Cereno incomplete without Babo’s perspective, Babo’s act of rebellion and the reversal of the readers’ expectations in the second part of the text show how Melville uses cultural difference to add to the story in a way that disturbs the narrative rather than “adding up”. The American Delano could not imagine the Africans as anything but docile, stupid, and inferior. Babo’s actions, whether heroic or barbaric, come from a place of cultural difference to contradict what the insulated American character believes.

 

*I used a free Amazon Kindle Edition of The Piazza Tales for all my in-text citations of Benito Cereno.

Waiting vs. Action in Blake: Or, The Huts of America

As I read Martin Delaney’s Blake: Or, The Huts of America, I noticed an interesting tension between the characters waiting and being active. Early in the novel after Henry discovers his wife has been sold, Daddy Joe says, “God moves in a myst’us way His wundahs to pehaum”, to which Henry replies “He moves too slow for me, Daddy Joe; I’m tired waiting so—” (21). Henry then reappropriates Christianity for his own purposes, arguing, “‘Now is the accepted time, today is the day of salvation.’ So you see, Daddy Joe, this is very different to standing still” (21). After this conversation, Henry takes action by running away and traveling all over the South in hopes of inciting rebellion. His actions are repeatedly referred to with an agricultural metaphor of preparing a field for harvest: “after sowing seeds from which in due season, he anticipated an abundant harvest” (73). However, this metaphor, while it shows Henry as an active player fomenting rebellion, contradicts Henry’s earlier comments about being tired of waiting. Although he’s spreading word and talking to people all over the South, Henry recognizes that now is not the time for rebellion, rather he is “sowing the seeds of future devastation and ruin to the master and redemption to the slave” (83, emphasis mine).

When Henry meets a slave who wants to spring into action and rebel immediately, Henry even says, “You are not yet ready for a strike; you are not yet ready to do anything effective” (105). He further explains, “You must know what, how, and when to do. Have all the instrumentalities necessary for an effective effort, before making the attempt. Without this, you will fail, utterly fail!” (105). Henry’s “action” of traveling across the South talking to various slaves about rebellion seems to be undercut by his contradictory message to wait until the right time to rebel. Although he isn’t just putting trust in the Lord like Daddy Joe in their earlier conversation, he seems to take on the role of Daddy Joe, arguing for the importance of waiting and biding time. The novel never shows any attempt at revolution by the slaves in America, so we cannot see if Henry’s travels served any real purpose in the U.S. However, as he asks questions and serves as a spectator to the horrible condition black slaves are in, the reader too becomes a spectator and can see the evils of slavery. Henry’s role as spectator waiting to act continues even after he leaves the U.S., for example when he’s in Cuba and watches a slave woman who is forced to whip her child: “To all this, Henry was a serious spectator, having twice detected himself in an involuntary determination to rush forward and snatch the infernal thing of torture from the hand of the heart-crushed mother” (170). Henry’s inaction parallels the inaction of many white readers at the time this book was written. By making Henry a spectator who waits to rebel, Delaney can show the reader that, by not doing anything, they are complicit in all of the violence and injustice against black slaves.

Despite the contradictory tension between action and waiting that I saw in Henry, I do not want to be too critical of him. He did try to do something to help his fellow black sufferers, and after reading the secondary sources for this week I better understood why he had to leave the U.S. behind without any sort of rebellion being fulfilled. Dr. Doolen explains,

From within a national model, the very act of opposing the nation tended to reinforce its authority and ideology. The very binarism of antislavery opposition could reinscribe the normativities of white nationalism that it was attempting to negate, since black appeals to natural rights or condemntations of tyranny harkened back to the white nationlist project of the revolutionary era. (156)

Slave rebellions in the U.S. ironically reinforce the American revolutionary rhetoric that excluded black slaves from the freedoms that whites fought for. For this reason, Henry’s slave rebellion needs to cross borders and move to Cuba to have the desired effect of undermining U.S. ideology. As Dr. Doolen cogently argues, “this transnational shift enables Delaney’s narration of a black historical experience that does not refer ultimately to white revolutionary ideology” (157).

 

John Carlos Rowe also makes an important point about why Delaney chose to have Henry move away from the U.S.: “Delaney’s plans for colonies in the American tropics and then in Africa…were designed to serve the political goal of hastening an end to United States slavery by demonstrating the potential economic self-sufficiency of African Americans and reconnecting them with their cultural roots” (86). Delaney’s belief in the potential for blacks to be self-sufficient and in the importance of Pan-African connections is revealed in the second half of the novel, especially when Placido explains to Madame Cordora why anyone of black descent is implied in the term Ethiopian. He even claims,

in Africa their native land, they are among the most industrious people in the world, highly cultivating the lands, and that ere long they and their country must hold the balance of commercial power by supplying as they now do as foreign bondmen in strange lands, the greatest staple commodities in demand…and that race and country will at once rise to the first magnitude of importance in the estimation of the greatest nations. (261)

While Delaney could have had any character in the U.S. make this argument, it has much more force in Cuba, a country that serves as the intermediary between Africa and the U.S. and that is largely populated by people of African descent, many of whom are free and wealthy. In fact, the wealthy quadroon Madame Cordora responds, “I never before felt as proud of my black as I did of my white blood” (262). Cuba becomes a place for black pride in a way that the U.S. cannot. I agree with Ifeoma Nwankwo, who argues, “The point that Delaney makes through his depiction of Cuba is that people of African descent in this hemisphere, regardless of their status, color, or national location, should share in a collective desire for freedom” (586).

