1 Cosmopuritanism

Exile is a model for the intellectual who is tempted, even beset and overwhelmed, by the rewards of accommodation, yea-saying, settling in. . . . To be as marginal and as undomesticated as someone who is in real exile is for an intellectual to be unusually responsive to the traveler rather than to the potentate, to the provisional and risky rather than to the habitual, to innovation and experiment rather than the authoritatively given status quo.

—Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual

“Now, then, for the writing,” said the cosmopolitan, squaring himself. “Ah,” with a sigh, “I shall make a poor lawyer, I fear. Ain’t used, you see, barber, to a business which, ignoring the principle of honour, holds no nail fast til clinched. Strange, barber,” taking up the blank paper, “that such flimsy stuff as this should make such strong hawsers; vile hawsers, too.”

—Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade

The framing of New England’s nonconformist settlers, whether Massachusetts Bay Puritans or their more radical separatist neighbors in Plymouth, as puritanical in the modern, negative sense, began early in the national life of the United States. Even as their society was increasingly argued to be the source of Americanness, it was also imagined as a restrictive, judgmental, inward-looking community—that is, as anything but cosmopolitan.

“In this enlightened and liberal age,” one of the narrators of Lydia Maria Child’s 1824 novel Hobomok, a Tale of Early Times tells us, “it is perhaps too fashionable to look back upon those early sufferers in the cause of the Reformation, as a band of dark, discontented bigots.” Mr. Conant, one of the novel’s central antagonists, is the model of the “the rigid Calvinist, in that lone place” of New England, who “seemed like some proud magnolia of the south, scathed and bared of its leaves.”1 From the beginning, he evinces the negative traits that would come to embody a Puritan stereotype before the middle of the nineteenth century: a rejection of earthly pleasures and an insistence on human fallability, and along with these a suspicion of the outside world. “It surely is not strange that I should think often of places where I have enjoyed so much,” his daughter, Mary, insists early in the novel as she dreams of the old country,

“and should now be tempted to ask questions concerning them, of those who have knowledge thereof.” “Aye, aye,” replied the stern old man, “encamped as you are in Elim, beside palm-trees and fountains, you are no doubt looking back for the flesh-pots of Egypt. You’d be willing enough to leave the little heritage which God has planted here, in order to vamp up your frail carcase in French frippery. But I would have you beware, young damsel. Wot ye not that the idle follower of Morton, who was drowned in yonder bay, was inwardly given to the vain forms of the church of England?”2

Thomas Morton, in the hands of Nathaniel Hawthorne, would of course become the famous emblem of resistance to Puritan ways.3 As resurrections of the settler Puritans became an increasingly popular literary tactic, Child’s moralistic, protonationalist nonconformists evolved into later depictions in which “puritan” was used to label those who are judgmental and deprecate the world and its pleasures. The movement of Hawthorne’s character Pearl away from Puritan New England to an aristocratic realm of unspecified nationality at the conclusion of The Scarlet Letter marks such an evolution in a novel that has helped sustain the popular stereotype.

Hobomok, however, depicts a range of nonconformist characters. It persistently reveals not only their transatlantic connections but also their constant interactions with Native people and with people in other settlements. It is perhaps the title character who is the most cosmopolitan of all, by the conventional definition. Hobomok is multilingual, deeply spiritual, but not sectarian; he is a broker among all the region’s nations, both settler and Indigenous. His exile at the end of the novel—not for his sins but for his generosity—bears not only the signature of the vanishing Indian myth but also an echo of the silence of the Miskito prince, George, when he turned away both from Olaudah Equiano’s attempts to convert him to Christianity and his shipmates’ attempt to turn him from Equiano.

If between the Puritans and worldly men like Morton “jollity and gloom were contending for an empire,” as Hawthorne famously put it, the battleground was not merely Indigenous space in New England but rather the whole cosmos.4 The English settlers of New England were neither isolated nor homogeneous in ways that make it easy to characterize their society as insular. Material and political interconnections with Europe and a range of Native nations contributed to the shaping of New England’s sociopolitical order, from long-standing separatist ties with the original émigrés in Leiden to a sustained interest by colonial thinkers in a range of Spanish-language publications from England’s most powerful imperial competitor.5 It has become easy to see how Hawthorne’s anxious narratives about prudery and the compression of space and time may have overstated the case. It is still difficult, however, to think about early New English communities in nonparochial terms. An ambient sense lingers that spatial isolation from Europe and the appropriation of Indigenous land, vectored by a stern judgmentalism, produced a historical rupture eventually leading to a democratic “America.”

Yet thinking of those people or communities as cosmopolitan may not provide us with what we are looking for, if that is some sort of historical redemption or merely a richer texture to the imagination of American nonconformist life. There is a long-standing, contentious conversation in the humanities about cosmopolitanism. Intensely debated in the 1990s, the question of cosmopolitanism as an alternative to national forms of belonging had been flagging when it was revived by the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the resulting response of the George W. Bush administration. Since the violently xenophobic reign of the forty-fifth U.S. president, it has surged again, across humanities fields. At the same time, early American studies has been flowering intellectually, in part by engaging the same questions that underwrite the cosmopolitanism debate: arguments about ideal forms of transnational political and social identities and how they relate to law, religion, and economics. The rituals and representations that sustained Puritan social formation have long been fertile for investigating the genealogy of U.S. exceptionalism. In the wake of the national trauma of 9/11, a seemingly endless series of mass shootings, and a reinvigorated providentialism in government, scholars of colonial America took up frameworks for understanding U.S. denizens as being bound to the nation by, in Lauren Berlant’s words, a spectacular “capacity for suffering and trauma at the citizen’s core.” Debates about trauma and the nature of the public and private worlds are tantalizing for early Americanists, building on decades of scholarship engaging Sacvan Bercovitch’s thesis about the Puritan origins of the American self.6 There seems to be something about the Puritan experience in the Northeast—about a belief structure that fuses a quest for supernatural grace with pious living deeply rooted in a specific earthly place—that we can trace forward continuously in time.

