Antipodean American Literature: Franklin, Twain, and the Sphere of Subalternity

Abstract

The question of interconnections between what is known conventionally as “early” American literature and postcolonialism has been fraught with controversy, not only because of the “doggedly antitheoretical” outlook of many cultural historians in this field, but also because of an uneasy awareness of the new nation's own strategies of “internal racial colonization” with respect to Native Americans and African Americans (Boydston 1223–24). Notwithstanding such incongruities, it would, as Peter Hulme has observed, “seem a strange definition of colonialism that would not include within its purview the European settlements in America that began in 1492” (118). It is of course true that a country such as the US can be, as Frederick Buell says, “simultaneously a neoimperial power and champion of anticolonial nationalism” (132), but to exclude the country on principle from any shadow of the postcolonial rubric seems no more than yet another version of American exceptionalism, one grounded upon the familiar premises of cultural amnesia and the kind of truncated historical perspective which tends to overlook the more contingent aspects of US political independence.1 To resituate American literature within a postcolonial matrix is not to confine it within a rigid theoretical model of coercion and resistance, but to suggest how various vectors of authority and authorization criss-crossed each other in complicated patterns over time and space. Stuart Hall has written how one of the tasks of postcolonial discourse is to problematize clearly demarcated lines of what might be “inside” or “outside” any given colonial system and, instead, to reconstitute “epistemic and power/knowledge fields around the relations of globalisation” (250), thus producing “a decentred, diasporic or ‘global’ rewriting of earlier, nation-centered imperial grand narratives” (247). In this sense, the postcolonial method might be seen to operate as a form of intertextuality, forcing scholars of US culture to reconceive national narratives in the light of a wider global framework.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 30 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.