 

At first I was annoyed by the lack of a conclusion in Delaney’s novel, but Dr. Doolen’s article made me realize that there is probably no better way it could have ended. Delaney’s conclusion very likely would have ended in failure for Henry and the rebels because antebellum literature “conditions us for the suffering and death of the defiant rebel, for the subsequent translation of the body into a martyr to the broken promise of American liberty and equality” (Doolen 174). Although we are still left waiting for something big to happen at the end, just as I argue we are left waiting from the very beginning, at least “Delaney’s extant novel breaks the affective chain that links the martyr’s suffering and death to political renewal in a U.S. context” (Doolen 174). The novel ends on a hopeful note for the black rebels, and it hints at action that is finally about to occur in Gondolier’s final words that resemble a battle cry: “Woe be unto those devils of whites, I say!” (313).

Transvestism and Masquerade, but not Feminism

Like Michelle and Jessica, I’ve been learning a lot about masquerade in my British literature course this semester, so I wanted to focus my blog post this week on masquerade and transvestism. I found both of our primary texts very intriguing, but I preferred Mary Andrews Denison’s The Prisoner of La Vintresse. What struck me most about this novel is how much agency the female heroine achieves in comparison to our two U.S.-Mexico War texts. Tellingly, the important female characters die at the end of both Lippard’s and Buntline’s texts, whereas Minerva actually saves the day in Denison’s text, the one sensationalist text we read by a female author. At first, I thought Denison’s text was radically feminist, but after rereading Aleman and Streeby’s introduction, I saw that masquerade and transvestism were used to promote other concerns. In discussing the prevalence of female cross-dressed characters in popular literature, Aleman and Streeby explain,

These cross-dressing texts might be considered critiques of normative gender codes, but they are also reactionary re-entrenchments of female roles and the nation’s borders. That is, while transvestism demonstrates that gender is performative rather than natural (as Judith Butler teaches), transnationalism threatens to undermine the sanctity of the nation’s domestic borders and the woman’s place in the home. (xxv)

Denison clearly uses Minerva’s actions to subvert the patriarchal authority she is originally placed under, but I struggled to find an actual example of masquerade or transvestism in the form of cross-dressing. Minerva does disguise herself in New York to protect herself from Don Carlos’s spies, which involves attempting to hide her Spanish blood and making herself look older, but her disguise is still as a woman and seems to be merely an act of self-preservation.

 

I finally realized that the moment Minerva starts to gain agency does involve transvestism, but through a disguise of her voice rather than her appearance:

‘Bring the priest!’ It was a strange fancy, but nevertheless, it occurred to Minerva to repeat the word ‘confess.’ ‘Ah!’ cried the senor, eagerly, ‘are you here, holy father?’ ‘I am,’ said Minerva, in a low voice. ‘No, no—but stop—I see the crown of your head—yes, yes, the shaven head, and the rosary, and the robe’; and here began a confession… (277)

Right before this moment in the text, Minerva seems to have lost all potential agency because she has just been abducted and is being brought back to Cuba. However, Senor Velasquez’s illness gives Minerva the chance to finally assert herself. She comes up with the “strange fancy” to impersonate a Catholic priest through her words using a “low voice”, and Senor Velasquez completes the transvestism for her when he imagines that he actually sees a priest in front of him. Senor Velasquez’s confession reveals not only the location of her fiancé Herman Goreham, but also reveals the truth about her inheritance. Minerva’s discovery that she is a wealthy heiress is ultimately what gives her agency, and she uses her new knowledge when she gets back to her home in Cuba. No written proof or physical force is needed for her to assert her will, only her own verbal acknowledgement that she is in charge. When she encounters her housekeeper, she goes against Don Carlos’s orders, saying, “I am mistress, now” (280). She repeats this assertion of her authority again when she says to Jose, “I am your mistress, now, and Senor Herman is to be brought from La Vintresse, by my orders” (280). The reversal of gender roles then continues, completely turning the reader’s expectations upside down in a typical carnivalesque masquerade fashion: “Since Minerva leads the expedition to free [Herman], the narrative inverts the rules of sensational melodrama, whereby heroic men save endangered women: here the woman rescues the man” (Aleman and Streeby xxvii).

