The Return of the Native: Indians and Myth-Making in Spanish America, 1810-1930
Rebecca Earle
Why does Argentina’s national anthem describe its citizens as sons of the Inca? Why did patriots in nineteenth-century Chile name a battleship after the Aztec emperor Montezuma? Answers to both questions lie in the tangled knot of ideas that constituted the creole imagination in nineteenth-century Spanish America. Rebecca Earle examines the place of preconquest peoples such as the Aztecs and the Incas within the sense of identity—both personal and national—expressed by Spanish American elites in the first century after independence, a time of intense focus on nation-building.
Starting with the anti-Spanish wars of independence in the early nineteenth century, Earle charts the changing importance elite nationalists ascribed to the pre-Columbian past through an analysis of a wide range of sources, including historical writings, poems and novels, postage stamps, constitutions, and public sculpture. This eclectic archive illuminates the nationalist vision of creole elites throughout Spanish America, who in different ways sought to construct meaningful national myths and histories. Traces of these efforts are scattered across nineteenth-century culture; Earle maps the significance of those traces. She also underlines the similarities in the development of nineteenth-century elite nationalism across Spanish America. By offering a comparative study focused on Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, Chile, and Ecuador, The Return of the Native illustrates both the common features of elite nation-building and some of the significant variations. The book ends with a consideration of the pro-indigenous indigenista movements that developed in various parts of Spanish America in the early twentieth century.
“An ambitious and important contribution to Latin American cultural and intellectual history, The Return of the Native is unique in its broad, comparative focus on nationalism in Spanish America and the uses of the Amerindian past. Moreover, it is refreshing in its attention to nineteenth-century historiography and the relation between that historiography and the process of state-building.”—Raymond B. Craib, author of Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes
Rebecca Earle is a Reader in History at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Spain and the Independence of Colombia and the editor of Rumours of War: Civil Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Latin America and Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter Writers, 1600–1945.
376 pages (January 2008)
25 b&w illustrations
$84.95
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-4063-8]
$23.95
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-4084-3]
The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade
Christopher L. Miller
The French slave trade forced more than one million Africans across the Atlantic to the islands of the Caribbean. It enabled France to establish Saint-Domingue, the single richest colony on earth, and it connected France, Africa, and the Caribbean permanently. Yet the impact of the slave trade on the cultures of France and its colonies has received surprisingly little attention. Until recently, France had not publicly acknowledged its history as a major slave-trading power. The distinguished scholar Christopher L. Miller proposes a thorough assessment of the French slave trade and its cultural ramifications, in a broad, circum-Atlantic inquiry. This magisterial work is the first comprehensive examination of the French Atlantic slave trade and its consequences as represented in the history, literature, and film of France and its former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean.
Miller offers a historical introduction to the cultural and economic dynamics of the French slave trade, and he shows how Enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu and Voltaire mused about the enslavement of Africans, while Rousseau ignored it. He follows the twists and turns of attitude regarding the slave trade through the works of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century French writers, including Olympe de Gouges, Madame de Staël, Madame de Duras, Prosper Mérimée, and Eugène Sue. For these authors, the slave trade was variously an object of sentiment, a moral conundrum, or an entertaining high-seas “adventure.” Turning to twentieth-century literature and film, Miller describes how artists from Africa and the Caribbean—including the writers Aimé Césaire, Maryse Condé, and Edouard Glissant, and the filmmakers Ousmane Sembene, Guy Deslauriers, and Roger Gnoan M’Bala—have confronted the aftermath of France’s slave trade, attempting to bridge the gaps between silence and disclosure, forgetfulness and memory.
