Notes
Introduction
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, 9th ed. (London: For the author, 1794), 306. Some contextual information here is taken from Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (New York: Penguin, 2007).
James Brooks, “Continental Shifts,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 74, no. 3 (2017): 534.
See also his later indictments of Western knowledge disciplines in Vine Deloria Jr., Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Facts (New York: Scribner’s, 1995); and the discussion thereof in Scott Michaelson, The Limits of Multiculturalism: Interrogating the Origins of American Anthropology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 3–15. There are also everyday attempts at cross-cultural understanding that can stand in the way of actual positive change; see, e.g., Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), which shows how “racial-liberal reading practices” ultimately “made it possible for white Americans to comprehend the act of reading a novel as (and as a substitute for) an active politics of social transformation” (24). See also Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337; Jennifer L. Fleissner, “After the New Americanists: The Progress of Romance and the Romance of Progress in American Literary Studies,” in A Companion to American Literary Studies, ed. Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 171–90; and Alan S. Rome, “Killing with Kindness: The Benevolent Roots of Violence in Early Virginia,” Itinerario 38, no. 1 (2014): 57–80, which insists that the “true tragedy of colonial relations—as well as humanitarianism—is that it is precisely the genuineness of benevolence, and not its cynical exploitation or subordination to other ends, that is often the compelling force behind conflict and suffering” (58).
See Simon Harrison, “Identity as a Scarce Resource,” Social Anthropology 7, no. 3 (1999): 239–51; and Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999), 64.
Kenneth M. Morrison, The Solidarity of Kin: Ethnohistory, Religious Studies, and the Algonkian–French Religious Encounter (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 5. On the same problematic of reproducing the terms of domination in literary criticism, see Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), esp. 1–14 and 169–208.
For good examples of this, see Lisa Brooks’s account of the land-related transactions and judicial maneuvers leading up to King Philip’s War in Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2018).
Jodi Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xviii.
Stephanie Nohelai Teves, Andrea Smith, and Michelle H. Raheja, “Introduction and Acknowledgments,” in Native Studies Keywords, ed. Teves, Smith, and Raheja (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015), viii. The terms in this volume are “sovereignty,” “land,” “indigeneity,” “tradition,” “nation,” “blood,” “colonialism,” and “indigenous epistemologies/knowledges.” Each term is taken up in two short essays by scholars taking different approaches to the concept, a dialogic structure that departs from other keywords studies, including recent ones such as Roland Greene, Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
James H. Merrell, “Second Thoughts on Colonial Historians and American Indians,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 69, no. 3 (2012): 457; see also Merrell, “Some Thoughts on Colonial Historians and American Indians,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 46, no. 1 (1989): 94–119.
Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 10.
Williams, Keywords, 22.
Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 1.
The literature here is vast, but key texts include James Clifford and George E. Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon, 1993); Michael A. Elliott, The Culture Concept: Writing and Difference in the Age of Realism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); and Lee D. Baker, Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010). More recently, for a history and defense of the concept, see Terry Eagleton, Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2018).
Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 169.
Williams, Keywords, 23.
Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995); see also Calvin Martin, ed., The American Indian and the Problem of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Devon A. Mihesuah, Indigenous American Women: Decolonization, Empowerment, Activism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003); Mihesuah, ed., Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing about American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998); and Susan A. Miller and James Riding In, eds., Native Historians Write Back: Decolonizing American Indian History (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2011).
See the arguments in Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40; and Manu Karuka, “Counter-sovereignty,” J19: Journal of Nineteenth Century Americanists 2, no. 1 (2014): 142–48. The reflections that follow in this book have been inspired by many thinkers, but in key ways by the following works: Paula Gunn Allen, Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-Busting, Border-Crossing Loose Canons (Boston: Beacon, 1998); Taiaiake Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938–40 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003); Brooks, Our Beloved Kin; Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Clarice Lispector, “Love,” in Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady, trans. Katrina Dodson (New York: Penguin Classics, 2018), 17–34; Scott Richard Lyons, X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008); and Robert Warrior, Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). The deep patterns of professional conventionality analyzed in each of the following chapters might be thought of as what Ludwig Wittgenstein famously called “forms of life”; Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. and trans. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 241.
On this critical “unsettling” in colonial studies, see Anna Brickhouse, The Unsettlement of America: Translation, Interpretation, and the Story of Don Luis de Velasco, 1560–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
For a summa of queer pessimism, see Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, Sex, or The Unbearable (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013); versions of Afropessimism inspiring this book can be found in Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013); and Hartman, Lose Your Mother.
For queer temporality theory, see Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010); Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017); and Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005). Among postsecularist religious studies, see Tracy Fessenden, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007); and John Lardas Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). For Native American and Indigenous studies’ interrogations of sovereignty and identity, see, among many others, Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of the Settler States (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014); Mark Rifkin, The Erotics of Sovereignty: Queer Native Writing in the Era of Self-Determination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness; and Michael F. Brown, “Sovereignty’s Betrayals,” in Indigenous Experience Today, ed. Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn (London: Routledge, 2007), 171–94. For irony, see Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance (Lincoln, Neb.: Bison Books, 1999).
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation in Tipití,” Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 2, no. 1 (2004): 11, 5. The ontological turn in anthropology extends its reflexive journey since the era discussed in chapter 4; in the words of three of its practitioners, it is “a technology of description designed in the optimist (non-skeptical) hope of making the otherwise visible by experimenting with the conceptual affordances present in a given body of ethnographic materials.” See Martin Holbraad, Morten Axel Pedersen, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “The Politics of Ontology: Anthropological Positions,” Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology website (2014), https://culanth.org/fieldsights/462-the-politics-of-ontology-anthropological-positions. See also Marisol de la Cadena, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond ‘Politics,’” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 2 (2010): 334–70; and de la Cadena, Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015).
Glissant, Poetics of Relation; Siobhan Senier, Sovereignty and Sustainability: Indigenous Literary Stewardship in New England (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020); Susan Howe, The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1993); Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: Norton, 2019); and Brooks, Our Beloved Kin.
Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus, 11; Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011). My thanks to Micah Bateman for the notion of strategic pessimism.
Christine M. DeLucia, Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2018), 1.
DeLucia, Memory Lands, 9.
1. Cosmopuritanism
An American [Lydia Maria Child], Hobomok, a Tale of Early Times (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard, 1824), 6, 10.
Child, Hobomok, 11.
See Peter C. Mancall, The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2019), esp. 1–17 and 179–210.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” in Twice-Told Tales (Boston: American Stationers, 1837), 78.
Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Greene, “Transatlantic Colonization and the Redefinition of Empire in the Early Modern Era: The British–American Experience,” in Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820, ed. Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy (New York: Routledge, 2002), 267–82; David Grayson Allen, In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transferal of English Local Law and Custom to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Norton, 1982); Ralph Bauer, The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Douglas Anderson, William Bradford’s Books: Of Plimmoth Plantation and the Printed Word (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); and Jan Stievermann, Prophecy, Piety, and the Problem of Historicity: Interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures in Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2016). More generally, see Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Virginia DeJohn Anderson, New England’s Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Mark Peterson, The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630–1865 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2019); and Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons: Language, Race, and American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2022).
Lauren Berlant, “Poor Eliza,” American Literature 70 (1998): 636; Peter Coviello, “Agonizing Affection: Affect and Nation in Early America,” Early American Literature 37, no. 3 (2001): 439–68; Kathleen Donegan, Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Bryce Traister, ed., American Literature and the New Puritan Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); and Sarah Rivett and Abram Van Engen, “Postexceptionalist Puritanism,” introduction to special issue edited by Rivett and Van Engen, American Literary History 90, no. 4 (2018): 675–92. Important precedents for this strand of work include Andrew Delbanco, The Puritan Ordeal (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); Mitchell Breitweiser, American Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning: Religion, Grief, and Ethnology in Mary White Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); and Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978).
Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 164.
Craig Calhoun, “The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travelers: Toward a Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (2002): 883.
See Bauer, Cultural Geography; Ed White, “Early American Nations as Imagined Communities,” American Quarterly 56, no. 1 (2004): 49–81; and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006).
Joy Harjo, “In Mystic,” in Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems (New York: Norton, 2017), 62.
Rob Wilson, “A New Cosmopolitanism Is in the Air: Some Dialectical Twists and Turns,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 355.
The critical literature on nationalism and cosmopolitanism is vast. Good surveys of the debate, including important contributions to it, are found in Bruce Robbins, “Introduction Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanisms,” in Cheah and Robbins, Cosmopolitics, 1–19; and Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, Carol A. Breckenridge, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, eds., “Cosmopolitanisms,” Public Culture 12, no. 3 (2000). David Harvey’s work is an important exception to the schematic I offer here; see Harvey, “Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils,” Public Culture 12, no. 2 (2000): 529–64. Suspicions of cosmopolitanism similar to mine are also found in Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (London: Verso, 1998); and Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). David A. Hollinger argues that cosmopolitanism’s resurgence as a critical category in the 1990s emerged from a reaction against pluralist multiculturalism; see Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
Martha C. Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” in For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 4.
The idea of “cosmopolitan democracy,” despite differences in approach and emphasis, appears in Robbins, “Introduction Part I,” and in Calhoun, “Class Consciousness,” 869–97; see also Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism”; David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996); and Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” in Cheah and Robbins, Cosmopolitics, 91–114. Appiah distinguishes patriotism from nationalism, observing that one can be patriotic to a nonnational group or locale.
Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (New York: Verso, 2000), 42.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 247; see also Timothy Brennan, “Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism,” New Left Review 7 (2001): 75–84; and Brennan, “Cosmo-Theory,” South Atlantic Quarterly 100, no. 3 (2001): 659–91.
It has, however, made possible the beginnings of a critique of the academy’s particular investment in speaking about cosmopolitanism. James Clifford, in “Mixed Feelings,” in Cheah and Robbins, Cosmopolitics, 362–70, calls for “a clear-sighted awareness of institutional entanglement and a skepticism of the purifying dodges that abound in ‘political’ critique” based on cosmopolitanism (368).
Bradford quoted in Nathaniel Morton, New-Englands Memoriall (Cambridge, Mass.: John Usher, 1669), 144–45.
See also Hebrews 11:13, and I Peter 2:11. All biblical quotations in this chapter are from the Geneva Bible, 1587 edition. This poem is discussed and annotated in William Bradford, The Collected Verse, ed. Michael G. Runyan (St. Paul: John Colet, 1974), 238–49.
Here I focus on shared characteristics of separatists and Puritans in order to obtain critical leverage on cosmopolitanism. Distinctions among nonconformists are crucial to understanding the development of religious and political forms in Anglo-America. At the same time, these Calvinist religious forms shared an argument about the structure of the relationship between a believer and the larger world, rooted in the common insistence that believers have an individual relationship with God and that Christ’s kingdom must be brought to earth. Property laws and church membership rules differed from colony to colony, but the structure linking these to religious imperatives through spatial and territorial metaphors or antitypes taken from the Bible was similar. Janice Knight observes a more outward-looking emphasis in the Cambridge-descended preachers of the Puritan colonies, but orthodox leaders were united in their interest in maintaining power through the sermon form and through a rigorous control over the terms of belonging to the church. See Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1965); Darrett Rutman, American Puritanism: Faith and Practice (Philadelphia, Pa.: Lippincott, 1970); Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); and Philip F. Gura, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620–1660 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984).
Roger Williams, The Hireling Ministry None of Christs, or A Discourse Touching the Propagating the Gospel of Christ Jesus (London, 1652), A2v–A3r.
Nan Goodman, The Puritan Cosmopolis: The Law of Nations and the Early American Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); see also Gruesz, Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons.
“A Modell of Christian Charity” (1630?), New York Heritage Digital Collections, https://cdm16694.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16124coll1/id/1952. See Jerome McGann’s discussion of the authorship of this document in Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes: The Unsettled Records of American Settlement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022).
Cotton Mather, India Christiana (Boston: E. Green, 1721), 57.
Carrie Hyde, Civic Longing: The Speculative Origins of U.S. Citizenship (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2018), 45.
Hyde, Civic Longing, 47.
The political theology of American nonconformist cosmopolitanism might be seen as one of the local formations antecedent to what Mary Louise Pratt terms “planetary consciousness,” a Eurocentric imagination of the relationships among individuals, nations, and the world whose persuasiveness is rooted in metaphors taken from science. Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Acculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 15–36.
Louise Breen, Transgressing the Bounds: Subversive Enterprises among the Puritan Elite in Massachusetts, 1630–1692 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), makes an important argument about New England cosmopolitanism that nonetheless shows the need for a more nuanced and historically specific understanding of nonlocal thinking in the colonies. Pointing out that orthodox Puritanism was more democratic than antinomianism, Breen argues that orthodoxy appealed to those middling groups invested in local economics and politics who were likely to achieve independent landholding status. Such residents organized by various means—antinomianism, the formation of militia companies—to bring their vision of community into the political field. For Breen, “dueling versions of the good life, pitting localism against cosmopolitanism and homogeneity versus heterogeneity, competed with one another persistently throughout the entire century and beyond” (9). Yet much like homogeneity or heterogeneity, cosmopolitanism is in the eye of the beholder. If the Puritan valorization of conformity appealed, it was because of an already configured argument, made by those ministers and leaders whom Breen considers insularists, about how individuals should relate to and think about space, nation, and time in pursuit of grace. This tension may be better understood as a contest between different cosmopolitanisms.
Walter Mignolo, “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism,” Public Culture 12, no. 3 (2000): 721.
Scholarly work on the history of cosmopolitanism emphasizes its Enlightenment origins and in many cases depends on a Kantian conceptual vocabulary (universalism, rationality, citizenship) that coalesced in the intellectual currents of the eighteenth century. With a few exceptions, this history presumes that in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries there was a profound skepticism about cosmopolitanism rooted in local variation, imperial competition, religious narrow-mindedness, and protean forms of modern reason and science. For exceptions, see Tom Conley, The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Denis Cosgrove, “Globalism and Tolerance in Early Modern Geography,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93, no. 4 (2003): 852–70; and Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: Free Press, 1990).
Julian Yates, Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 109.
Sir John Mandeville’s travel narrative was the central English text of this genre until the sixteenth century; see Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 26–51. On shifts in the uses of travel narrative, see Anthony Parr, “Foreign Relations in Jacobean England: The Sherley Brothers and the ‘Voyage of Persia,’” in Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, ed. Jean Pierre Maquerlot and Michele Willems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 14–31; and Parr, ed., Three Renaissance Travel Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
Bauer, Cultural Geography, 84.
Thomas Palmer, An Essay of the Meanes How to Make Our Trauailes, into Forraine Countries, the More Profitable and Honourable (London, 1606), A2v, 1.
On the Dutch commercial framework for the global connectedness with which New England Puritans contended, see Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Knopf, 1987); and Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987). Bradford reports in Of Plimmoth Plantation that emigrants’ motives included the preservation of the English language and customs among the separatists’ children, who were rapidly adopting Dutch habits.
See Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Anonymous [possibly Henry Ainsworth], The Confession of Faith of Certayn English People, Living in Exile, in the Low Countreyes (Amsterdam, 1607), A2r.
Confession of Faith, A2v.
Ann Kibbey, The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism: A Study of Rhetoric, Prejudice, and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 131. For analyses of Puritan preaching and oral authority, see Jane Kamensky, Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990); Sandra Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and Meredith Neuman, Jeremiah’s Scribes: Literary Theories of the Sermon in Puritan New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
Kibbey, Interpretation of Material Shapes, 125.
Anonymous, A Relation or Iournall of the Beginning and Proceedings of the English Plantation Setled at Plimoth (London, 1622), 65.
Relation or Iournall, 66.
Relation or Iournall, 68, 69. For discussions of the rhetoric of settlement in relation to colonial concepts of property and sovereignty, see Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Jean O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003); and O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
Relation or Iournall, 68.
Massachusetts Bay passed laws in the 1630s requiring residents to live within a short radius of the meetinghouse, and in the following decade added other laws requiring church attendance by all residents. An “Essay on the Ordering of Towns,” in the Winthrop papers, recommends that settlement be limited to a radius of no more than two miles from a town’s meetinghouse. See John Winthrop, Winthrop Papers (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1943), 3:181–83; and Morgan, Visible Saints, 123.
See Greene, “Transatlantic Colonization”; Mark Greengrass, Conquest and Coalescence: The Shaping of the State in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 1991); and Jenny Hale Pulsifer, Subjects unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
Jace Weaver, The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000–1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 17. See also Coll Thrush, Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2016); Anna Brickhouse, The Unsettlement of America: Translation, Interpretation, and the Story of Don Luis de Velasco, 1560–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); and Alden T. Vaughn, Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500–1776 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
See Salisbury, Manitou and Providence; Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); and Kathleen Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1500–1650 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996).
On the Pequot War, see Alfred A. Cave, The Pequot War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996); Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York: Norton, 1976); Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1974); Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967); Alden T. Vaughan, New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620–1675, 3rd. ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995); and Salisbury, Manitou and Providence, 203–24.
Salisbury calls this the “wampum revolution”; see Manitou and Providence, 147–48. See also Paul A. Robinson, “Lost Opportunities: Miantonomi and the English in Seventeenth-Century Narragansett Country,” in Northeastern Indian Lives, ed. Robert S. Grumet (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 13–28.
Lynn Ceci, “Native Wampum as a Peripheral Resource in the Seventeenth-Century World System,” in The Pequots in Southern New England: The Rise and Fall of an American Indian Nation, ed. Laurence M. Hauptman and James D. Wherry (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 60–61. See also Kevin McBride, “The Source and Mother of the Fur Trade: Native–Dutch Relations in Eastern New Netherland,” in Enduring Traditions: The Native Peoples of New England, ed. Laurie Lee Weinstein (Westport, Conn.: Bergin & Garvey, 1994), 33–51.
Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Vintage, 1996), 64.
Said, Representations, 53.
Bercovitch, American Jeremiad, 11.
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), 39; and see Homi K. Bhabha, “Locations of Culture,” in The Critical Tradition, ed. David H. Richter (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1998), 1331–44.
George E. Tinker, Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide (Minneapolis, Minn.: Augsburg Fortress, 1993); Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness; and Byrd, Transit of Empire, 117–46.
Homi K. Bhabha and Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Cosmopolitanism and Convergence,” New Literary History 49, no. 2 (2018): 189; see also Homi K. Bhabha, “Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism,” in Text and Nation: Cross-Disciplinary Essays on Cultural and National Identities, ed. Laura García-Moreno and Peter C. Pfeiffer (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1996), 191–207. “Some embraces can be sweet but toxic,” Dorothy Wang writes. “The academic enamored of the global, transnational, cosmopolitan, and/or diasporic can be a slightly altered version of the familiar Orientalist,” a narcissist “whose seeming valorization of the Oriental or subaltern thinly veils self-righteous imperialist drives.” Wang, review of Kandice Chuh and Karen Shimakawa, eds., Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora, in Journal of Asian American Studies 5, no. 3 (2002): 272. Similarly, see Nan Z. Da, Sino–U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018); and Sam Knowles, “Macrocosm-opolitanism? Gilroy, Appiah, and Bhabha: The Unsettling Generality of Cosmopolitan Ideas,” Postcolonial Text 3, no. 4 (2007): 1–11.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—targeting Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida at the time—made a foundational observation about the imagined cosmopolitan universalism of high critical theorists in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” See a revised version in Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea, ed. Rosalind C. Morris (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 21–79.
Stephen Greenblatt, “Racial Memory and Literary History,” PMLA 116, no. 1 (2001): 48–49.
Among many others, on the Jesuits, see James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); on the Iroquois, Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); and on the Society of Friends, Jane E. Calvert, “The Quaker Theory of a Civil Constitution,” History of Political Thought 27, no. 4 (2006): 586–619.
Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (New York: Dix, Edwards, 1857), 245, 219.
Harjo, “In Mystic,” 63.
Harjo, “In Mystic,” 62.
2. Believing in Piety
N. Scott Momaday, “An Element of Piety,” in The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), 193–95.
See the Southern Baptist Convention, https://www.sbc.net/ (as of September 2021).
James Garrison, Pietas from Vergil to Dryden (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 258.
Considering the curve of Figure 1, and taking forms of the word piety as a proxy for devotional commitment more broadly, one wonders if what is referred to as the First Great Awakening may not have begun in the early eighteenth century and started to decline only around 1833. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958). Amanda Porterfield, arguing for the social power of female piety in colonial New England in Female Piety in Puritan New England: The Emergence of Religious Humanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), writes that the “religion of female piety was largely responsible for the social cohesion that existed in seventeenth-century New England,” which by extension “made possible the economic success of the merchant class” (9). Respecting the skepticism of self described in the paragraphs that follow, see Andrew Delbanco, The Puritan Ordeal (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).
Michael Kaufman, “Post-secular Puritans: Recent Retrials of Anne Hutchinson,” Early American Literature 45, no. 1 (2010): 35.
“The distance, even marginality,” Michael Denning writes in Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (New York: Verso, 2004), “of the Puritans from the canons of orthodox literary criticism, historiography, political science, sociology, and religious studies, combined with their presumed centrality to American culture, has allowed a richness of interdisciplinary work that is unparalleled in other fields of American studies” (182). On the postsecular, see in addition to the scholars cited later in this chapter John Lardas Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
For some of the scholarly landscape summarized here, see Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956); Edmund S. Morgan, “The Historians of Early New England,” in The Reinterpretation of Early American History, ed. Ray Allen Billington (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1966), 41–63; Michael McGiffert, “American Puritan Studies in the 1960s,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 27, no. 1 (1970): 36–67; David D. Hall, “On Common Ground: The Coherence of American Puritan Studies,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 44, no. 2 (1987): 193–229; and Foster, Long Argument.
On white Indians, see James Axtell, The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 168–206.
Douglas L. Winiarski, “Native American Popular Religion in New England’s Old Colony, 1670–1770,” Religion and American Culture 15, no. 2 (2005): 151.
Sir John Eliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006); Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: Norton, 1999).
Winiarski, “Native American Popular Religion,” 155.
The structure of this argument is inspired by the work of Michel Serres, in particular The Parasite (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), and the dialogical cosmology advocated in Kenneth M. Morrison, The Solidarity of Kin: Ethnohistory, Religious Studies, and the Algonkian–French Religious Encounter (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002).
Vine Deloria Jr., God Is Red: A Native View of Religion (Golden: Fulcrum, 2003); and Deloria, Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (New York: Macmillan, 1969).