The nonconformists’ homelessness, their search for a nonnational space when they left for the New World, has been an important part of the story. “Nation” was a contested, often typological term in early modern English writing in general, but the Puritans and Plymouth’s separatists, who had a conflict-ridden relationship with the Stuart monarchy and the Church of England, were particularly agile in resisting the language of English nationalism. “The respectable, London-based colonial enterprise had emerged as a colony dominated by Puritans who proclaimed their allegiance to King and Church but clearly expected to be free of both,” Neal Salisbury says of the Massachusetts Bay settlement.7 Given that these godly settlers were prenational, perhaps even in a degree anational, more tied as they were to the body of Christ than to a national body, in what relation does cosmopolitanism stand to the genealogy of American political and intellectual order imagined to emerge out of Puritanism?

Today, as religious fervor increasingly shapes public feeling, rhetoric, and policy on the international stage, scholarly debates about cosmopolitanism seem at once more important and more unsatisfying. The debates’ terms have come to seem mismatched to today’s vocabulary of international relations. Although critics may speak of one or another ideal of cosmopolitanism, they share reference to something that they understand, as Craig Calhoun puts it, to have taken shape “largely in opposition to traditional religion and more generally to deeply rooted political identities,” especially national ones.8 In the U.S. context, however, cosmopolitanism has been profoundly incubated in the Christian universalist tradition as well as tangled in a web of transnational, translingual dependencies. The recent resurgence of right-wing and fundamentalist leaders and policy across the globe has put increasing pressure on the practical potential of cosmopolitan theory, and scholars of colonial America have offered trenchant reminders that the way the United States understands itself in relation to those outside its imagined national space can be described as a long history of contests shaped in complex and mutual ways by Indigenous, hemispheric, and transcontinental contexts.9

The debate over critical cosmopolitanism shares logics with the ways the dissenting groups that first settled New England thought about themselves. In what follows, I look in two directions at once to interrogate cosmopolitanism as a way of talking about the past and imagining the future. Typology was a way of understanding the Bible for many seventeenth-century Christians. Assuming that God had placed prefigurations of the New Testament Christ in the Old Testament, it linked the two through a logic that was metaphorical, rather than causal or successive, as a means of countering the contradictions between those two sets of texts. Here typology functions as a methodological model, one that does not rely on a continuous causal narrative. The appeal of cosmopolitanism, after all, does not merely rest in how, by providing an analytical lens, it can reveal things about the past; it is also one of the supposed virtues of the academy and its denizens. The academy’s entanglement with cosmopolitanism as a culture-bridging stance, method, and attachment can obscure the ways in which it is also both authority generating and bound to ideas about what history telling can do in the world. Exceptionalism can work just as powerfully in methodology as it does in narrative.

Although any number of religious groups might be examined to make this argument, including the nonconformists’ nemeses, the Jesuits and the Quakers, New England’s people of God are particularly suggestive. The notion persists both in the popular imagination and in scholarly writing that the Puritans were in some way set apart from the world. Whether thought of as God’s chosen people or provincials, their social self-differentiation and geographic isolation are considered to have produced influential, if sometimes irrational, departures from European ways. Yet if the dissenting settlers of New England were in fact deeply woven into international currents of thought, theology, and economics, then we are left with a question. How could such a cosmopolitan community have implemented violent suppression of dissent within its bounds and grindingly dispossessed Native Americans beyond them, all while operating under notions of openness and interconnectedness? It was perhaps cosmopolitanism itself that enabled that violence; cosmopolitanism, no less than other means of identification such as nationalism, has a dark side. That should give us pause when we consider cosmopolitanism’s potential as a logic of postnational representative political formation, and what it means to summon it as a way of describing colonial-era communities, whether settler or Native. In the space of that pause might enter an appreciation for manners of extralocal thinking that are nonextractive, that respect the loss of territory and of history that have attended travel and settlement, and that confess that we are, to paraphrase Joy Harjo, visitors to contested histories of relation in all places touched by colonialism.10

To Be Citizens of the World

Beginning in the early 1990s, cultural critics began to grapple with the strengths and limitations of cosmopolitanism as an approach to political theory that could think past the nation-state as a form. The discussion was fueled by broad conversations about globalization, particularly in the wake of the end of the Cold War. Often in this debate it is unclear by what precise means cosmopolitanism could be effective. Sometimes the vision is idealistic: cosmopolitanism is an ideal of universal citizenship, from which a political order beyond the power of any individual state is to be built and to which any individual might appeal for protection. Other times it is a form of subjectivity or affect, what Rob Wilson calls an “aesthetic of openness toward others.”11 Sometimes it seems merely to be an analytical skill; at still other times, it comprises some combination of all of these orientations and talents. Perhaps as a result of this ambiguity, some scholars worry that the cosmopolitanism advocated by academics is, particularly when cast as a subject-forming project, merely an adaptation to new regimes of economic exploitation: the norms of highly mobile labor and flexible capital accumulation. If we all adopt an open attitude toward other people and places, after all, won’t we be less attached to any particular place or people, as well as more accepting of a norm in which employment is highly unstable with respect to place and demographics?

Two responses to such concerns are perennially summoned: a notion of cosmopolitanism as a model for a democratic world order and a competing understanding of “discrepant cosmopolitanisms” emphasizing the local.12 The idea of “cosmopolitan democracy” underwrites a range of influential scholarship on cosmopolitanism. This notion dates back in its particulars to the seventeenth-century emergence of the law of nations and in its inspiration via classical Greece. Martha Nussbaum has influentially argued for a “national unity in devotion to worthy moral ideals of justice and equality,” the enabling condition of which is a democratic concept of civic belonging. Finding the U.S. educational system not up to the task of promoting such a concept, she proposed a Stoic cosmopolitanism as the foundation for a new public pedagogy. Nussbaum’s essay was a response to statements by Richard Rorty and Sheldon Hackney that called for a “‘national conversation’ to discuss American identity” in the midst of the culture wars of the 1990s.13 Rorty and Hackney make arguments that are familiar to students of early New England’s community rituals, invoking a kind of polity-wide mental “chewing the cud,” an intellectual day of atonement, as the paradigm for pushing nationalism into a more ethical incarnation. Nussbaum’s criticism of the narrow-mindedness of such an approach nonetheless implicitly posits democracy as a universal governmental ideal.14

How would representation work in a putatively global democracy? Chantal Mouffe anatomizes the difficulty with post- or extranational governance schemas:

We should . . . be aware that without a demos to which they belong . . . , cosmopolitan citizen pilgrims would in fact have lost the possibility of exercising their democratic rights of law-making. They would be left, at best, with their liberal rights of appealing to transnational courts to defend their individual rights when these have been violated. In all probability, such a cosmopolitan democracy, if it were ever to be realized, would be no more than an empty name disguising the actual disappearance of democratic forms of government.15

Liberal democracy, it is claimed, requires boundaries, so cosmopolitanism may only safely refer to the establishment of an awareness of connectedness or contingency at the heart of any nationalized mentality. “National consciousness,” Frantz Fanon notes, “which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension.”16

Other scholars have imagined a cosmopolitanism functioning at the level of the local. James Clifford’s influential formulation of discrepant cosmopolitanisms argues that one need not identify one’s self under a universalist categorization of the human. Clifford relocates human affiliation within those forms of society, local or regional, that provide individuals or groups with strong political commitments. Such distributed and potentially incompatible forms of affiliation would require different mechanisms of politics than, say, representational democracy to come into dialogue with each other. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins label as “cosmopolitics” the attempts to formulate a responsible representative or negotiative schema that could bring such discrepant systems of belonging into order. This use of cosmopolitanism seems most promising ethically and theoretically, yet it is perhaps the least likely to produce material changes in governance.17 The small number of arguments that synthesize these two approaches, making as their “local” or discrepant gesture a criticism of the academy’s position in this debate, often ultimately advocates a tentative, abstract model of global democracy.

The means by which cosmopolitanism, whatever its configuration, could be achieved or implemented are almost never specified in any of these approaches. The many frustrated efforts of the United Nations and the resurgence of xenophobic totalitarianism, underwritten by a rhetoric of salvation, suggest the limited effects the debate has had on its objects. Yet conversations about cosmopolitanism have sustained a belief that humanistic, comparativistic education and experience can at least produce individuals who are less susceptible to the appeals of xenophobia and violent patriotism. One of the key figures in this belief is the exile. The experience of exile and its effect on how one thinks about the world are a centerpiece of one theoretical conversation about how critical subjectivity is formed. It is here that a brief return to the ways in which the English settlers of New England addressed the real-world means of implementing their particular cosmologic visions can be helpful in reflecting on our attachment today to cosmopolitanism as an ideal, and to the idea of the scholar as a kind of exile.

Puritans in “Native” Spaces

In a poetic meditation on his own death, William Bradford describes the terms by which godly church members must find their path:

From my years young in dayes of Youth,

God did make known to me his Truth,

And call’d me from my Native place

For to enjoy the Means of Grace.

In Wilderness he did me guide,

And in strange Lands for me provide.

In Fears and Wants, through Weal and Woe,

As Pilgrim passed I to and fro.18

The trope of the wanderer or pilgrim, invoked both by separatists like Bradford and by nonseparating Puritan leaders, draws biblical resonance from descriptions of God’s covenant with the Jews such as that in Exodus 6:4: “I made my couenant with them to giue them ye land of Canaan, the land of their pilgrimage, wherein they were strangers.”19 The Plymouth settlers in particular saw their emigration as a do-or-die venture—a venture that Bradford’s poem pictures less in terms of a material fear than as a spiritually mortal decision. To leave a place one feels to be one’s own is the condition of beginning one’s access to “the Means of Grace.” The poem celebrates the tension between mobility and groundedness, making the status of “pilgrim”—rootless, in transit—into a morally ideal mode of existence, producing as it does the tension between “weal and woe” prescribed for those who would be godly.

Crucially, Bradford chooses a simile—“As Pilgrim”—to express his relationship to the model of mobility he proposes and to distinguish his rootlessness from ritual religious travel to sacred sites or icons. Avoiding metaphor removes an identifiable “proper,” concrete meaning through which to imagine the relationship of the subject of the poem to a landscape or nation. It is not merely the “Native place” that is thus deprecated but “strange Lands” as well. Indeed, all “Lands,” figured here as state entities (unlike the uncivilized spaces of “Wilderness”) remain ever foreign. Bradford’s etherealization of the notion of locality exemplifies one of the many modes of imagining the extralocal—the relationships among the global, the metaphysical, the local, and the material—advocated by New England’s leaders.20

Even those with fringe theological orientations insisted on the interchangeability or enduringly metaphorical status of places. Roger Williams, who was exiled from both Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth Plantation, depicted his rootlessness time and again to suggest parallels to Paul and the struggles of the early church. Williams invokes his traveling from place to place, living in proximity to barbarians and heathens, and surviving (by God’s grace) to tell the tale to testify to his spiritual authority. “I know what it is to Study, to Preach, to be an Elder, to be applauded,” he claims in the preface to one tract, “and yet also what it is also to tug at the Oar, to dig with the Spade, and Plow, and to labour and travel day and night amongst English, amongst Barbarians!”21 Such exile had both spiritual and political implications. No nation could, for Williams, legitimately represent itself as Christian. Indeed, Williams’s Key into the Language of America (1643) famously indicted Englishness by comparison with Narragansett social practices, urging readers to seek membership in the body of Christ’s regenerate people rather than relying on national or ethnic membership to supply spiritual foundations—and, by extension, to justify taking land away from another nation.

Exile was one of many domains in which extralocal thinking was crucial. Puritan leaders such as Cotton Mather, influenced by treaty making under the newly international “law of nations” philosophy, reworked basic components of their faith, such as the covenant and the millennium, in the late seventeenth century. The understandings of these components became dependent on a kind of global comparativism and a sense of the availability of all humans to join the Christian universe of souls. From a narrow focus on whether or not Jews were converting to Christianity—one of the predicted signs heralding the millennium—Mather and other Puritan writers expanded to take in evidence from the Ottoman Turks, Catholic political thinkers, and globally minded legal theorists.22 Just as the sermon “A Modell of Christian Charity” had asked its hearers to imagine themselves with a world audience—warning that their failure to model successful Christian colonization would be “a story and a by-word through the world”—so inversely did the globe become increasingly interesting as evidence of God’s attention.23

These cosmopolitanisms were all limited in metaphorical and material ways. First, they were constrained by a particularly Christian kind of universalism: the cosmopolis of the Puritan mind was specifically filled with the godly, and conversion was the primary requirement for peaceful coexistence with other peoples. The distinctions made between Christians and non-Christians in “A Modell of Christian Charity” starkly convey this fundamental difference, as the requirements for charity change depending on whether or not its object is in the fold. That prejudice was built out of a vision in which ultimately Christ’s return would result in either the purging or conversion of non-Christians. “It will be an Addition unto the pleasure,” Mather writes, “to see the Harmony which True, Right, Genuine PIETY will produce, in Persons that are in many Sentiments as well as Regions, distant from one another.”24 Second, the legal premises of treaty law, which spoke to the material distinctions among peoples by jurisdiction, may have been crucial in a few treaty cases with Indigenous groups. As Lisa Brooks has shown, however, it was not treaties but land deeds and deals that were the primary legal operator of Native dispossession in early New England, and that triggered King Philip’s War as a result of Plymouth’s expansion campaigns. Extralegal means of dispossession—performing missionary work, encouraging drunkenness, creating and exploiting Native indebtedness, and enforcing extended family separation through imprisonment and other means—were pivotal to effecting a program of territorial theft and cultural transformation that looks far from what today is thought of as cosmopolitan.