“This dazzling, provocative book is a compendium that sets an explosive new agenda for French Studies. Christopher L. Miller’s work is important not only for scholars but also for postcolonial France as it struggles to comes to grips with its past.”—Paul Gilroy, author of The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
“This is a lovely book about an un-lovely subject. Christopher L. Miller brings the insight of a mature major scholar to questions about literature, slavery, and culture in the Francophone world.”—Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers
“Revealing a remarkable breadth of knowledge, Christopher L. Miller combines conceptual sophistication, an authoritative analysis of Francophone texts, and a compelling discussion of the ways that the French Atlantic triangle emerged and put a lasting imprint on French imagination and politics. This is a significant contribution to an understanding of the world slavery built. It is a truly great book; it should be read by anyone who cares about race, memory, literature, and citizenship.”—Françoise Vergès, author of Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Métissage
“The French Atlantic Triangle is an extremely impressive, compelling, and necessary book. Christopher L. Miller provides a magisterial examination of how the history of slavery, which profoundly shaped the culture of France, has haunted and animated the work of generations of writers and artists. In the process he offers us a new way of defining and seeing the French Atlantic.”—Laurent Dubois, author of A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804
“The French Atlantic Triangle is a tremendous achievement. Meticulously researched and lucidly written, it is an introduction to a neglected water world, without knowledge of which our encounter with continental history and literature is doomed to perpetuate biases and omissions.”—Deborah Jenson, author of Trauma and Its Representations: The Social Life of Mimesis in Post-Revolutionary France
Christopher L. Miller is Frederick Clifford Ford Professor of African American Studies and French at Yale University. He is the author of Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture; Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa; and Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French.592 pages (January 2008)
15 illustrations, 1 table, 2 figures
Cloth - $99.95
ISBN 0-8223-0-8223
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-4127-7]
ISBN 0-8223-0-8223
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-4151-2]
Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640-1940
Laura Doyle
In this pathbreaking work of scholarship, Laura Doyle reveals the central, formative role of race in the development of a transnational, English-language literature over three centuries. Identifying a recurring freedom plot organized around an Atlantic Ocean crossing, Doyle shows how this plot structures the texts of both African-Atlantic and Anglo-Atlantic writers and how it takes shape by way of submerged intertextual exchanges between the two traditions. For Anglo-Atlantic writers, Doyle locates the origins of this narrative in the seventeenth century. She argues that members of Parliament, religious refugees, and new Atlantic merchants together generated a racial rhetoric by which the English fashioned themselves as a “native,” “freedom-loving,” “Anglo-Saxon” people struggling against a tyrannical foreign king. Stories of a near ruinous yet triumphant Atlantic passage to freedom came to provide the narrative expression of this heroic Anglo-Saxon identity—in novels, memoirs, pamphlets, and national histories. At the same time, as Doyle traces through figures such as Friday in Robinson Crusoe, and through gothic and seduction narratives of ruin and captivity, these texts covertly register, distort, or appropriate the black Atlantic experience. African-Atlantic authors seize back the freedom plot, placing their agency at the origin of both their own and whites’ survival on the Atlantic. They also shrewdly expose the ways that their narratives have been “framed” by the Anglo-Atlantic tradition, even though their labor has provided the enabling condition for that tradition.Doyle brings together authors often separated by nation, race, and period, including Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Olaudah Equiano, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Wilson, Pauline Hopkins, George Eliot, and Nella Larsen. In so doing, she reassesses the strategies of early women novelists, reinterprets the significance of rape and incest in the novel, and measures the power of race in the modern English-language imagination.
“Laura Doyle’s study provides a powerful and persuasive historical ‘Atlantic world’ recontextualization of the dialectical relation of African American and Anglo-American narrative traditions. This imaginative reframing complicates and deepens our understanding of the ‘Black Atlantic’ and energizes her readings of black authors, including Pauline Hopkins, Nella Larsen, and others.”—Kevin K. Gaines, author of American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era
“Freedom’s Empire is a truly excellent work of scholarship, an important contribution to the study of the English-language novel, and a significant addition to the critical examination of the deep and varying entanglements of the discourses of race and modernity. It vitally enriches the growing field of Atlantic literary studies and will, I suspect, become one of the keystone texts of that field.”—Ian Baucom, author of Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History
“Freedom’s Empire is a bold, exciting book. Laura Doyle shows how the call to move past the framing terms of nation and historical period will result in different readings not only of novels but also of the issues with which they engage. She demonstrates how challenging the structures of literary criticism can lead to a new transatlantic cultural history.”—Priscilla Wald, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative
Laura Doyle is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture; editor of Bodies of Resistance: New Phenomenologies of Politics, Agency, and Culture; and coeditor of Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity.