 

While the reversal of gender roles and the female empowerment in Denison’s text is provocative, I do have to come back to the second point Aleman and Streeby make in the quote about cross-dressing that I brought up earlier—the “reactionary re-entrenchments of female roles and the nation’s borders” (xxv). Minerva uses her new power to bring Goreham back to the U.S. Herman is much weaker due to his mishaps in Cuba, “not at all like the brave, handsome” man who left Saratoga (284); however, he’s restored to his rightful place. Aleman and Streeby argue, “Filibustering and U.S. involvement with Cuba, the novel warns, threaten to enervate white American manhood by subjecting young men to the passions of slaveholders and the cruelties of slavery” (xxvii). In addition to the text’s criticism of slavery and American involvement with Cuba, the text also shows that people of mixed blood can reject ties to Cuba. Minerva, half Spanish and half English, gives up her Spanish heritage to assimilate into her husband’s Anglo-American culture. Denison’s novel only uses masquerade and transvestism to restore order and reassert national boundaries. Even Minerva, who had her heroic moment in Cuba, is put back into her traditional gender role when she moves to the U.S. and marries Goreham. We can even assume she’s become more of a submissive wife because her life with Herman is placed in contrast to Don Carlos’s life back in Cuba, where his “willful little wife” Dora “queens” their mansion (284). Goreham and Minerva are also described as making “home an Eden,” which reminds the reader of the creation story in which Eve was made to be the subservient helpmate of Adam. By contrasting the married couple living in the U.S. with the one living in Cuba, Denison concludes her novel with a critique of the extravagance that comes with slavery in Cuba. Denison’s concerns about slavery and American involvement in Cuba take precedence over any potentially feminist concerns.

Uncanniness and Stifled Remorse in George Lippard’s ’Bel of Prairie Eden

In his article “The Other Country: Mexico, the United States, and the Gothic History of Conquest”, Jesse Aleman quotes Lewis Cass articulating ambivalence to the stipulations of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo:

It would be a deplorable amalgamation [uniting the US and Mexico]. No such evil will happen to us in our day. We do not want the people of Mexico, either as citizens or subjects. All we want is a portion of territory, which they nominally hold, generally uninhabited, or, where inhabited at all, sparsely so, and with a population which would soon recede, or identify itself with ours. (Aleman 414)

As Shelley Streeby voices in American Sensations: Empire, Amnesia, and the US-Mexican War, such hopes were a ridiculous fantasy: “evidence proliferated in war representations, which inevitably revealed that Mexico was not a vacant wilderness, that many different peoples already lived there, and that violence would be required to displace them” (58). The relationship between John and Isora in George Lippard’s ’Bel of Prairie Eden illustrates the problems with the belief that the United States could take Mexican territory without adopting any of its people or its heritage. John intends to merely seduce and have sex with Isora in order to enact his revenge on Don Antonio Marin, but he unexpectedly falls in love with her. If Isora is symbolic of the Mexican nation, Lippard’s novel’s conclusion shows that Mexico cannot be objectified; in the process of the US fighting for Mexican land, the different peoples intermingle and the United States is forced to recognize the humanity of the Mexicans, even if by annihilating them.

Aleman discusses how Mexico “appropriately stands in as the US’s uncanny imperial other because the continental proximity of the two countries and their shared revolutionary histories make them estranged national neighbors” (409). He quotes Freud, explaining that the uncanny “is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar” (409). Aleman argues that Mexico is uncanny because the natives fought for independence just as Americans did against Britain. At the same time, Americans are also forced to identify with the Spanish conquistadors who made Mexico part of their empire. In identifying with both of these groups, Americans are put in a similar position to John; the enemy becomes more human and relatable just as Isora moves from sexualized object to beloved wife. In attempting to deal with the United States’ uncanny resemblance to Spanish conquistadors, popular writers like Lippard

fantasized about heterosexual union between a feminized Mexico and a masculinized United States, they appealed to narratives of gender and sexuality to turn force into consent and conquest into international romance. In this way, they tried to establish distinctions between a rapacious Spanish conquest and an idealized, peaceful, and nonaggressive U.S. relationship to Mexico. (Streeby 65)

Thus, by having John fall in love with Isora and ultimately marry her, Lippard distinguishes John from Don Antonio Marin, the Mexican of Spanish descent who raped John’s sister Isabel and left her without ever offering marriage.

There seems to be hope for peaceful relations between the US and Mexico through the symbolic marriage of John and Isora. John remembers Isabel’s dying words which point to the possibility of forgiveness between the two nations: “Let us forgive, and make such recompense for our wrong as is in the power of man to make. Be kind, very kind to Isora” (194). However, this forgiveness is one-sided and the recompense for their wrongs is not complete because Isabel also says, “let [Isora] never know her brother’s fate” (194). John cannot erase his brutal acts of revenge, he can only hide them. Isora is not given the opportunity to forgive because the history of violence against her brother (and fellow Mexican) is withheld from her. The novel ends with John’s intense guilt. Despite his kindness to Isora, he cries out, “There is no living breast into whose recesses, I may pour the agony of my soul—may pour my horrible secret and my remorse. For Isora—oh God! she is dying” (194). If John’s remorse is read symbolically, it would seem that no amount of kindness toward Mexico after the violent war can erase the guilt that Americans are stuck with. By repressing the truth about the violence against Mexicans and framing the conquest as consensual and paternal, Americans make forgiveness impossible—the Mexicans cannot forgive what the Americans will not admit to.

In addition, Isora’s death shows that a peaceful union is short-lived, if even possible at all. Streeby explains that Lippard’s novel “suggests that romance cannot heal the wounds of war…Force is never plausibly transformed into consent; the violence that structures most of the narrative does not disappear but instead fully implicates the Texas colonizer in the bleak conclusion” (76). She goes on to say, “It is even possible to read this as an antiwar novel if one emphasizes the ending and interprets the escalating revenge plots as an allegory about the futility of the violence between the United States and Mexico” (76). However, I read the ending more cynically as a sign that it is too late for Americans to fix their wrongs against Mexico and that they can’t even admit those wrongs to the Mexicans. John’s hidden remorse is the same remorse that Americans suppress today through the dominant narrative of United States history.