Bradford’s poetic lament voices a tradition of Christian estrangement: “the notion,” in Carrie Hyde’s words, “that true Christians are pilgrims and strangers in this world and must renounce worldly desires and attainments to ensure their spiritual passage to a heavenly home.”25 The distant colonization of part of America by way of a corporation put self-consciously estranged groups like the Plymouth separatists neither into an unambiguously “English” political position with respect to the maintenance of cultural and political boundaries nor into a position entirely removed from the forms of imperial and commercial belonging that their appeals to the pilgrims-and-strangers model would deprecate. For just as the imagination of Christian nationalism emerged out of the adaptations of a model of heavenly citizenship—allowing Christians to identify “the progress and development of the government with the realization of God’s kingdom on earth” despite clear biblical counterindications—so too were the strangers in the wilderness able to co-opt the imaginary space of cosmopolitanism as a distinctly Christian orientation to a shifting geopolitics, despite the seeming contradictions of their policies toward Indigenous people, Quakers, and Catholics.26 In short, it is not just the material cosmopolitanism of the Puritans that ought to give us pause as we consider the relationship between early settlement and today, but also the imaginary one—call it the cosmopuritanism—that did not sidestep the model of engagement with other nations as equals, but rather replaced it.

Nonconformist leaders appealed to potential church members and justified the parameters of membership in the polity by linking afterworld or metaphysical spatiality to geopolitical spatiality. What these English colonists were building was necessarily as much an ex-tablishment (an imagination of how to be in relationship to the globe) as an es-tablishment (an architecture of an internal self that related to a local community of saints). Envisaging a church member as mobile within a space both material and figurative was accomplished by creating and encouraging tensions between a set of cultural theories and a real geography of church participation (including religious and vernacular architecture and the landscape of New England) particular to the historical moment.27 Not an ideology and not quite a conspiracy, American nonconformist cosmopolitanism featured the interplay of a range of senses of space, from belonging within the Protestant international body to locally peculiar jurisdictional concepts, synchronizing and unsynchronizing as they emerged in sermons, essays, rumors, warfare, and the allocation of real property.28

American nonconformist ideas about global belonging competed for persuasiveness within a much larger social ferment over geopolitical boundaries and individual mobility. Debaters of cosmopolitanism customarily begin by observing that the “first global design of the modern world was Christianity,” a project that “preceded the civilizing mission, the intent to civilize the world under the model of the modern European nation-states.”29 This overstates the degree to which what we would call secular cosmopolitanism can be extricated from religious conceptions.30 Cosmopolitanism was controversial in the English Renaissance. Dynamics of rank and class shaped these debates, but so did suspicions about international political and religious plots against the sovereignty of England and the Protestant cause. Transregional travel, economic relations, and military associations were common, including Queen Elizabeth’s progresses through the Low Countries and the migrations of radical religious believers.

Those two cases equally exemplify the distrust of internationalism that characterized the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. For Elizabeth, extranational aristocratic affiliations (even to the point of rebellion) made it difficult to control the dukes of Leicester and Essex, suggesting the benefits of national thinking. Anglicans and dissenters alike shared suspicions about Catholic plots not just to undermine England’s power but also to take over the world. Roger Ascham’s 1570 pedagogical manual The School-master was virulently isolationist, associating foreign travel and instruction with the undermining of English spiritual purity. Another writer “declared ‘Rome to be hell itself,’ . . . home to Jesuit-run seminaries from which issued a steady stream of ‘Jesuited’ Englishmen, heading home to propagate their faith.” Travel—even talking or writing about travel—could be polluting.31

Yet by the end of the century, a change was underway. A cosmopolitanism less subject to biblical regulation was on the rise. Around the time that members of the Leiden separatist congregation made their move to America, vast travel itineraries on the scale of those in the old fantastic voyages literary genre were becoming a literal possibility. Those in elite circles, at least, could make such journeys to distant countries, and they became part of the machinery of social dominance.32 Books like Thomas Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller (1594) and Thomas Coryate’s Crudities (1611) parodied attitudes like Ascham’s. The potentially corrupting content of these narratives was still a concern: Ralph Bauer observes that in England, “the cultural anxiety about the need to ‘police’ empirical travel accounts in an expanding world is manifest in a proliferation of manuals aimed at prescribing, formalizing, and regularizing the content and style of travel histories” during this period.33 These books had an effect on actual travel. As an apprentice in London, eventual Pilgrim leader Edward Winslow likely printed An Itinerary Written by Fines Morrison, Gent., an early travel narrative. Not long after his shop printed the book, Winslow departed on a tour of Europe—one that ended in his conversion from Anglicanism not to Catholicism, as antitravel writers had warned, but to separatist Protestantism in the Low Countries.

The courtly rendition of cosmopolitanism ran parallel to the Puritan logic of temporal homelessness. Unlike Bradford’s poem, narratives that valorized foreign travel often did so expressly in the name of England. Thomas Palmer offered An Essay of the Meanes How to Make Our Trauailes, into Forraine Countries, the More Profitable and Honourable (1606) to correct “the manifould errors and misprisions, that the greater sort of such as trauaile into forraine Countries, haue theretofore committed.” His book offers a rubric for ensuring that English travelers’ accounts work “for the good of this kingdom wherein they liue so happily” in “better seruice to his Maiestie.” Such travelers must ask themselves if by their travel “they will benefit their Countrie, or themselues.”34 For Palmer, nationalism is the goal of properly conducted and recounted travel.