Garrison, Pietas from Vergil to Dryden, 2. My discussion of pietas is indebted largely to Garrison.
See David Hall, “Transatlantic Passages: The Reformed Tradition and the Politics of Writing,” in Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas, ed. Stephanie Kirk and Sarah Rivett (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).
John Dryden, The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker, H. T. Swedenberg Jr., and Vinton A. Dearing, 16 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956–2000), 5:288.
Virgil, The Works of Virgil: Containing His Pastorals, Georgics, and Æneis, trans. John Dryden (London, 1697); Cotton Mather, Pietas in Patriam (London, 1697). The title page of Cotton’s 1697 edition features a quotation from book 12 of the Aeneid, “Discite Virtutem ex Hoc, verumque Laborem,” or “Learn virtue/valor and true toil from this man.” See an analysis rooted in the myth-symbol school in John Shields, The American Aeneas: Classical Origins of the American Self (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001); an unusual treatment of pietas and Mather in Christopher Felker, Reinventing Cotton Mather in the American Renaissance: Magnalia Christi Americana in Hawthorne, Stowe, and Stoddard (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993); and Jane Donahue Eberwein, “‘In a Book, as in a Glass’: Literary Sorcery in Mather’s Life of Phips,” Early American Literature 10, no. 3 (1975): 289–300.
Augustine of Hippo, De civitate Dei contra paganos, ed. and trans. George E. McCracken et al., 7 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), 2:82.
Quoted in William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York: Modern Library, 1967), 197–98.
Jonathan Swift, The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis, 14 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941), 11:278.
Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Boston: Beacon, 1968), 4, ix.
Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).
Janice Knight, Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994); Matthew P. Brown, The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Cultures in Early New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 179–207; Jordan Stein and Justine Murison, “Introduction: Religion and Method,” Early American Literature 45, no. 1 (2010): 7. For other exemplary works on the period formed around the concept of piety, see Charles Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); and Charles Cohen, God’s Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 145.
Tracy Fessenden, “Religion, Literature, and Method,” Early American Literature 45, no. 1 (2010): 185. It is illuminating when David Hall, for example, says plainly in the introduction to his edition of Hugh Amory’s writing that the key thing to keep in mind as you consider his editorial effect on Amory’s text is that he is a believer, and Amory was not. Hugh Amory, Bibliography and the Book Trades: Studies in the Print Culture of Early New England, ed. David D. Hall (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).
Lyons, X-Marks, 96.
Joel W. Martin and Mark A. Nicholas, eds., Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 8–9; David Silverman, Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1600–1871 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Anticipating these approaches was James P. Ronda, “Generations of the Faith: The Christian Indians of Martha’s Vineyard,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 38, no. 3 (1981): 369–94.
This is a fact that Nancy Shoemaker has also emphasized in questions of gender, governance, and the body, and that Jill Lepore influentially argued in the case of war. See Nancy Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); and Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Knopf, 1998). The argument for cultural similarity as a driver of differentiation is taken further in Erik Seeman, Death in the New World: Cross-Cultural Encounters, 1492–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). Seeman claims that similarity was the matrix of understanding for Europeans in the New World, and that from just after the beginning of colonization, similarities were put to exploitative use.
Rachel Wheeler, To Live upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008), 82, 4.
Edward Andrews, Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013).
Fessenden, “Religion, Literature, and Method,” 191. See, e.g., Brown, Pilgrim and the Bee; Meredith Neuman, Jeremiah’s Scribes: Creating Sermon Literature in Puritan New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); and Lisa M. Gordis, Opening Scripture: Bible Reading and Interpretive Authority in Puritan New England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
Here I draw on Winiarski, “Native American Popular Religion.” Winiarski’s other works on the topic are equally rich.
David Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York: Knopf, 1989), 119.
Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 171.
Winiarski, “Native American Popular Religion,” 149.
Daniel Mandell, “Eager Partners in Reform: Indians and Frederick Baylies in Southern New England, 1780–1840,” in Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape, ed. Joel W. Martin and Martin A. Nicholas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 38–66; Winiarski, “Native American Popular Religion”; and Joanna Brooks, “Hard Feelings: Samson Occom Contemplates His Christian Mentors,” Martin and Nicholas, Native Americans, 23–37.
Andrews, Native Apostles, 228.
On “hand piety,” see Brown, Pilgrim and the Bee, 102; Amory, Bibliography.
Walter Woodward, Prospero’s America: John Winthrop, Jr., Alchemy, and the Creation of New England Culture, 1606–1676 (Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute and the University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 93–137.
Amory, Bibliography, 29; Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).
Kevin A. McBride, “Bundles, Bears, and Bibles: Interpreting Seventeenth-Century Native ‘Texts,’” in Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology, ed. Kristina Bross and Hilary E. Wyss (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 135.
See Seeman, Death in the New World.
See a longer discussion of the relations between kinship and systematicity in Matt Cohen, The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), especially chap. 4. On the complexities of the region’s Indigenous politics in the seventeenth century, see Michael Leroy Oberg, Uncas: First of the Mohegans (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006).
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1995), 13.
McBride, “Bundles, Bears, and Bibles,” 136.
Frank Chouteau Brown, “‘The Old House’ at Cutchogue, Long Island, New York: Built in 1649,” Old-Time New England 31, no. 1 (1940): 11–21; and John and William Blye, quoted in Robert Blair St. George, Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 188.
George F. Horton, compiler, Horton Genealogy, or Chronicles of the Descendants of Barnabas Horton, of Southold, L.I., 1640 (Philadelphia, Pa.: Home Circle, 1876).
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Penguin, 1978). For a particularly intense version of the anti-Pequot position, see Jeff Benedict, Without Reservation: The Making of America’s Most Powerful Indian Tribe and Foxwoods the World’s Largest Casino (New York: HarperCollins, 2000).
Amory, Bibliography, 13.
The Pequots are the subject of a large and contentious body of writing; for a synopsis, see Cohen, Networked Wilderness, chap. 4.
Joanna Brooks, “From Edwards to Baldwin: Heterodoxy, Discontinuity, and New Narratives of American Religious-Literary History,” American Literary History 45, no. 2 (2010): 429.
Foster, Long Argument, 305.
Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 106. Piety, it could be argued, belongs to that arsenal that Ginzburg describes as “the powerful and terrible weapon of abstraction” (115).
“We are always,” writes Michel Serres, “simultaneously making gestures that are archaic, modern, and futuristic.” Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 60.
3. Waiting for the Beginning
Tracts Relating to the Attempts to Convert to Christianity the Indians of New England, Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd ser., vol. 4 (Cambridge, Mass.: Charles Folsom, 1834), 240. For Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), this qualification and elaboration signal evidentiary solidity: “Would the missionary have fabricated such an imperfect and inconsistent record of his big day, especially with a well-connected skeptical audience present to contradict him? Questions remain, but it seems likely that the narratives recorded in Tears of Repentance are a reasonably authentic record of the converts’ speeches” (117). Impatience, as well as its management in the moment and in print, emerges as key here: the patience that Eliot dramatizes himself as having, in contrast even to the “graver sort,” served him well at a time when Christian patience was the dominant framework for understanding such exhibitions. It seems also to have done so in the long run for the reception of his account as fact in the present.
Transactions of the Buffalo Historical Society: Red Jacket (Buffalo, N.Y.: Buffalo Historical Society, 1884), 40.
Transactions of the Buffalo Historical Society: Red Jacket, 41.
For a range of important work on temporality and cultural differences, see Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time; the notion of chrononormativity in Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010); and Jason Farman, Delayed Response: The Art of Waiting from the Ancient to the Instant World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2019).