Reason, Cultivation, and (In)Voluntary Land Transfers

In searching for a “hot spot” in Life of Black Hawk this week, I found myself settling on a passage that both J. Gerald Kennedy and Mark Rifkin discuss:

My reason teaches me that land cannot be sold. The Great Spirit gave it to his children to live upon, and cultivate, as far as is necessary for their subsistence; and so long as they occupy and cultivate it, they have the right to the soil—but if they voluntarily leave it, then any other people have a right to settle upon it. Nothing can be sold, but such things as can be carried away. (56)

This passage is such a hot spot because it not only shows the strong ideological differences between white and Native American conceptions of land ownership but also contradicts the dominant narrative about Native Americans.

 

In the introduction to the text, Rifkin explains that “rationalism enables Black Hawk to understand the ethics of land conservation” (xxii). Black Hawk’s rationalism contradicts white expectations of natives as “savages” and places him right in the middle of the debate about racial difference that Reginald Horsman discusses in Race and Manifest Destiny. Horsman asserts, “Before 1815 the prevailing intellectual view in America as well as in Europe was that environment, not innate racial differences, accounted for the marked gaps in achievement between different peoples and different nations” (98). Even Thomas Jefferson took a “classic Enlightenment position” about Native Americans, writing that “proofs of genius given by the Indians of N. America, place them on a level with Whites in the same uncultivated state” (Horsman 107). Black Hawk’s explicit mention of “reason” both supports and contradicts Enlightenment thinkers. The capacity to reason is an inherent human capability that all races share, thus this passage seems to be in agreement with the Enlightenment thinkers who argued against inherent racial differences. However, the passage also shows that different environments won’t always lead to differing abilities. Just because Black Hawk’s reason led him to a different understanding of land ownership does not mean his reasoning capabilities are inferior to a white person’s; he should not have to be equated to a white person who is still in an “uncultivated state.”

 

Black Hawk’s use of the word “cultivate” also has the double-sided effect of supporting and contradicting white ideology. Whites who first came to America saw it as their Christian prerogative to cultivate and tame the wilderness, and cultivation additionally became a measure of progress and civilization. White Americans used agriculture and cultivation as another marker of their superiority over the Native Americans. Horsman explains, “Ignoring the extensive agricultural development among the Indian tribes with which the United States was in contact…placed the whole confrontation in the simple context of a primitive hunting society, on a lower stage of human evolution, encountering an American agrarian society at the highest stage of human development” (107). Both Horsman and Rifkin point to the inaccuracy of this narrative. Rifkin argues that Black Hawk’s presentation of the story of the origin of corn forges “a connection between the hunting grounds and the fields of Saukenuk by portraying hunting not as the antithesis of cultivation but its (differently gendered) partner” (687). As with Black Hawk’s “reason,” his conception of “cultivation” is not inferior to that of white people, it is merely different. Like white Americans, he highly values cultivation, so much so that he believes cultivation gives people a right to land, whereas paying for land does nothing.

 

A final important element I saw in the Life of Black Hawk passage is the mention of “voluntarily” giving up land. Rifkin explains

If legitimate settlement follows upon others “voluntarily” vacating the territory, the text calls into question the validity of U.S. jurisdiction by repudiating not simply native assent to a particular sale but the possibility of construing the sale of Indian territory as ever consensual in light of the fundamental alienness of such a transfer to indigenous philosophies and spirituality. (684)

Indian removal and land treaties are partially problematic because Native Americans simply don’t see land as something that can be bought and sold. However, even without that difference in ideology, “voluntarily” giving up land still remains an important sticking point. Even if white Americans refuse to believe that land cannot be sold, their treaties are predicated on Indians voluntarily giving up their land, which gets at one of Maureen Konkle’s arguments in her article. She explains, “Since the treaty, duplicitous or not, required the presumption of Indian autonomy in order to be construed as legitimate, it also allowed for Indians’ resistance to U.S. governmental authority: Indians could choose not to sell” (460). White Americans had to find ways around this freedom of choice in order to take the land they wanted. Black Hawk’s whole story focuses on the consequences when Indians fight for the land that they never voluntarily left in the first place.

Portraying Native Americans in Paintings and Photographs

I used to be pretty oblivious about just how bad Native Americans still have it today, but the movie Edge of America first opened my eyes a few years back. (The movie is about a teacher who goes to the Three Nations Reservation to teach high-school English and winds up coaching the girls’ basketball team. It’s definitely a good complement to the photographs we’ve been looking at if anyone is interested.) Despite being aware of the reality of poverty, alcoholism, and gangs on Indian reservations, I was still deeply affected by Aaron Huey’s photographs and the stories about Pine Ridge. In his TED Talk, Huey shocked me with the statistics about poverty and unemployment; I couldn’t believe that 90% of Native Americans live below the poverty line and that 85% are unemployed.