Palmer’s principal categorical distinction in An Essay was between voluntary and involuntary travelers, a categorization that still shapes the cosmopolitanism debate today. The Scrooby congregation—which emigrated to Leiden, and some members of which would make up the Plymouth venture—fell between these categories. Separatists involved themselves in an international reform movement even before those who made up much of the Plymouth settlement moved to Leiden. When they left the Low Countries, it was not simply because they thought it was the moment to establish themselves as a discrete, reasonably self-sufficient community. It was also in part because they feared Spanish invasion with the expiration of the Dutch treaty with Spain. When they left, neither material nor intellectual isolation resulted. A print marketplace, economic arrangements with New and Old World entities, sustained familial immigration—strong and sophisticated ties like these with the larger world remained.35

The particular uses of cosmopolitanism by early New Englanders were conditioned by their involvement in the socioeconomic and intellectual environment of the Low Countries and the reach of its publishing. The Low Countries were a hot spot for the rapid circulation and intense discussion of ideas at a time when many places in Europe offered little access to texts in languages beyond Latin and local vernaculars.36 The separatists who settled Plymouth, by a coincidence of their cosmology and their movement from England to the renowned university town of Leiden, had been involved in international intellectual currents. The 1607 edition of The Confession of Faith of Certayn English People, Living in Exile, in the Low Countreyes, for example, addresses itself to “the reverend and learned men, Students of holy Scripture, in the Christian Vniversities, of Leyden in Holland, or Sanct-andrewes in Scotland, of Heidelberg, Geneva, and other the like famous schooles of learning in the Low countreys. Scotland, Germany, & France.”37 The purpose of claiming this audience for the profession is

to have the truth through your help more defended & furder spread abroad . . . partly also moved with love of our native countrey, and of these wherein now we live and others else where; wishing that al may walk with a right foot to the truth of [t]he Gospel, & praying daily vnto God, that the great work of restoring religion . . . by our Gracious Soveraigne and the other Princes of these countreyes & ages . . . he would fully accomplish, to the glorie of his name & eternal salvation in Christ of his elect in al places of the earth.38

Described here is a progression through concentric geopolitical scales of potential effect to an ultimately cosmopolitical belonging: from congregation, to land of birth, to foreign nations, to the ethereal body of Christ “in al places.”

“So It Is Lawful Now to Take a Land”

While offering a rich metaphorics of salvation, New England’s church leaders at the same time tied congregations to the aural space of their words and the zones of mobility that gave access to them. “Although the ‘appointed place’ of the Puritans seems to be the entire world,” Ann Kibbey emphasizes, “in actuality the colonists are limited to the space the Puritan church actually occupies. In refusing the limitations of the concept of sacred place, and by locating the source of spiritual power and truth in the words of ecclesiastical authority instead, the Puritan is bound to the words of the preacher.”39 Such a binding had implications difficult to imagine in the present day. For many New England Congregationalists, the full civic rights of property ownership, for example, were attainable only through the pursuit of grace. As Kibbey points out in the case of John Cotton’s Revelation sermons, it is “conversion, and therefore obedience to the minister’s rhetoric, that bestows the rights of property.”40 If one lived in, say, the Massachusetts Bay colony, such conversion had to be proved in an individual performance that took the form of a peripatetic spiritual narrative ending with submission upon witnessing God’s saving glory. The performance happened in a material space, the church, the occupation of which was structured by codes of hierarchical social organization that made it a proper place within which to tell these radically equalizing stories of grace before a judgmental ministry. Immanent grace was a solution to the problem of defining membership, and a key ingredient in the imagination of social and real spaces.

How did Puritan leaders deliver such a complicated spatial appeal? Many sermons, like Samuel Danforth’s famous one of 1670 proclaiming his listeners to be on an “errand into the wilderness” to bring the true church to earth, forged a temporality out of spatial ingredients. Listeners yearning for the reappearance of Christ on earth and hoping to find themselves among the regenerate were offered a future-oriented, even apocalyptic understanding of their place in history. Such sermons also functioned in local, political ways to shape the order of New England space through a sustained appeal to the nonlocal. Leaders appealed to believers through other genres as well. Robert Cushman’s “Reasons and Considerations Touching the Lawfulness of Removing out of England into the Parts of America,” a 1622 settlement essay by one of the Leiden separatists, exemplifies how the tension between disembodied, distant places and local understandings of the materiality of space was used by religious leaders.

Cushman’s essay offers a justification for the physical takeover of American geography from its Indigenous denizens. The essay directs itself beyond those who “[affect] their home-borne countrey so vehemently” toward those who harbor religious reservations about emigration and colonization.41 Cushman insists that God’s call to the Jews in the Bible to travel “from citie to citie,” together with the allocation of certain lands as “appropriated vnto a holy people,” is no longer in effect as a literal justification for migration and expropriation. The idea of a territorial sovereignty based on divine will is defunct in the wake of Jesus’s advent, and consequently, “we are all in all places strangers and Pilgrims.”42 Cushman, like other English writers of his time, regards the conversion of Native Americans as a rationale for settlement, but his argument implies that it is less by missionizing than by creating a shared living space that Natives will come to the true church. His claim for how settlers would legally justify their jurisdiction rests on a now-familiar shell game. Massasoit (or Ousemaquin), leader of the Wampanoags, whom Cushman says is “the Imperial Gouernor” of the territory, would guarantee the homogeneity of consent of his territory, “whose circuits in likelihood are larger then England and Scotland.” The paradox is that although the topographical circuit coheres because of an implied communications chain, one linking “Emperour” to Native subject, yet it is not a circuit: “It being then first a vast and emptie Chaos.”43

Ultimately Cushman’s case for territorial expropriation depends on abstracting biblical knowledge analogically, rather than offering either a typological or literal justification from Scripture. “As the ancient patriarchs therefore removed from straiter places into more roomy,” Cushman argues, “where the Land lay idle and waste, and none vsed it, though there dwelt inhabitants by them . . . so it is lawfull now to take a land which none vseth, and make vse of it.”44 Already, America belongs to the dissenting religious settlers who choose to work its land. Yet for Cushman the movement is not into an uninhabited, chaotic wilderness. It is rather a migration into a zone where usufruct rights (which during this period were codified in the notion of vacuum domicilium) have decayed, but whose population represents an opportunity for the wise-walking godly to effect religious conversion. It is not separation and isolation but convergence, the possibility of performing an infectious godliness, that combines with a legal claim to justify travel and colonization.