Vine Deloria Jr., We Talk, You Listen: New Tribes, New Turf (New York: Dell, 1970), 62.
See Marta Alda, Marta Puebla-Guedea, Baltasar Rodero, Marcelo Demarzo, Jesús Montero-Marín, Miquel Roca, and Javier García-Campayo, “Zen Meditation, Length of Telomeres, and the Role of Experiential Avoidance and Compassion,” Mindfulness 7 (2016): 651–59; Zoë Corbyn, “Elizabeth Blackburn on the Telomere Effect: ‘It’s about Keeping Healthier for Longer,’” Guardian, January 29, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/; and James Masters, “U.S. Scientists Awarded Nobel in Medicine for Body Clock Insights,” CNN.com, October 2, 2017, http://www.cnn.com/. For Buddhists, the relationship between intersubjective understanding and the exercise of patience is causal. See Dalai Lama XIV, Healing Anger: The Power of Patience from a Buddhist Perspective (Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion, 1997), which argues that the practice of patience is an often uncomfortable activity that cultivates compassion by way of an ability to apprehend the suffering of others. For another famous example of Native American claims about Western urgency, see the account of the treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in Frank Kelderman, Authorized Agents: Publication and Diplomacy in the Era of Indian Removal (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019), 161–64.
Robert Levine, A Geography of Time: The Temporal Misadventures of a Social Psychologist, or How Every Culture Keeps Time Just a Little Bit Differently (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 24.
For an analysis of the “discrepant temporalities” of more recent colonial relations between Native America and the settler state, see Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time, 3.
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Methuen, 1982).
James 1:4, Geneva Bible (1599 ed.).
See also Ethan Shagan, The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion, and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011): “The ubiquitous moral principle of moderation was a profoundly coercive tool of social, religious and political power” (3). Patience was, of course, one of the components of that moderation and hence was at the heart of contests over “proper” conduct and political action.
Lynch to Viscount Cornbury, March 29, 1672, quoted in Nuala Zahedieh, “Trade, Plunder, and Economic Development in Early English Jamaica, 1655–89,” Economic History Review, n.s., 39, no. 2 (1986): 209.
Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
On Williams, see Edmund S. Morgan, Roger Williams: The Church and the State (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967); and Edwin S. Gaustad, Roger Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Quoted in Rev. J. Lewis Diman, ed., introduction to The Complete Works of Roger Williams, vol. 5 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), vii. On the settler Quakers, see Thomas D. Hamm, The Quakers in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
Williams, Complete Works, title page, 3–4.
Williams, A Key into the Language of America (London: Dexter, 1643), 55.
Letter of Richard Scot, in George Fox and John Burnyeat, A New-England Fire-Brand Quenched . . . , 2 vols. (London, 1678), 2:248.
Williams, Complete Works, 20.
Williams, Complete Works, 40.
“To the People Called Quakers,” in Williams, Complete Works, p. 2, point 7.
Williams, Complete Works, 307–8.
Williams, Complete Works, 19.
Williams, Complete Works, 23.
Williams, Complete Works, 9.
Williams, Complete Works, 39.
Williams, Complete Works, 162, 34.
Williams, Complete Works, 213.
Fox and Burnyeat, New-England Fire-Brand, 1:223.
Fox and Burnyeat, New-England Fire-Brand, 2:216.
Fox and Burnyeat, New-England Fire-Brand, 1:218, 1:240.
Fox and Burnyeat, New-England Fire-Brand, 1:66.
Fox and Burnyeat, New-England Fire-Brand, 1:153, 1:130.
Williams, Complete Works, 45.
Fox and Burnyeat, New-England Fire-Brand, 1:175.
Williams, Complete Works, 218.
By publishing his book in Boston, and appending with it a letter to King Charles II, Williams placed this theological contest at the nexus of earthly domains. Apparently wanting to draw as much on Williams’s own words as he had on George Fox’s, the Friends waited too: Fox and John Burnet did not publish their response until 1678 (in two volumes, in London). Although from internal evidence it appears that Williams composed the text not long after the conferences took place, the tome was not published until four years later, in the last phases of King Philip’s War. It may be that the increasing tensions of 1674–75 delayed the book’s issue. It has been speculated that Williams’s text, written during the winter of 1672–73, was set in type in Boston not long after, but that the issue of the book was delayed. It is possible the book existed in sheets during the whole of the war, but it seems more likely that Williams had arranged for publication and therefore wrote his prefatory material in that expectation, with Foster waiting to set the text until funding was obtained. Williams’s manuscript’s being in Boston would also explain the survival of his copy despite the burning of Providence during the conflict. Governor John Leverett paid the costs of publication when it eventually appeared. See Williams, The Correspondence of Roger Williams, ed. Glenn LaFantasie, 2 vols. (Providence: Rhode Island Historical Society and University Press of New England, 1988), 2:688–90. In any case, it seems possible that in the wake of King Philip’s War, there was at once a solace in returning to theological combat and a heightened rhetorical edge for Williams, whose accusations of Quaker similitude to Native Americans and insistence on the Friends’ threat to colonial sovereignty would ring loud in the wake of the most devastating conflict the English had experienced in America.
Williams, Complete Works, 39.
Brooks, Our Beloved Kin, 115. Much of my account here is based on Brooks’s extraordinary book.
Brooks, Our Beloved Kin, 126, 131.
Brooks, Our Beloved Kin, 8.
Williams, Correspondence, 2:695.
Williams, Correspondence, 2:722.
Williams, Correspondence, 2:723.
Williams, Correspondence, 2:723.
Williams, Correspondence, 2:724.
Brooks, Our Beloved Kin, 284.
Quoted in Noah Newman to John Cotton, March 14, 1676, Curwen Family Papers, American Antiquarian Society. See discussions of this letter in, e.g., Lepore, Name of War, 94–96, 283n96; and Brooks, Our Beloved Kin, 258–61, 403n11, where she discusses the possibility that Printer wrote the note at Nashaway leader Monoco’s dictation.
Brooks, Our Beloved Kin, 287.
Williams, Keywords, 63, 116.
Williams, Keywords, 162.
John Underhill, Newes from America . . . (London, 1638), 14.
Proverbs 14:29, Geneva Bible (1599 ed.).
Underhill, Newes from America, 14.
Brooks, Our Beloved Kin, 4.
N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn (1968; reprint, New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2010), 53; James Clifford, “Varieties of Indigenous Experience: Diasporas, Homelands, Sovereignties,” in Indigenous Experience Today, ed. Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn (New York: Berg, 2007), 199; Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 168.
4. Rethinking Reciprocity
Nathaniel Saltonstall, A New and Further Narrative of the State of New-England (London, 1676), 6–7. On Puritan piety and American Indians, see, e.g., Lepore, Name of War; and Kibbey, Interpretation of Material Shapes. Lepore observes that the Algonquian anti-Christian actions reported during the war bear strong similarity to Catholic anti-Protestant actions in religious riots of the era, and that their descriptions may be a result of Native reactions to the distinctive character of congregationalism in New England, or of English dissenters’ rhetorical habits, or some combination of these (Lepore, Name of War, 286n28). Goodman Wright’s story is more layered than my brief summary can indicate: Saltonstall’s narrative offers him as a warning to other settlers against independent interpretation of the Bible and too much reliance on the Bible as an object of security, as opposed to investment in the common defense. On warfare and reciprocity in Algonquian societies, see, e.g., Adam J. Hirsch, “The Collision of Military Cultures in Seventeenth-Century New England,” Journal of American History 74, no. 4 (1988): 1187–212; and Salisbury, Manitou and Providence.