Huey definitely accomplished his goal to “hurt the viewer” with his photos. After looking through the photos, I felt sad, upset, guilty, and frustrated. Like Huey mentions in his TED Talk, white people continue to take the best meat, but at the same time, he says, “Pity is not the answer. The Lakota are an incredibly beautiful and proud people” (“Behind the Scenes: Still Wounded”). I don’t know if there even is an answer, but I appreciate how Huey is working towards “a more complete view of the Pine Ridge reservation” with new images and by letting the Oglala Lakota people tell their own stories through the Pine Ridge Community Storytelling Project. The story of hope and perseverance is just as important as the story of poverty and dejection. Alexandra Fuller successfully captures this ambivalent sense of hope when she quotes Olowan Thunder Hawk Martinez at the end of her article: "We’re in dire distress, but we don’t need anyone to come and save the Indian. When we honor our customs, and when we perform ceremonies, and when we listen to our ancestors, then we have everything we need to heal ourselves within ourselves" ("In the Shadow of Wounded Knee").

Martinez’s comment inspired me to look for some of the more hopeful messages in Huey’s photographs, especially by comparing them with Catlin’s paintings. I have four images I want to focus on for the rest of this blog.

 

These two images struck me as surprisingly similar. Both Huey’s photograph (top) and Catlin’s painting (bottom) show lone Indian figures standing in the foreground high above natural landscapes. In his article, Gareth John discusses George Catlin’s painting River Bluffs, 1320 miles above St. Louis, explaining that the lone figure “conveys a sense of solitude, perhaps a surrogate for Catlin himself, romantically pondering the dreadful fate that awaits the western Indian tribes who face the spectre of an ever-encroaching frontier” (193). John’s reading of River Bluffs accurately captures what he terms “ambivalent imperialism” in Catlin’s works. By comparing Catlin’s painting with Huey’s photograph, however, we see that Catlin’s ideas were part of the misguided cult of the Vanishing American. The lone figure in Huey’s photograph is a testament to the endurance of the Indians. He is much larger and much more of a central focus than the figure in Catlin’s painting. Furthermore, rather than looking out over the vast landscape like the Indian in Catlin’s painting, the figure in Huey’s photograph looks down as if he’s trying to make his way over the rough mountain ridge without stumbling. The viewer’s eye follows the figure’s line of sight, looking down at the perilous path he is taking rather than out at the immense landscape in the background. In addition, while the landscape in the photograph is beautiful, it is brown and rugged as opposed to the green rolling hills in Catlin’s painting. The harsh yet lovely terrain in the photograph seems to symbolically capture both the beauty and the pain that Native Americans experience on the reservations today. In contrast, the terrain in Catlin’s painting beckons pioneers to fertile, untouched land in which Indians seem to almost melt away because of how small the Indian figure is in the painting.

Here’s another pair of images that lend themselves to comparison. Catlin’s painting Comanche Feats of Horsemanship (bottom) is briefly described on the webpage at http://americanart.si.edu/catlin/highlights.html:

All of the “untouched” Plains cultures Catlin most admired had been affected by Europeans, in no way more dramatically than by the acquisition of horses from the Spanish. An enthusiastic horseman himself, Catlin considered the Comanche the best of all Plains equestrians. He pointed out their adaptations of such Spanish techniques as the use of the lasso as well as practices they had developed on their own, including the use of their horse's body as a shield when firing upon enemies with bows and guns. (Image 19)

I completely forgot that horses came from the Spanish until I read this, and it made me look at both Catlin’s painting and Huey’s photograph (top) in a new way. Catlin’s painting shows Native Americans in their home setting wearing traditional attire and using traditional weapons. However, it also shows how their culture has been shaped by contact with European cultures as they use horses originally brought to them by the Spanish. The painting contradicts the cult of the Vanishing American, showing the Native Americans as fierce warriors who have adapted to “civilization” before, reappropriating horses for their own needs. Horses have become so synonymous with Native American cultures that people who see Huey’s picture assume that the Indians at Pine Ridge are staying connected to their roots by continuing to use horses. Although horses did not originally belong to Indians, Huey’s photograph still does accomplish a similar effect to Catlin’s painting. The Indians in Huey’s photograph wear clothes that look just like those that white men wear, but they continue to ride horses like their ancestors, and they ride bareback as opposed to using saddles. Both Huey’s photograph and Catlin’s painting show that Native Americans will be flexible to modernization, but, as Martinez says, “When the lights go out for good, my people will still be here. We have our ancient ways. We will remain” (Fuller, "In the Shadow of Wounded Knee").

 

Patriarchal Puritanism, England, and the Native American in Hobomok

Like Katie mentioned in her blog, I too was hoping for a radical feminist/anti-racist text when I started reading Hobomok. What I found was a novel that seemed more interested in nationalist and religious issues. The various religious debates and sermons in the text were focused on establishing the Puritan Church in a new land and casting out the British Episcopal Church, thus effectively separating from England. In just one example of this, Mr. Conant puts separatist religious concerns above the concerns of race relations: “To my mind there is more danger of Satan’s killing us with the rat’s-bane of toleration, than the Lord’s taking us off with the Indian arrows” (37). Conant’s rejection of Charles Brown due to his religion is also the catalyst for the whole issue of miscegenation later in the novel. This seems to put the religious issues in a higher place of importance, at least at first glance.