Like other leaders, Cushman and Danforth made space one of their explicit subjects. They did so in the interests of preserving dependence on ministerial authority and of expanding New England’s economic and political spheres, whose geopolitical well-being was imagined in cosmologic terms. Cushman’s essay fused spiritual rationales with physical reasons for separation. The expansionist implications of the metaphor of the spatialized body of Christ manifested themselves in what has been called the declension debate. New England’s colonial leaders argued that settlers should remain in close proximity to one another, sometimes even passing laws to limit movement away from the meetinghouse. Such an argument conflicted with the geographically centrifugal logic that tied virtue to expansion in promotional literature like Cushman’s. In both cases, however, an etherealization of local history and residents’ agency, setting them in a biblical-historical scheme, worked to maintain situated hierarchies of English settler authority.45 Accompanying each cosmopolitan vision was a local gain.

The geopolitical situation of the settlement complicated appeals to authority. Congregationalist leaders were part of a population at once peripheral in an imperial, mercantilist economic system and locally dominant in efforts to eliminate or reterritorialize Indigenous political entities.46 Of course, Indigenous American communities had their own powerful notions of how to relate to the extralocal. Those ideas and protocols, rooted in regional intertribal relations and long-distance travel and trade, Jace Weaver has argued, enabled a thoroughgoing transformation of the Atlantic world in the wake of encounter and colonization. “Native resources, ideas, and peoples themselves,” Weaver reminds us, “traveled the Atlantic with regularity and became among the most basic defining components of Atlantic cultural exchange.” American wealth revitalized Europe; Indigenous technologies and agricultural products transformed the world’s senses and sensibilities; Indigenous alliances were not just integral to European political transformations but were also their very medium for centuries in the colonies; and Indigenous languages, mores, arts, and cosmologies forever altered the course of European sciences, philosophy, and religion.47 Tisquantam’s appearance, speaking English to the Pilgrims on their arrival, may have seemed providential to the newcomers, but his multilingualism and worldly hospitality were no miracle. The Algonquians of southeastern New England were among the most crucial of Weaver’s “defining components” of exchange in the seventeenth century, possessing time-tested long-distance trade circuits and elaborate protocols for interacting with outsiders, in addition to a range of cosmologic beliefs premised on kinship responsibilities, the redistribution of resources, and the maintenance of a deep connection between landscape and history.48

The Pequot War of 1637—the first large-scale conflict in New England between Natives and settlers—suggests how some New England colonies borrowed from Native systems of linking communities together even as they displaced Indigenous control. In the early seventeenth century, the Pequots were the center of a large tributary domain that included the Mohegans, the Western Niantics, and other communities along the Connecticut and Mystic rivers. In the mid-1630s, English traders and settlers moved into this domain, where the Dutch had already begun to make inroads. Two Englishmen and one Pequot man were murdered in the process, straining relations on all sides. As Pequot tribal politics roiled in response, rumors began to spread of attacks coming from all parties. Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay demanded of the Pequots not just compensation for the murders but also political subjugation—a position that quickly led to violence.

The complete destruction of the palisaded village at Mystic and the killing of hundreds of children, women, and elders—as well as the accompanying English celebrations of these deaths as evidence of God’s favor—have hitherto been explained in two ways. Either these events are seen as logical extensions of European war practices or, more often, they are a product of an “othering” of the Native in which Puritans measured their “civility” in inverse proportion to and by violent domination of supposed Indian “savagery.”49 Other possibilities become visible when the conflict is understood in terms of international relations. As Lynn Ceci has observed, seventeenth-century Pequots occupied a key geographic zone for the production of wampum. Wampum—cowrie, whelk, and quahog shells handcrafted into beaded belts with complex designs—served more than an exchange function for Indigenous groups. It was simultaneously clothing, document, money, ritual object, and more; consequently, its production was controlled, and access to it was considered valuable. The Pequots and their tributary tribes controlled the most important shell-gathering and bead-production zones in this period, linking their trade networks into a broader set of markets through Dutch, English, and French trade in wampum and furs. The Pequots had been in the forefront of economic and political reconfigurations leading to a new, imperial world economy.50 After their defeat, the English explicitly took control of the interface between Native wampum production (again, cosmologic as much as economic) and European trade networks, but without replacing wampum production.51 Native understandings of extralocal relationships were put to work in conjunction with English Puritan cosmology to promote the interests of the Massachusetts Bay colony.

To this point, I have used concepts from the recent debate over cosmopolitanism to suggest the historically and culturally specific relations between a particular way of being in the world and the imagination of space that underwrote it. Calling attention to a cosmography’s local situatedness pulls it out of its seemingly natural, often nationalistic, context. The anationality of American congregationalism is interesting to critics of nationalism today, but it is problematic as well. Infamous exclusions and violent removals—of the Pequots from Mystic, but also of Roger Williams, Thomas Morton, and Anne Hutchinson, among others—enabled the inward-looking effects of the Puritan production of space on land allocation and policy. At the same time, they forced the surrounding tribes into new extramural arrangements with each other, with settler empires, and with those empires’ cosmographies. If this double-edged conception of relations with others was already an important part of what has been perceived as American particularity, then what light might such a use of it throw on cosmopolitanism as an academic conception or outlook?