John Collier, Indians of the Americas: The Long Hope, abridged ed. (New York: Mentor, 1960), 11.
On “unitary totalities,” see Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). This identification of a culture with one of its logics in contradistinction to other cultures is reminiscent of Dumontian anthropology, which posited a contrast between South Asian (hierarchical and holistic) and Western (equalitarian and individualistic) modes of social being. See Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
I am not directly engaging Nancy Fraser’s controversial essay “Rethinking Recognition,” from which my title takes its structure, but I take energy from her sense of the way recognition might function at cross-purposes to the long-term goals of those who invoke it. See Fraser, “Rethinking Recognition: Overcoming Displacement and Reification in Cultural Politics,” in Adding Insult to Injury: Nancy Fraser Answers Her Critics, ed. Kevin Olson (New York: Verso, 2008), 129–41. As Glen Sean Coulthard, to take just one of many critics of Fraser’s framework, puts it, “When applied to Indigenous struggles for recognition, Fraser’s status model rests on the problematic background assumption that the settler state constitutes a legitimate framework within which Indigenous peoples might be more justly included, or from which they could be further excluded”—a pervasive problem in political theory. Coulthard, Red Skin, 36.
Confucius, The Analects, trans. Arthur Waley (New York: Random House, 1983), book 15, chap. 23. In the Bible, see in the New Testament Matthew 7:12, Luke 6:31, and many places in the Epistles; and versions of the same in the Old Testament in Leviticus 19:18 and 19:34, among other places.
See, e.g., Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994); Will Kymlika, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999); Fraser, “Rethinking Recognition”; Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange, trans. Joel Golb, James Ingram, and Christiane Wilke (London: Verso, 2003); Amy Gutmann, Identity in Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003); Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004); and Selya Benhabib, The Rights of Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Gerard de Malynes, Consuetudo, vel, Lex mercatoria, or The Antient Law-Merchant (London, 1629), esp. “Of Reciprocall and double Exchanges,” 404–8, at 404.
Articles 2–4, The Articles of the Treaty of Peace, Signed and Sealed at Munster, in Westphalia, the 24th of October, 1648 (London: Onley, 1697), 5, 6, 4.
Article 112, Articles of the Treaty of Peace, 39.
See, e.g., Max Savelle, The Origins of American Diplomacy: The International History of Anglo-America, 1492–1763 (New York: Macmillan, 1967); Andreas Osiander, “Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth,” International Organization 55, no. 2 (2001): 251–87; Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Nan Goodman, The Puritan Cosmopolis: The Law of Nations and the Early American Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 143. The cultural and political consequences of these developments have of course been vast. “Treaties of reciprocity,” Hannah Arendt observes in The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Shocken, 2004), “have woven a web around the earth” that makes citizens’ legal status portable (373). Yet without a state framework, she argues, that status evaporates; rights are only actionable under some state regime that substantiates them. The history of Native people in, under, and in relation to the United States powerfully evidences this generative paradox of modern liberal statehood.
In the nineteenth century and into the present, scientific uses of the term “reciprocity” in mathematics and physics would follow this economic logic as well; this likely reflects the original use of the term “reciprocate” from the field of logic, where it signals transposability or reversibility of definitions, dating at least to the early sixteenth century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. But consider also the case of what Audra Simpson in Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of the Settler States (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014) calls “nested sovereignties,” induced by the complex layers of group agency in the reserve and reservation systems in Canada and the United States. “Sovereignty may exist within sovereignty,” she writes. “One does not entirely negate the other, but they necessarily stand in terrific tension and pose serious jurisdictional and normative challenges to each other” (10). Given the refusals of the Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke (in Simpson’s case) and many other Native nations to operate exclusively within Westphalian models of sovereignty, it seems reasonable to assert, as Simpson does, that “there is more than one political show in town,” and that “Indigenous sovereignties and Indigenous political orders prevail within and apart from settler governance” (11).
Robert O. Keohane, “Reciprocity in International Relations,” International Organisation 40, no. 1 (1986): 1–27.
John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689; reprint, New York: Dover, 2002), 2.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill (London, 1651), 48.
See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. and ed. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); and Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor, ed. Lara Denis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
Gutmann and Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy?, 98. Consider Chickasaw critic Jodi Byrd’s warning against “the syllogistic traps of participatory democracy born out of violent occupation of lands.” In Byrd, Transit of Empire, xii.
Gutmann and Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy?, 98.
Gutmann, in Identity in Democracy, sketches a fairly precise role for reciprocity in deliberative democracy, but elsewhere refers to reciprocity as a “social good,” describing it as “the generalized form of mutual aid” (113). She also asserts, following Charles Taylor (following Hegel), that it is essential to establishing minority group recognition, or the “public recognition of the value of some cultural particularities that are not universally valued” (43).
“Reciprocity” has become a key term of art in evolutionary anthropology. In the study of the history of cooperation—whether for mutual benefit or for altruism—reciprocity has been hailed as an evolved trait of human societies. Unlike other animals, researchers claim, humans cooperate instinctively and in wider social circles than other animals do, even with complete strangers. See Michael Tomasello with Carol Dweck, Joan Silk, Brian Skyrms, and Elizabeth S. Spelke, Why We Cooperate (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009). “Norms of cooperation,” Tomasello writes, were built on top of evolved tendencies to work together, “on reciprocity and respect for others as beings like oneself” (106). That said, evolutionary anthropologists also seem to agree that reciprocity as they understand it does not operate free of potential selfishness or deception—what they term “contingent reciprocity” is premised on continued mutual benefit. These scientists would argue, then, that antecedent to any cosmological or political traditions of reciprocity is a deep-rooted, universal human willingness to help each other.
For many anthropologists, as for Hegel’s theory of subject formation, reciprocity just happens—first at the level of human subjective formation, then somewhere in the chain of need and response of social belonging or seeking. “It is through these reciprocal processes and exchanges of recognition,” Glen Coulthard summarizes, that for Hegel “the condition of possibility for freedom emerges,” as individuals recognize each other and imagine their identities through an emergent and transforming relationship (Red Skin, 25). Frantz Fanon criticized Hegel’s notion of a guaranteed reciprocity of subject formation compactly in Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove, 1967): “For Hegel there is reciprocity,” he writes. “Here the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work” (220n8). For Fanon, reciprocity’s relationship to equality is at best unclear; reciprocity can sometimes be a shell game, and sometimes it can exist in the eye of the beholder.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John Russell (New York: Criterion Books, 1961), 179.
Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, 230–31.
Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, 97–98.
Soumhya Venkatesan, Jeanette Edwards, Rane Willerslev, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Perveez Mody, “The Anthropological Fixation with Reciprocity Leaves No Room for Love: 2009 Meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory,” Critique of Anthropology 31, no. 3 (2011): 210–50.
David Aberle, The Peyote Religion among the Navaho (Chicago: Aldine, 1966); Walter Holden Capps, ed., Seeing with a Native Eye: Essays on Native American Religion (New York: Harper Forum, 1976); Barre Toelken, “Seeing with a Native Eye: How Many Sheep Will It Hold?,” in Capps, Seeing with a Native Eye, 9–24; Kenneth Lincoln, Native American Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 16.
Brooks, Common Pot; Brooks, “Digging at the Roots: Locating an Ethical, Native Criticism,” in Reasoning Together, ed. Craig S. Womack, Daniel Heath Justice, and Christopher B. Teuton (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 234–64.
Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); Salisbury, Manitou and Providence.