592 pages (January 2008)
$99.95
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-4135-2]
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-4159-8]
The Life and Traditions of the Red Man: Reading Line: A rediscovered treasure of Native American literature
Joseph Nicolar
Edited, Annotated, and with a History of the Penobscot Nation and an Introduction by Annette Kolodny
Joseph Nicolar’s The Life and Traditions of the Red Man tells the story of his people from the first moments of creation to the earliest arrivals and eventual settlement of Europeans. Self-published by Nicolar in 1893, this is one of the few sustained narratives in English composed by a member of an Eastern Algonquian-speaking people during the nineteenth century. At a time when Native Americans’ ability to exist as Natives was imperiled, Nicolar wrote his book in an urgent effort to pass on Penobscot cultural heritage to subsequent generations of the tribe and to reclaim Native Americans’ right to self-representation. This extraordinary work weaves together stories of Penobscot history, precontact material culture, feats of shamanism, and ancient prophecies about the coming of the white man. An elder of the Penobscot Nation in Maine and the grandson of the Penobscots’ most famous shaman-leader, Old John Neptune, Nicolar brought to his task a wealth of traditional knowledge.
The Life and Traditions of the Red Man has not been widely available until now, largely because Nicolar passed away just a few months after the printing of the book was completed, and shortly afterwards most of the few hundred copies that had been printed were lost in a fire. This new edition has been prepared with the assistance of Nicolar’s descendants and members of the Penobscot Nation. It includes a summary history of the tribe; an introduction that illuminates the book’s narrative strategies, the aims of its author, and its key themes; and annotations providing historical context and explaining unfamiliar words and phrases. The book also contains a preface by Nicolar’s grandson, Charles Norman Shay, and an afterword by Bonnie D. Newsom, former Director of the Penobscot Nation’s Department of Cultural and Historic Preservation. The Life and Traditions of the Red Man is a remarkable narrative of Native American culture, spirituality, and literary daring.
“Joseph Nicolar’s The Life and Traditions of the Red Man is surely a landmark text, and Annette Kolodny’s framing helps make the narrative come alive.”—Philip Deloria, author of Indians in Unexpected Places
“The Life and Traditions of the Red Man is an extraordinary rendering of Eastern Algonquian history, story, and prophecy, self-published in the nineteenth century by a native writer from the northeast coast of the United States. As remarkable as the text was Joseph Nicolar himself, a brilliant and largely self-educated member of the Penobscot tribe who fervently wished to pass on what he could to the younger generations.”—Patricia Clark Smith, coauthor of On the Trail of Elder Brother: Glous’gap Stories of the Micmac Indians
“Joseph Nicolar’s The Life and Traditions of the Red Man, reissued with Annette Kolodny’s excellent prefatory material, provides students and scholars of American Indian literatures with a valuable text in a reader-friendly edition, which is, crucially, endorsed by the Penobscot Nation.”— Eric Cheyfitz, editor of The Columbia Guide to American Indian Literatures of the United States since 1945Joseph Nicolar (1827–94) was an elder and political leader of the Penobscot Nation of Maine. He served six terms as the tribe’s elected representative to the Maine State Legislature.
Annette Kolodny is the College of Humanities Professor of American Literature and Culture at The University of Arizona. She is the author of Failing the Future: A Dean Looks at Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century, also published by Duke University Press; The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630–1860; and The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters.
240 pages (February 2007)
8 illustrations
Not yet available. You may place an order now. The title will be shipped when it becomes available.