Academic Pilgrims

Bradford’s poetic description of early New Englanders’ notion of the relationship between a subject and the globe resonates across time in an eerily familiar way. That one learns the “Truth” in one’s “Native place,” but must be “call’d” from thence in order to enjoy “the Means of Grace” is a formula that structures the critical imagination of what is known as exile theory. Homi Bhabha and Edward Said, among others, have argued that to be the best, most insightful critic of culture, one must be an exile, passing “to and fro” in “strange lands” (though rarely, apparently, in the wilderness). Exile theory sutures material spaces with critical powers in a way that ultimately evacuates places of particularities that bind, keeping them forever “strange.” Said tells us:

Because the exile sees things both in terms of what has been left behind and what is actual here and now, there is a double perspective that never sees things in isolation. Every scene or situation in the new country necessarily draws on its counterpart in the old country. Intellectually this means that an idea or experience is always counterposed with another, therefore making them both appear in a sometimes new and unpredictable light: from that juxtaposition one gets a better, perhaps even more universal idea of how to think.52

Here a promised, but not quite automatic, revelation is claimed to be brought on through the experience of a particular spatial configuration—a structure of reasoning that Mather and Cushman would have found familiar. The newly acute critical vision is a product of a physical dislocation and a necessarily resulting temporal juxtaposition that, as for the Puritan convert who has experienced grace, renders a different kind of history. Said makes explicit the particular means by which the “universal idea” might become apparent to individuals—or at least, to intellectuals: “The pattern that sets the course for the intellectual as outsider is best exemplified by the condition of exile, the state of never being fully adjusted, always feeling outside the chatty, familiar world inhabited by natives, so to speak, tending to avoid and even dislike the trappings of accommodation and national well-being. Exile for the intellectual in this metaphysical sense is restlessness, movement, constantly being unsettled, and unsettling others.”53 Thus, like the Puritan, the ideal (regenerate?) observer is one “who is always a traveler, a provisional guest, not a freeloader, conqueror, or raider.” Better an unsettler than a settler, perhaps. But who, metaphorically and materially, are the “chatty,” perhaps “familiar” natives doing the community-maintaining work to welcome, serially, this figure whom Said elsewhere refers to as “undomesticated”? Implied here is a division of intellectual labor based not so much on an experience of space but on a particular relationship to mobility: the idea that movement necessarily produces insight is dangled, but it obfuscates the resources, institutions, or simple luck necessary to producing that subjectivity in fact.

In a crucial and little-remarked-on passage at the beginning of a work that has shaped all early Americanist scholarship since, The American Jeremiad, Sacvan Bercovitch traces the intellectual origins of his insight into the form of the jeremiad as the product of just such an exilic experience:

Indeed, what first attracted me to the study of the jeremiad was my astonishment, as a Canadian immigrant, at learning about the prophetic history of America. Not of North America, for the prophecies stopped short at the Canadian and Mexican borders, but of a country that, despite its arbitrary territorial limits, could read its destiny in its landscape, and a population that, despite its bewildering mixture of race and creed, could believe in something called an American mission, and could invest that patent fiction with all the emotional, spiritual, and intellectual appeal of a religious quest. I felt then like Sancho Panza in a land of Don Quixotes.54

This last line takes us back even to the Congregationalists’ antagonist, Thomas Morton of Merrymount, who also made reference to Cervantes’s fiction as he framed the separatists and Puritans as uncosmopolitan and irresponsibly coercive. Yet Bercovitch does not mention here that he is not just any Canadian immigrant; he is one whose parents named him after the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. His experience of the shock of American nationalism’s imagination of community no less than his methodological facility result as much from a radical upbringing and an uncharacteristically extensive, well-connected education as from the simple act of crossing national borders.

There is no denying the significance of Bhabha’s critique of nationalism, or of Said’s insistence on overturning “an uncritical alignment between intellectuals and institutions of power which reproduces the pattern of an earlier imperialist history.”55 Indeed, such visions inspire this book. Yet the figure of the exile as authority and cosmopolitanism as a universalist form of commitment are part of the pattern of an earlier imperialist history. Indigenous studies scholars have often identified the self-authorizing logic of cosmopolitan universalism as complicit with imperial projects despite the best intentions of the cosmopolites. George Tinker, Taiaiake Alfred, and Jodi Byrd, writing out of different fields and tribal backgrounds, have made such claims about missionaries, sovereignty negotiations, and Native debates about tribal citizenship.56 In addition, postcolonialism, at least recently, has run a risk beyond embedding expertise in the exile. Even as it ingrains what Bhabha terms a dialogical cosmopolitanism in transnational methods of cultural study, it simultaneously describes some forms of cosmopolitanism as a necessity for the oppressed. “To survive,” Bhabha says, some people “have to learn new moral idioms, strange habits of life, and vernacular ways of speaking and living.”57 Cosmopolitanism thus becomes woven into the social logics of its academic institutionalization by virtue of the scholar’s ability simultaneously to identify (in academic publications) such things as “vernacular” or other cosmopolitanisms, to teach university students how to be cosmopolitan, and to embody that cosmopolitanism in one’s person. The appeal of this fusion is grounded in the social politics of the profession: in the modern literary and academic sphere, critical cosmopolitanism is a positioning technology, a job skill; scholars and writers can loosen their physical spatial constraints by freeing their intellectual spatial constraints.58

Stephen Greenblatt once reported an uncomfortable social moment that shows how cosmopolitanism becomes sewn into the affective fabric of academic work. Sent to pick up Nadine Gordimer and Carlos Fuentes from the airport, Greenblatt is at first understandably giddy at the prospect of having two such well-known and fascinating authors as interlocutors. As the two writers talk in the back seat about mutual friends, shutting Greenblatt out of the conversation, his enthusiasm wanes. Still attentive, Greenblatt decides to intervene when Gordimer suggests, in an assessment of the U.S. president’s cosmopolitanism, that Bill Clinton probably read William Faulkner at Oxford, while he was a Rhodes scholar:

“I doubt that Faulkner was part of the Oxford curriculum,” I said. “Clinton probably read it in Arkansas or perhaps at Georgetown.” From the backseat there was a terrible silence . . .
In the comical awkwardness of the remainder of the ride, I mused on why I had felt the urge to intervene. In part, of course, I was simply trying, at a stroke, to win what is called, in a different context, a social promotion. . . . My suggestion . . . was probably motivated less by a passion for scholarly accuracy than by an obscure sense that Faulkner was ours, not England’s. In other words, I was giving expression to the gravitational tug of the old national model of literary history, a model that has, despite significant weakening in recent decades, retained considerable power. All it took was a drop in my class status to make me start waving the flag.59

It is the kind of moment in which many academics have participated. Although he frames his response in terms of nationalism, Greenblatt suggests the complex way in which such chauvinisms are relational. One might see this exchange as a contest of cosmopolitanisms: Greenblatt (no mean cosmopolite himself, as the perfecter of a globe-spanning New Historicism) wields the authority of the U.S. professor of English who knows both his president’s regional roots and the history of the Oxford curriculum. As he suggests, at issue is class (though perhaps ethnicity and gender were also at work in that “terrible silence” from Gordimer and Fuentes). Between the academy and the literary marketplace, episodes like this are tense, but perhaps less is at stake than in their more common manifestations among university workers, or between scholars and the local communities with which they live. Cosmopolitanism inscribes itself between the anxiety of control over certain kinds of knowledge and the silences or the aggressions we utter in—if there is such a thing—casual conversation.

