Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature

Peter Coviello

Offers a major rereading of the antebellum literary canon.

Nineteenth-century America was a sprawling new nation unmoored from precedent and the mainstays of European nationalism. In their search for nationality, Americans sought coherence instead in a sense of far-reaching mutuality, of connection between scattered strangers.

Reading seminal works by Jefferson, Poe, Melville, Stowe, and Whitman, Peter Coviello traces these writers’ enthusiasms and their ambivalences about the dream of an intimate nationality, revealing how race and sexuality were used as vehicles for an imagined national coherence. As Coviello shows, race—and especially whiteness—functioned less as a form of identity than as a model of attachment and identification, a language of affiliation. Whiteness came to symbolize not only civic entitlement but a kind of affinity between strangers, which itself became entangled in the nation’s evolving codes of sexuality. Bringing race theory and “white studies” into dialogue with questions of intimacy and affect, Coviello provides a practical rapprochement between historicist and psychoanalytic methodologies.

At once a work of race theory, American sexual history, and scrupulous literary scholarship, Intimacy in America gives us a new perspective on the still-current dream of Americanness as an impassioned relation to far-flung, anonymous others.

“[An] intelligent, innovative book. The relevance of its subject matter to the present and its fresh take on overly familiar texts (and even on Foucault) make a good resource for an advanced audience. Recommended.” —Choice

Peter Coviello is associate professor of English at Bowdoin College.

240 pages | 5 7⁄8 x 9 | 2005

$20.00 Paper 
ISBN: 0-8166-4381-4
ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4381-3

Colonization and Conflict in Early America

Ed White

Calls for the rural electrification of early American studies.

What would an account of early America look like if it were based on examining rural insurrections or Native American politics instead of urban republican literature? Offering a new interpretation of eighteenth-century America, The Backcountry and the City focuses on the agrarian majority as distinct from the elite urban minority.

Ed White explores the backcountry-city divide as well as the dynamics of indigenous peoples, bringing together two distinct bodies of scholarship: one stressing the political culture of the Revolutionary era, the other taking an ethnohistorical view of white-Native American contact. White concentrates his study in Pennsylvania, a state in which the majority of the population was rural, and in Philadelphia, a city that was a center of publishing and politics and the national capital for a decade. Against this backdrop, White reads classic political texts such as Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer , Franklin's Autobiography , and Paine's "Agrarian Justice," alongside missionary and captivity narratives, farmers' petitions, and Native American treaties. Using historical and ethnographic sources to enrich familiar texts, White demonstrates the importance of rural areas in the study of U.S. nation formation and finds unexpected continuities between the early colonial period and the federal ascendancy of the 1790s.

Ed White is associate professor of English at the University of Florida.

320 pages | 5 7/8 x 9 | October 2005

Locating Early American Imperialism

Andy Doolen

Demonstrates how imperialism was fundamental to the formation of the early American republic.

In Fugitive Empire , Andy Doolen investigates the relationships among race, nation, and empire in colonial and early national America, revealing how whiteness and American identity were conflated to stabilize racial hierarchy and to repulse challenges to national policies of slavery, war, and continental expansion.

Fugitive Empire begins not in 1776 but in 1741 with the New York Conspiracy trials. Linking them to the British conflict with the Spanish in the West Indies, Doolen describes how white colonists were led to suspect all foreigners, particularly slaves, as insurgents. He shows how this protonational story resonated later in the suppression of resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793. In addition to examining the only extant record of the New York Conspiracy trials, Doolen catalogs the rampant fear of aliens in Charles Brockden Brown's novels; places James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers in the context of early efforts to relocate African-Americans to Liberia; and considers Pequot writer William Apess, whose writing on Native rights landed him in jail. Bridging the gap between the British Empire and the new United States, Doolen concludes that imperial authority lies at the heart of American republicanism, an unstable mixture of idealism, force, and pragmatism, wielded in the name of freedom even today.

Andy Doolen is assistant professor of American literature and American studies at the University of Kentucky.

280 pages | 5 7/8 x 9 | November 2005

$19.95 Paper
ISBN 0-8166-4454-3

David Kazanjian

An illuminating look at the concepts of race, nation, and equality in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America.

The idea that “all men are created equal” is as close to a universal tenet as exists in American history. In this hard-hitting book, David Kazanjian interrogates this tenet, exploring transformative flash points in early America when the belief in equality came into contact with seemingly contrary ideas about race and nation. The Colonizing Trick depicts early America as a white settler colony in the process of becoming an empire—one deeply integrated with Euro-American political economy, imperial ventures in North America and Africa, and pan-American racial formations.

Kazanjian traces tensions between universal equality and racial or national particularity through theoretically informed critical readings of a wide range of texts: the political writings of David Walker and Maria Stewart, the narratives of black mariners, economic treatises, the personal letters of Thomas Jefferson and Phillis Wheatley, Charles Brockden Brown’s fiction, congressional tariff debates, international treaties, and popular novelettes about the U.S.–Mexico War and the Yucatán’s Caste War. Kazanjian shows how emergent racial and national formations do not contradict universalist egalitarianism; rather, they rearticulate it, making equality at once restricted, formal, abstract, and materially embodied.

David Kazanjian is associate professor of English, Queens College, and visiting associate professor of English, The Graduate Center, City University of New York.