Carolyn Karcher’s introduction helped me bring the two separate issues of religious nationalism and racism together as she showed the parallels between Charles Brown and Hobomok. She explains,

Both represent a fusion of nature and culture. Both foster the aesthetic impulses Puritan society contemns. Both fulfill the spiritual aspirations thwarted in Mary by a religion that has ruled out the feminist principle. Both embody the sexuality Puritanism seeks to repress. And both, above all, provide a means of defying patriarchal authority, as vested not only in Mary’s father but in the society for which he stands. (xxix)

Although I wanted to see a stronger feminist stance, the connection Karcher establishes between Brown and Hobomok shows that at its core the novel fights against patriarchal Puritan society. Even when Hobomok is replaced by Brown, the text still strongly rejects Puritan values, thus reinforcing ties with England.

 

Child refers to Mary’s past in England as a “fairy dream” (78), and she explains that “the remembrance of the little fairy” (46) that Mary was in England caused Charles to follow her to America. England is viewed as a positive, fantasy-like place straight out of romance. However, the romanticized past is no longer the present reality. Conant argues that “England has come to a dreadful pass in these days” (116). Even Charles Brown laments, “My hearte bleedeth for olde England, torne with religious commotions, as she hath beene, from the time of the second Tudor: but my feeble hand may not stop her wounds” (104). The solution is to bring a piece of England to America and to fuse it with certain native qualities found there just as Karcher fuses together certain aspects of Charles and Hobomok. Mary’s son is a clear embodiment of the intermingling of English and Native American, and his name specifically joins Mary’s two lovers together.

 

Ezra Tawil interestingly points out that the issue of race actually becomes more important than the issue of religion when Charles replaces Hobomok as Mary’s husband: “By giving his blessing to the same union which he had prohibited before Mary went native, Mr. Conant pronounces religious difference inconsequential in relation to race” (112). Reading the text in this light, Child clearly shifts the focus of her novel part way through. I was disappointed to see Child ultimately give in to the “popular convention” of the Vanishing American that “premised on a moralistic judgment, had become natural law” (Dippie 11). Not only does Hobomok disappear into the wilderness, but his son returns to England and relinquishes his Indian name.

 

Although Child doesn’t “move beyond racial egalitarianism to cultural pluralism” (215) in “An Appeal for the Indians,” I appreciated that this text showed a stronger anti-racist stance. Rather than reinforcing ties with England at the expense of the Native Americans, she clearly exposes the faults of white people in various nations at different periods of time while showing Indians in a positive light. She also directly attacks the convention of the Vanishing American, arguing, “How can people improve, who are never secure in the possession of their lands? Yet, while we are perpetually robbing them, and driving them ‘from post to pillar,’ we go on repeating, with the most impudent coolness, ‘They are destined to disappear before the white man’” (231). Child takes a much more radical stance against racism in this piece.

Abolitionist Literature Relocated: Humanity in Algiers

Reading Humanity in Algiers felt like déjà vu because so much of it reminded me of abolitionist texts I’ve read for history and English classes in the past, all of which were focused on slavery within the United States. One specific parallel I saw was between Valachus’s lust for Alzina and the lust so often depicted in literature that white slave owners had for their black female slaves. On his death bed, Valachus tells Omri:

I then commanded [Alzina] to be treated with the utmost kindness, and employed several agents to seduce her into compliance: But all my arts were in vain; she still remained unmoved, heedless of all my promises or threats. My passion being inflamed by this unexpected opposition, and despairing of ever obtaining her consent to my wishes, I was determined to make use of my authority over her person, and by force to compel her to submit. (22)

A similar scene takes place toward the end of Lydia Maria Child’s short story “The Quadroons” (1842):

For some months, [the master] sought to win her smiles by lavish presents, and delicate attentions. He bought glittering chains of gold, and costly bands of pearl. His victim scarcely glanced at them, and the slave laid them away, unheeded and forgotten…she gave her master no thanks, and her gloom deepened. At last his patience was exhausted. He grew weary of her obstinacy, as he was pleased to term it; and threats took the place of persuasion. (Child, The Liberty Bell, 140)

Both of these passages make use of similar rhetoric and portray masters who are ultimately willing to resort to violence against their female slaves to achieve what they desire. However, while Child’s portrayal of this relationship between master and slave was so typical to the texts I’ve always read, Humanity in Algiers brought a new spin to it for me with its African setting in which black slaves work for black masters. Without the dynamic of racial difference, I read the relationship between Valachus and Alzina as one purely based on gender dynamics, which helped me connect Humanity in Algiers back to Sansay’s Secret History. Just as Clara became a commodity desired by St. Louis, Rochambeau, and others, Alzina becomes a commodity who Valachus can quite literally purchase because of her status as a slave. The gendered power hierarchy is made more explicit in that he is her master, not her husband or suitor. Amid the many other issues that this text reveals about slavery, it also shows slavery putting males in an even greater place of power over females. In the relationship between Valachus and Alzina, I see a compelling argument against sex slavery and sexual violence that might be occurring anywhere in the world, regardless of racial differences. In this way, the text has global significance and resonates with the issue of sex trafficking that continues today.