As Greenblatt’s story suggests, alongside the jeremiad as part of the social ritual of consensus in public ceremonies is a cosmopuritanical ideal, part of the social ritual of consensus within the academy. It takes shape both in publications and in the material form of academic sociality: talks, department life, conferences, choices of where to live and whose dinner invitations to return, multilingual repartee. The rhetorical assertion that one cosmopolitanism is better than another, or is threatened by someone else’s supposed parochialism, is no less a powerful tool in academic conversations than it is in state justifications of violence, restriction of mobility, and economic oppression. It is not less so now than it was when reservations and removal were first advocated for Native people. Puritan approaches to Indigenous North American worldviews lacked the syncretism of the Jesuits and the insistence on nonviolence of the Quakers. Yet precisely because the cosmologic dynamics were different, to think about the literatures of encounter involving those groups and others—the Iroquois, the Dutch on the Hudson River, or other English colonies—in terms of contests of cosmopolitanisms might contribute to making contemporary debates more thoughtful.60

Herman Melville is often thought of as among the most cosmopolitan of U.S. writers. Melville, however, left us a sharply ironic portrait of the cosmopolitan in the character by that name from his last published novel, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. Part of a wide-ranging condemnation of American credulity and chicanery whose ultimate target is the reader’s affection for fiction itself, the cosmopolitan from the start seems too good to be true. He calls himself Frank; he does good things like criticizing “The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating”—the tale of Colonel Moredock, a spiritual inheritor of the sacred violent rage of the colonial army in the Pequot War. “If ever there was such a man as Moredock, he, in my way of thinking, was either misanthrope or nothing; and his misanthropy the more intense from being focused on one race of men,” the cosmopolitan pronounces, after having praised “Massasoit, and Philip of Mount Hope, and Tecumseh, and Red-Jacket, and Logan—all heroes.”61 Melville’s book, however, warns us, darkly, about the limits of this kind of vision. The human-loving cosmopolitan turns out, for instance, to be equal parts seraph and Satan in the novel’s final scene, one of a series of supernatural incarnations of the confidence man. Melville’s novel, by hinting that these incarnations may be either good or evil, depending on one’s perspective, pivots on how badly we want to believe, on our acceptance of fiction as a palliative, even as a source of our worlds—a disillusionment forged by the ironic cosmopolitan for would-be cosmopolitans.

Consider, by contrast, “In Mystic,” a poetic reflection on the Pequot War by U.S. poet laureate Joy Harjo, certainly a well-traveled writer and exemplar of cultural curiosity:

I do not want to know this, but my gut knows the language

of bloodshed.

Over six hundred were killed, to establish a home for God’s

people, crowed the Puritan leaders in their Sunday

sermons.

And then history was gone in a betrayal of smoke.

There is still burning though we live in a democracy erected

over the burial ground.

This was given to me to speak.62

This conflict of two ways of thinking about how to relate to others, this failure to let cosmopolitanism rule the day—these lay the groundwork for a tragic U.S. democracy in this poem. Still, the most regenerative step beyond Melville’s cynicism about death and fiction might be the way the poem opens. Rather than assume the poet’s lyrical privilege of imaginary tourism, Harjo, who is Mvskoke Creek, begins with a protocol of asking permission to enter not just this physical space, but the difficult history hosted and represented by it.

My path is a cross of burning trees,

Lit by crows carrying fire in their beaks.

I ask the guardians of these lands for permission to enter.

I am a visitor to this history.63

The logic of a nonconformist English settler’s relation to the world beyond was elaborate, rich with imaginative figuration. Within the imaginary limits it helped to construct, it was a source of community and a comfort, but it was simultaneously part of a larger contest. Without a well-developed sense of their relationship to a larger world, both real and supernatural, the specific means English settlers used to dispossess Indigenous people and others—including witches, Quakers, and dissenters within—would not have functioned as they did. Theirs was, in the grand scheme of things, a sectarian universalism. Cosmopuritanism helped justify attacks on others in order to effect a distinctly transnational body of Christ. Harjo’s sense of being “a visitor to this history,” of making central that status as a guest in both time and space, prompts us to ask what attitude toward this history makes the most sense, if we really do dream of being able to live together justly, happily, and equitably. On the basis of their effects, perhaps we should think of early American Christian imaginations of the world in terms different than the cosmopolitan. Cosmopuritanism could serve as a revelatory example of cosmopolitanism’s material dimensions in the imagination and in resulting social practice. It is a warning and a way of explaining how, for example, today’s tyrants, who are profoundly world traveled, with vast international networks of friends, family, and economic interests, can so powerfully wield xenophobia, separating families and excluding refugees in clear violation of their stated Christian principles. The xenophobic citizens of the world today are not a contradiction in terms, and they are not unprecedented. Recognition of the other does not guarantee openness to the other; nor does it preclude the proselytizing, judgmental framework with which the Puritans and many other groups have regarded other religions and cultures over the centuries. Theirs was an openness designed to dispossess, a large-mindedness designed to convert.

Recognition of the otherness of the past does not ensure openness to the contradictory lessons it might hold. Early American studies has been anchored in historicism for a long time. The lesson of cosmopuritanism, however, is darker than what we have been learning through historical relativism. Cosmopuritanism reminds us of cosmopolitanism’s elastic, Janus-faced quality; it warns us not to try to perfect a definition of cosmopolitanism but continually to interrogate its role in creating authority. When we use seventeenth- or eighteenth-century definitions of the cosmopolis or cosmopolitanism, we can get closer to the mind-sets, goals, and capacities of the people of the time, and we can uncover hidden stories. We can also begin to think of the ways in which those definitions might need to be put alongside non-Western imaginations of external relations because they insufficiently describe the mind-sets, goals, and capacities of all peoples. It is difficult fully to set aside our dreams and valorizations of cosmopolitanism today, our sense of how openness to others is embodied in a world with international legal bodies, human rights, and global media. That which produces good in those dreams and valorizations, including the careful investigation of the historical past and the utterances of our ancestors, whispers to us the power and value of our feeling for openness.