Abram Van Engen, Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow Feeling in Early New England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 3.
See, e.g., David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).
John Cotton, Christ the Fountaine of Life (London, 1651), 35; see also Perry Miller’s discussion of this passage in Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956), 61.
John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles . . . (London, 1624), book 3, chap. 2, 44.
Anne Bradstreet, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America . . . (London, 1650), 40.
Woodward, Prospero’s America, 19.
Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy (New York: Zone Books, 1988). See also Ethan Shagan, The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Shagan observes that the quest for balance was more broadly characteristic of early modern English governance and society—a middling-way ideal enforced by extremes of violence and social control. “The middle ages were nothing if not Aristotelian,” he reminds us, “and besides numerous attempts to reconcile Peripatetic ethics with Christianity, concepts of ‘balance’ or ‘equilibrium’ brought moderation to the core of medieval science and economics” (3).
See, e.g., Matthew Dennis, Cultivating a Landscape of Peace: Iroquois–European Encounters in Seventeenth-Century America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993): “In general, the Five Nations lacked a means to achieve peaceful relations with those not tied to them by consanguinity or affinity. The archaeological record suggests that, from an ancient time, their response to the dangers posed by the proximity of hostile outsiders was to transform them symbolically and physically into kinspeople. Unpredictable raiding activity that raged back and forth, even if sporadically, created a cycle of violence and chaos, which left no one secure” (8).
Brooks, Our Beloved Kin, 215.
Seth Mallios, The Deadly Politics of Giving: Exchange and Violence at Ajacan, Roanoake, and Jamestown (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 4.
As Brooks puts it, discussing the Cascoak raid, the abstracting or erasing of names and families of the victims of war “occurs on both sides, shifting our perspective as readers of history.” Brooks, Our Beloved Kin, 212.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Reciprocity and Hierarchy,” American Anthropologist, n.s., 46 (1944): 267.
Julie A. Fisher and David J. Silverman, Ninigret, Sachem of the Niantics and Narragansetts: Diplomacy, War, and the Balance of Power in Seventeenth-Century New England and Indian Country (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2014), 17. See also Thomas Morton’s observations about Native burial styles being differentiated by “noble, and of ignoble, or obscure, or inferior discent” of the deceased in New English Canaan (Amsterdam: Stam, 1637), 51.
Jenny Hale Pulsipher, Subjects unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 12.
See Michael Leroy Oberg, Uncas: First of the Mohegans (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003).
Joan Silk, “Forum,” in Tomasello et al., Why We Cooperate, 118. See also Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011).
On the Cowwéwonck or dream soul and interpretation, see Fisher and Silverman, Ninigret, 5.
Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 10–11. He cites as an example of such fetishization Michael Taussig’s discussion of the transformation of reciprocity-based exchange into commodity exchanges among Bolivian miners. Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), esp. 224.
“Acts of kindness from indigenous ancestors passed being reciprocated nearly 200 years later through blood memory and interconnectedness,” writes Vanessa Tulley in a post appended to “Navajo and Hopi Families COVID-19 Relief Fund,” GoFundMe.com, May 3, 2020, http://www.gofundme.com/f/NHFC19Relief.
Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 2.
In Venkatesan et al., “Anthropological Fixation,” Elizabeth Povinelli notes, following Maurice Godelier, that “Mauss’s logic of the gift is striated with affective powers: rather than understanding the gift from the point of view of the demand to give, receive and reciprocate, we can understand the gift as dependent upon the power to persuade, seduce, wait and make others wait, a waiting that increases the desire for the love object” (223). This suggests a way of looking at reciprocity that isn’t exactly economic and that identifies part of its complex temporality. How many times have you done something for someone—a kind of gift—and that someone didn’t notice? If you can count the times, if you haven’t forgotten them, do those instances constitute latent reciprocity? And if you have forgotten them, is it the same, or are they gifts?
Taiaiake Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 133.
Deloria, God Is Red, 3, 1–2.
Deloria, We Talk, You Listen, 196.
Paula Gunn Allen, Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-Busting, Border-Crossing Loose Canons (Boston: Beacon, 1998), 142.
Coulthard, Red Skin, 61.
Coulthard, Red Skin, 60.
Coulthard, Red Skin, 35, 48.
Eva Marie Garroutte, Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
Lyons, X-Marks, 58.
Lyons, X-Marks, 58, 58.
Gerald Vizenor with Colleen Eils, Emily Lederman, and Andrew Uzendoski, “‘You’re Always More Famous When You Are Banished’: Gerald Vizenor on Citizenship, War, and Continental Liberty,” American Indian Quarterly 39, no. 2 (2015): 226–27.
Vizenor, “You’re Always More Famous,” 227.
5. Beyond Understanding
Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1964), ix.
Miller, Errand, 153.
“UNESCO Constitution (1945–46),” UNESCO.org, https://en.unesco.org/.
Ryan Enos, The Space between Us: Social Geography and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Such observations have a long history; see, e.g., Randolph Bourne, “Trans-National America,” Atlantic 118 (July 1916): 86–97.
Seward Darby, “White Supremacy Was Her World. And Then She Left,” New York Times, July 17, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/; see also Darby, Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism (New York: Little, Brown, 2020).
Deloria, Custer Died, 5, 27.
Deloria, We Talk, You Listen, 15–16.
Donald Fixico, “Ethics and Responsibilities in Writing American Indian History,” in Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing about American Indians, ed. Devon A. Mihesuah (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 93.
Fixico, “Ethics and Responsibilities,” 92.
Fixico, “Ethics and Responsibilities,” 93.
Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” small axe 26 (June 2008): 12.
Harjo, Conflict Resolution, 55.
Richard White, “Creative Misunderstandings and New Understandings,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 63, no. 1 (2006): 9. White himself has, according to that essay, been misunderstood by many of the scholars influenced by The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Anna Brickhouse argues that “strategic” or motivated mistranslation by Indigenous peoples underwrote “a long history of American unsettlement.” That is, deliberate mistranslation characterized the colonial political scene broadly, rather than being a unique tactic of European empires. Brickhouse, The Unsettlement of America: Translation, Interpretation, and the Story of Don Luis de Velasco, 1560–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 8. See also Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from “The Tempest” to “Tarzan” (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). Anthropologist Anna L. Tsing argues in Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005) that productive misunderstandings are in fact constitutive of global interconnections in a world of integrated markets.
Nancy Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 3.
Céline Carayon, Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas (Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 30.
Carayon, Eloquence Embodied, 7. “We have really everything in common with America nowadays,” Oscar Wilde once wrote, “except, of course, language.” Wilde, The Canterville Ghost (Boston: J. W. Luce, 1906), 6.
Carayon, Eloquence Embodied, 73.
Christopher Columbus, Select Letters of Christopher Columbus, ed. and trans. R. H. Major (London: For the Hakluyt Society, 1847), 9.
Cartier, in 1541, quoted in Carayon, Eloquence Embodied, 232.
Abram Van Engen, Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow Feeling in Early New England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 18; see also Norman Fiering, “Will and Intellect in the New England Mind,” William and Mary Quarterly 29, no. 4 (1972): 515–58.
Isaac Ambrose, Media: The Middle Things, in Reference to the First and Last Things . . . (London, 1649), 27.
Ambrose, Media, b2.5, 152.
Miller, Errand, 51.
Thomas Shepard, The Sincere Convert (London, 1641), A4.5. This stance has been updated for evangelicals in the age of science by C. S. Lewis, in his widely read Mere Christianity. “A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it.” C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 55. That which surpasseth understanding holds understanding in its offered hand on the other side. Understanding is not eliminated but promised, as long as you can let go of it.