Alzina also serves as an excellent example of the religious rhetoric used throughout Humanity in Algiers. Azem first encounters Alzina praying to God for deliverance from her fate. She exclaims, “Oh! Is it not enough that [Valachus] has embittered all my days with servitude, but that he would rob me of chastity, in which consists all my remains of happiness?” (15) Her ardent desire to remain chaste aligns with the valuing of female virtue which I’ve seen in countless American texts of this time period, largely due to the dominance of Christianity. At the end of her prayer, Alzina says, “O God! thou knowest my heart, and seest the anxiety of thy creature. O Thou, who alone givest aid and consolation to the captive! in thee I trust, in thy love and mercy” (15). Like many other characters throughout Humanity in Algiers, Alzina ultimately trusts in God to save her rather than actively trying to change her situation. Ultimately, everything works out because divine Providence intervenes on Alzina’s behalf—Valachus is stung by a scorpion on his way to rape her, and he sets her free. The different characters’ submission to God further reinforced my feelings of déjà vu, hearkening back to when I first read Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative. Yet, once again, this text brought in something new and different from other texts I’ve read—the Islamic faith.

I don’t know how accurately Humanity in Algiers portrays the religious tenets of Islam, but I was surprised to see it shown in such a positive light. The text doesn’t focus on many particularities of the Islamic faith, but it does show the ways in which it is similar to the Christian faith. Readers of this text during the 1800s could have found ways to sympathize with the characters through similarities, rather than focusing on their differences and vilifying the characters as “other.” The inclusion of Islam in its similarities to Christianity also combats American exceptionalism. The early Americans with their Christian faith cannot pretend they are so different or so much better than African Muslims after reading this text. Despite how similar Humanity in Algiers seemed to so many other abolitionist texts I’ve read, I appreciated how it gave me a new trans-hemispheric view on issues like sex slavery and religion.

Sansay's Secret History

When I finished reading Sansay’s Secret History, I was at first surprised by the “scant attention to the cataclysmic events of the Haitian revolution, the complex politics of race and colonial power, and the often horrific scenes of warfare that took place during the very years of the novel’s exposition” (Dillon 78). However, I appreciated the novel’s complex treatment of social and marital relations within the context of the revolutionary period, especially through the parallel between Clara’s oppressive marriage and the slave rebellion. St. Louis’s violence against Clara mirrors the violence the slaves experienced under their cruel masters. The novel not only shows the success of the slave revolution, but also Clara’s success in escaping her husband. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon points out in her article that “a surprising effect of the revolution is thus to enable white women to escape from the power of men” (92). The large scale rebellion that topples the hierarchy in St. Domingue paves the way for shifts in gender dynamics.

 

Mary’s letters to Burr reveal that life goes on during periods of warfare and revolution, thus seemingly trivial concerns will continue to be discussed and worried about in addition to bigger issues. In many ways, Mary’s attention to social experiences is a coping mechanism. She often tells Burr that the horrors she experiences “cannot be imagined” (61) or that she “cannot describe” (83) them. Her inability to fully convey the gravity of the situation in addition to a desire to distract herself must be strong motivations for her sudden jumps to describing social experiences. When describing social life, she is often able to take the focus away from herself, as well, acting as an objective observer. In focusing on other people’s issues, like her sister’s unhappy and unhealthy marriage, she can avoid talking about her own issues. Mary even acknowledges in one of her letters to Burr, “You say, that in relating public affairs, or those of Clara, I forget my own, or conceal them under this appearance of neglect” (89). While Mary comes up with excuses, Burr’s comment still resonates since the reader must have thought the same thing.

 

Dillon discusses the novel as a creole novel in which Sansay’s “account of the community of creole women that is created in the wake of the Haitian Revolution indicates that she understood herself and other white U.S. citizens to be creoles as well” (88). Dillon’s reading of Sansay’s novel is very much in line with Edward Watts’ arguments for a new way of reading texts in his “Settler Postcolonialism as a Reading Strategy” article we read last week. In this way, I think Dillon provides a useful and provocative reading of a text that shows an alternative history to the myth of American nationalism. However, Dillon’s contrast of the white creole women from St. Domingue to the French leaves out another important cultural group—the Spanish.

 

As Dillon explains, “Mary’s initial view of the creole is eventually subject to a direct reversal. Ultimately, she will contend, the apparent lack of stability and seriousness of the creole masks superior capacities for self-support that are revealed by the violent upheaval of revolution” (89). Yet, Mary exhibits ambivalence toward the Spanish creoles as well. When in St. Jago, she gives many accounts showing “the inhabitants of this island have long since reached the last degree of corruption” (126). However, this contrasts with her experience with Jacinta in Barracoa. Jacinta is a “native of the Havanna” who speaks Spanish, and despite having to move to the “deserted” region of Barracoa, “she never repines, and seeks to diffuse around her the cheerfulness by which she is animated” (108). After leaving Baraccoa, Mary writes, “a sigh for the peaceful solitude of their retreat will often heave my breast amid the mingled scenes of pleasure and vexation in which I shall be again engaged. Fortunate people!” (108). In some ways, the Spanish creoles have an idyllic lifestyle.