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-4009-6]
Paperback - $19.95
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-4028-7]
Another Face of Empire: Bartolome de Las Casas, Indigenous Rights, and Ecclesiastical Imperialism
Daniel Castro
The Spanish cleric Bartolomé de Las Casas is a key figure in the history of Spain’s conquest of the Americas. Las Casas condemned the torture and murder of natives by the conquistadores in reports to the Spanish royal court and in tracts such as A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552). For his unrelenting denunciation of the colonialists’ atrocities, Las Casas has been revered as a noble protector of the Indians and as a pioneering anti-imperialist. He has become a larger-than-life figure invoked by generations of anticolonialists in Europe and Latin America.
Separating historical reality from myth, Daniel Castro provides a nuanced, revisionist assessment of the friar’s career, writings, and political activities. Castro argues that Las Casas was very much an imperialist. Intent on converting the Indians to Christianity, the religion of the colonizers, Las Casas simply offered the natives another face of empire: a paternalistic, ecclesiastical imperialism. Castro contends that while the friar was a skilled political manipulator, influential at what was arguably the world’s most powerful sixteenth-century imperial court, his advocacy on behalf of the natives had little impact on their lives. Analyzing Las Casas’s extensive writings, Castro points out that in his many years in the Americas, Las Casas spent very little time among the indigenous people he professed to love, and he made virtually no effort to learn their languages. He saw himself as an emissary from a superior culture with a divine mandate to impose a set of ideas and beliefs on the colonized. He differed from his compatriots primarily in his antipathy to violence as the means for achieving conversion.
“Father Las Casas offered what all empires need: a sense of their own moral legitimacy. This book forthrightly unmasks the imperial gift-giver. It should be read by all colonialists and those who study human rights issues.”— Colin M. MacLachlan, John Christie Barr Distinguished Professor of History, Tulane University
Daniel Castro is Associate Professor of History at Southwestern University. He is the editor of Revolution and Revolutionaries: Guerilla Movements in Latin America.
248 pages (January 2007)
Cloth - $74.95
ISBN 0-8223-3930-7
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-3930-4]
ISBN 0-8223-3939-0
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-3939-7]
Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child, and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W. E. B. Du Bois
Caroline F. Levander
Throughout American literature, the figure of the child is often represented in opposition to the adult. In Cradle of Liberty Caroline F. Levander proposes that this opposition is crucial to American political thought and the literary cultures that surround and help produce it. Levander argues that from the late eighteenth century through the early twentieth, American literary and political texts did more than include child subjects: they depended on them to represent, naturalize, and, at times, attempt to reconfigure the ground rules of U.S. national belonging. She demonstrates how, as the modern nation-state and the modern concept of the child (as someone fundamentally different from the adult) emerged in tandem from the late eighteenth century forward, the child and the nation-state became intertwined. The child came to represent nationalism, nation-building, and the intrinsic connection between nationalism and race that was instrumental in creating a culture of white supremacy in the United States.
Reading texts by John Adams, Thomas Paine, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Augusta J. Evans, Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, William James, José Martí, W. E. B. Du Bois, and others, Levander traces the child as it figures in writing about several defining events for the United States. Among these are the Revolutionary War, the U.S.-Mexican War, the Civil War, and the U.S. expulsion of Spain from the Caribbean and Cuba. She charts how the child crystallized the concept of self—a self who could affiliate with the nation—in the early national period, and then follows the child through the rise of a school of American psychology and the period of imperialism. Demonstrating that textual representations of the child have been a potent force in shaping public opinion about race, slavery, exceptionalism, and imperialism, Cradle of Liberty shows how a powerful racial logic pervades structures of liberal democracy in the United States.