Shepard, Sincere Convert, 165.
Eliot quoted in The Eliot Tracts: With Letters from John Eliot to Thomas Thorowgood and Richard Baxter, ed. Michael P. Clark (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003), 85.
On Eliot’s translation shop, see Brown, Pilgrim and the Bee, 179–207; and Brooks, Our Beloved Kin, 72–106.
Ives Goddard and Kathleen Bragdon, Native Writings in Massachusett (Philadelphia, Pa.: American Philosophical Society, 1988), 586.
Thomas Shepard with Grindal Rawson, Sampwutteahae Quinnuppekompauaenin, trans. John Eliot et al. (Cambridge, Mass. Bay Colony, 1689), A2.1. Williams, in his Key into the Language of America, records several phrases using the term “understand,” most of which feature the wah- stem. But he also records a phrase for “I understand you”—Cuppíttous—with a different stem, which may be a lesser-known term or a phrase peculiar to the Narragansetts, with whose dialect Williams was most familiar (8, 56).
Mashpee petition quoted in Van Engen, Sympathetic Puritans, 162; Goddard and Bragdon, Native Writings, 177.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill (London, 1651), 12.
Hobbes, Leviathan, 18.
Hobbes, Leviathan, 31.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790), trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1987), 62.
William James, Pragmatism (1907; reprint, New York: Dover, 1995), 5. For an introduction to these philosophical questions focused on the problem of understanding, see Josef Bleicher, Contemporary Hermeneutics: Hermeneutics as Method, Philosophy, and Critique (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980).
German, of course, has many ways of speaking of “understanding,” a few of which Gadamer focalizes: gemeiner Verstand or gesunder Menschenverstand indicate good sense; verstehen is everyday intersubjective agreement; and Verständigung a sense of coming to agreement about something. See, e.g., Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Continuum, 2004), 180.
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 484. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 117.
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 11.
For a recent treatment of this fact in the colonial Northeast, see Christine DeLucia, Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2018). On precolonial imperial historiography, see, e.g., Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001).
Irving Hallowell, “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and Worldview,” in Readings in Indigenous Religions, ed. Graham Harvey (New York: Continuum, 2002), 20.
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, 9th ed. (London: For the author, 1794), 303.
Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 303. For more on Equiano and the Mosquito Coast venture, see Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (New York: Penguin, 2007). Some contextualization in this section is drawn from C. Napier Bell, Tangweera: Life and Adventures among Gentle Savages (London: Edward Arnold, 1899); George Henderson, An Account of the British Settlement of Honduras . . . , 2nd ed. (London, 1811); Alden Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500–1776 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 219–20; and Eric Rodrigo Meringer, “Miskitu Takaia: Miskito Identity and Transformation, 1600–1979” (PhD diss., Arizona State University, 2007), esp. 22–90. See also Robert Berkhofer’s contemplations on the paradoxes of studying Miskito history—whom is the ethnohistorian to believe, in reconstructing a heavily politicized Miskito past in the wake of their rebellion against the Sandinistas?—in Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 181. For a comparative look at Atlantic missionizing, see, e.g., Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006).
Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 304–6.
Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 306.
Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 235. While the hottest recent debate about Equiano has been about whether he was or was not Indigenous—actually born in Africa or in South Carolina—the meaning of cross-racial interactions in the Interesting Narrative would have depended less, I suspect, on the resolution of that question than on the connection between a former heathen and a current one. In the eighteenth century, Equiano defended himself against similar claims that his origins were not African. See Carretta, Equiano; and a summary of the debate in Jennifer Howard, “Unraveling the Narrative,” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 9, 2005.
Ian Finseth, “Irony and Modernity in the Early Slave Narrative: Bonds of Duty, Contracts of Meaning,” Early American Literature 48, no. 1 (2013): 40–41.
Yael Ben-Zvi, “Equiano’s Nativity: Negative Birthright, Indigenous Ethic, and Universal Human Rights,” Early American Literature 48, no. 2 (2013): 401–2. For Ben-Zvi, it is significant that Equiano compares his African past with the Miskito cultural present, praises the fact that the Miskitos build houses for him “exactly like Africans, by the joint labor of men, women, and children,” and dwells with the Indigenous people (309). Yet such comparisons had a long foreground in the rhetoric of English colonial writing, and there was much precedent in the English colonial past alone for Natives and colonists living side by side. See, e.g., Morton, New English Canaan; for an expansion of Ben-Zvi’s argument, see Ben-Zvi, Native Land Talk: Indigenous and Arrivant Rights Theories (Lebanon, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2018). In the case of the Zambo Miskito group, from which Prince George came, Equiano’s comparisons may have had more concrete foundations, given “a high level of African miscegenation” in the chiefdom resulting from successive nearby shipwrecks from which slaves had escaped to the Mosquito coast. Meringer, “Miskitu Takaia,” 83–84.
Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2000), 243.
Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 336.
Joanna Brooks, American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 60.
Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s arguments about the book format in relation to the presentation of black subjectivity on the one hand, and Homi Bhabha’s about the paradoxes of the book in colonialism on the other, have deeply shaped scholarly discussions of literacy, the book, and the colonized. See Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford, 1988), 127–69; and Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 102–22.
Thomas Wilson, An Essay towards an Instruction for the Indians (1740); anonymous [signed Laurence Harlow], The Conversion of an Indian, in a Letter to a Friend (London, 1774). Several editions were published in the eighteenth century and a German translation in 1796 in Lancaster.
Conversion of an Indian, 9.
Conversion of an Indian, 13.
See, e.g., John Foxe, Acts and Monuments of Matters Most Speciall and Memorable . . . (London: Islip, Kingston, and Young, 1632).
For a discussion of the popularization of Foxe’s book of martyrs—how it came to be adopted by Protestants of otherwise radically differing theologies and how it helped shape a complex contest over Englishness itself—see Jesse M. Lander, Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 56–79.
Quoted in Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 266.
Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 306.
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 96.
Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press, 1984), 111. Other theorizations like Carayon’s that decenter understanding include the concept of cha’anil in Genner Llanes-Ortiz, “Yaan muuk’ ich cha’anil/El potencial de Cha’anil: Un concepto maya para la revitalización lingüística,” Ichan Teolotl/La Casa del Tecolote 26, no. 301 (2015): 28–30; and Inga Clendinnen’s reference to the surrendering of the act of interpretation that grounds this version of “understanding” as “a heroic act of renunciation” confessing the limitations of our knowledge in her magnificent essay “‘Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty’: Cortés and the Conquest of Mexico,” in New World Encounters, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 18.
David Treuer, The Translation of Dr Apelles (New York: Vintage, 2008), 167.
See Marisol de la Cadena, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond ‘Politics,’” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 2 (2010): 334–70; and Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus. As Simpson shows, among the many examples of North American Indigenous opacity, Mohawk refusals to assimilate to Canadian governmental and commercial languages, laws, and forms of recognition exemplify an insistence on the right not to be understood or to agree on terms as a concrete form of Native community and maintenance of sovereignty. The Black refusal referenced by Harney and Moten is further elaborated on by members of the Practicising Refusal Collective; see, e.g., Tina Campt, “Black Visuality and the Practice of Refusal,” Women and Performance 29, no. 1 (2019): 79–87. See also the question of silence explored at the human–animal boundary in Kalpana Rahita Seshadri, HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
De la Cadena, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics,” 351.
Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 189–90.
Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 190.
Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 192.
Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 155.
Kimberly Theidon, Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 12.
Theidon, Intimate Enemies, 245; Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
Harjo, Conflict Resolution, 82.