 

Clara’s letters to Mary also show the negative aspects of the Spanish as their filth and poverty fills her “with disgust” (143). However, Clara doesn’t blame the Spanish people, “believing that it is entirely owing to their vicious government” (144). Like the French creoles in St. Domingue, there are important political issues that complicate the Spanish characters. Both sisters’ accounts reveal that every culture has its vices and problems, but there are always examples of goodness as well.

Letting Go of My Established Principles

The article that most struck me this week was Suzanne Bost’s “Doing the Hemisphere Differently.” Bost claims, “It’s hard work for those of us educated in the US to unlearn the narratives and definitions that govern US academic studies” (235). I think part of what was so disorienting for me last week was the sense that I had to “unlearn” so much of what I was previously taught. I thought it was important to include texts by marginalized writers within the field of American studies, but I hadn’t even considered looking beyond the boundaries of the United States to Spanish literature written in Cuba, for example. I wanted to move beyond the canon, but at the same time I really liked reading the canonical works. I was having a hard time reconciling everything I love about what I’ve already learned with all of the new compelling ideas I was encountering. However, as Bost (along with the rest of the writers) argues, “we must be willing to surrender our own narrow perspectives to wider and longer views” (236). As hard as it is for me, I agree, especially because I don’t think there’s one objective truth or reality. We need multiple perspectives to have a more holistic understanding of American history. The stories that the white European settlers tell are of course different from the stories that the Native Americans tell. Yet, Bost challenged me to think about perspective in another way entirely. Multiple perspectives don’t have to be locked in time; instead, our multiple perspectives can be taken from across time. She explains that “we in the present bear the imprint of the past, but this imprinting is not linear or irreversible,” which is illustrated by Chicana/o writers creating “alternative pasts that are more useful than the real” (237). Not only did Bost get me thinking in a new way, she also showed one example of how texts by minority writers can enrich American studies—these Chicana/o writers bring something to American literature that’s entirely different from the norm.

Bost’s attention to difference rather than similarity was especially provocative. Last week’s readings got me thinking mostly about how we could link seemingly disparate texts together, seeking for connections by which we could compare them. Contact zones imply difference, but I wanted to seek hidden similarities. However, Bost highlights the importance of embracing difference (while admitting her postmodern bias). She argues, “Focusing on shared terms might never get past the dynamics of imperialism and resistance to imperialism, missing local realities and perceptions not defined by the empire” (238). In line with our class discussion last week, Bost’s argument articulates one way in which the “transnational” turn just reinforces American exceptionalism. Even if we read “outside” texts that we can compare to our US texts, we aren’t really fixing the problem. We have to be willing to seek out texts that at first glance may not seem to fit in with our US texts at all. In spite of, and perhaps because of, their differences, these types of texts will give us a fuller picture of American history. In her last paragraph, Bost asks, “What if we were to jettison familiar methods like genealogy or comparison and approach the Americas through collage or dialogue?” I’ve always loved the idea of a dialogue because it implies two equal parties bringing what they can to the table. The idea of “dialogue” is part of what made me embrace Porter’s “quadruple set of relations” last week—I saw her putting continents in dialogue with one another while keeping things organized. I’m normally big on organization and fitting things into neat little categories, but I’m going to try to let that go to see where it can take me in this class. We don’t need neatly organized continents in dialogue, we need individual texts in dialogue, or maybe in a collage as Bost suggests. We can even embrace the messy and incommensurable.

The Transnational Conundrum

After reading the numerous arguments for why and how we should expand our conception of American literature, I felt overwhelmed. Clearly it’s important to decenter the United States and include the voices of many currently marginalized writers from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. However, I struggle to see how we could possibly do them all justice within American studies alone. Moya and Saldivar mention in “Fictions of the Trans-American Imaginary” that “the literature that is enshrined in a canon has less to do with what is valued at the time of the making of an individual work than it does with what is valued at the time a canon is put together” (6). Values have shifted since the traditional American literary canon was put together, and it would be crazy to stick to that traditional canon with everything we now know about American history and the dialogues taking place across borders for hundreds of years. The hardest task that I envision for the future of American studies is choosing which writers to now include, and which ones to exclude. Even if scholars can theoretically keep reading more and more neglected works, American literature classes are limited in scope. My undergraduate courses in American literature struggled to fit in the important canonical works, let alone works by marginalized writers. Whenever we were assigned works by ethnic minorities, we rarely discussed how those works conflicted with or related to the canonical works.

As time goes on, it will only be more difficult to fit everything into our literature courses. Moya and Saldivar explain that we currently live in a period of “rapid economic internationalization” in which “transformation is being played out before our very eyes” (12). The transnational imaginary is inevitable. As American literature progresses throughout this century, the current literature will be in more and more of an interplay with the rest of the globe. Scholars of the future will have an even bigger task ahead of them, so we must begin the transition for them. For now, maybe the answer is changing the American literature curriculum to reflect Carolyn Porter’s “quadruple set of relations between (1) Europe and Latin America; (2) Latin America and North America; (3) North America and Europe; and (4) Africa and both Americas” (510). Dividing American literature courses into these four categories could help professors tackle the problem of showing the relationships between the different continents while still doing justice to the writers from each place.