“Imaginatively combining history, literature, politics, visual culture, and transnational American studies, Cradle of Liberty’s interdisciplinary exploration of the role of the child in the American imaginary offers some intriguing insights into the intersections of race, nation, and ideas of ‘belonging.’”—Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Stanford University
“In this rich combination of cultural history, literary criticism, and social critique, Caroline F. Levander argues that the idea of childhood has figured centrally in American liberalism’s entanglement with racial inequality. Levander reveals that from the late eighteenth century to the present, the belief in a natural path of human development from childish dependency to adult autonomy has both derived from and contributed to racial and gender hierarchies that have been constitutive of U.S. national identity. Cradle of Liberty takes on an impressive array of writers, including novelists, social theorists, and philosophers, in telling the story not only of those whose engagement with the concept of the child contributed to the nation’s limited conception of liberalism, but also of those whose critiques of prevailing assumptions may provide us with strategies to increase liberalism’s capacity to deliver social justice in our own time.”—Kenneth Warren, University of Chicago
Caroline F. Levander is Professor of English and Director of the Humanities Research Center at Rice University. She is the author of Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture and a coeditor, with Carol J. Singley, of The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader.264 pages (October 2006)
11 illustrations
ISBN 0-8223-3856-4 Cloth - $74.95
ISBN 0-8223-3872-6 Paperback - $21.95
Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country
Tiya Miles , Sharon P. Holland
Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds explores the critically neglected intersection of Native and African American cultures. This interdisciplinary collection combines historical studies of the complex relations between blacks and Indians in Native communities with considerations and examples of various forms of cultural expression that have emerged from their intertwined histories. The contributors include scholars of African American and Native American studies, English, history, anthropology, law, and performance studies, as well as fiction writers, poets, and a visual artist.
Essays range from a close reading of the 1838 memoirs of a black and Native freewoman to an analysis of how Afro-Native intermarriage has impacted the identities and federal government classifications of certain New England Indian tribes. One contributor explores the aftermath of black slavery in the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations, highlighting issues of culture and citizenship. Another scrutinizes the controversy that followed the 1998 selection of a Miss Navajo Nation who had an African American father. A historian examines the status of Afro-Indians in colonial Mexico, and an ethnographer reflects on oral histories gathered from Afro-Choctaws. Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds includes evocative readings of several of Toni Morrison’s novels, interpretations of plays by African American and First Nations playwrights, an original short story by Roberta J. Hill, and an interview with the Creek poet and musician Joy Harjo. The Native American scholar Robert Warrior develops a theoretical model for comparative work through an analysis of black and Native intellectual production. In his afterword, he reflects on the importance of the critical project advanced by this volume.
Contributors. Jennifer D. Brody, Tamara Buffalo, David A. Y. O. Chang, Robert Keith Collins, Roberta J. Hill, Sharon P. Holland, ku'ualoha ho’omnawanui, Deborah E. Kanter, Virginia Kennedy, Barbara Krauthamer, Tiffany M. McKinney, Melinda Micco, Tiya Miles, Celia E. Naylor, Eugene B. Redmond, Wendy S. Walters, Robert Warrior
“Tiya Miles and Sharon P. Holland have brought together precision history, evocative criticism, and wrenching memoir and fiction to offer a compelling picture of the meeting grounds where black and Indian lives intertwine. So much more than a decentering of whiteness, this collection truly opens up new and exciting terrain.”—Philip J. Deloria, author of Indians in Unexpected Places
“This collection is an important extension of a vital topic—historical and contemporary cultural and political relationships between Indian and African peoples—fully into the realm of African diaspora studies.”—James F. Brooks, editor of Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America“Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds addresses an extremely important nexus in ethnic studies and cultural studies and demonstrates the indispensable contributions of relational and comparative study.”—George Lipsitz, author of American Studies in a Moment of Danger
Tiya Miles is Assistant Professor of American Culture, Afroamerican and African Studies, and Native American Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Ties that Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom. Sharon P. Holland is Associate Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity, also published by Duke University Press
392 pages (August 2006)
7 illus, 1 table
Cloth - $84.95
ISBN 0-8223-3812-2
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-3812-3]
ISBN 0-8223-3865-3
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-3865-9]
Published August 2006
Cloth - $84.95 Paperback - $23.95
March 10, 2008