Re Crusoe/Pocahontas: Circum-Atlantic Stagings in The Female American - playing - Critical Essay

My reading has attempted to show that The Female American is useful for us as readers today because it triggers a theoretical and methodological crisis not only for feminist analyses but also for the very ways in which literary studies still serve to recode the power of the nation as a way of organizing knowledge production. In the next section, I will situate this text as a site of difference for two significant narrations of the nation and underscore how the work of postcolonial theorists such as Paul Gilroy and Homi Bhabha and partly derivative works such as Joe Roach's Cities of the Dead, for instance, may help us imagine a different textual community. By resituating texts in new and emergent contexts, this "community" formation can mimic the lived realities of communities that actually congeal in ways that disrupt the exclusive claims of nationality, especially within cultural traditions that have elided questions of genocide and the slave trade in the constitution of their literary canons.

The Nation as Organizing Principle

In her classic study, Revolution and the Word, Cathy Davidson indicates that her story of the rise of the novel in America is by no means an attempt to develop an "insular and ahistorical model of the `American mind' or an `American tradition' based solely on books written in the Americas"; it is after all well known that most books Americans read, even after Independence, came from abroad.(20) Yet Davidson asserts at the same time that Americans used the novel "to express their own vision of a developing new nation," and "[l]ike writers in any country that has achieved independence through revolution early American novelists faced the special task of creating literature against the overwhelming impact of their nation's residual Colonial mentality" 11). While it is true that the postcolonial moment is often most visible as a moment of nationalist consolidation, Davidson is also assuming the recoding power of the nation as already given when she says that national "boundaries are all the more difficult to perceive because of a persistent imperial presence" (11). Are national, and by implication literary boundaries any less difficult to perceive, after the moment of independence? To be fair, Davidson is clearly aware that ultimately it is institutional rules (like copyright law) that make the book (a commodity with transatlantic referents, audiences, and orbits of circulation) into a national product, a product that is never fully assimilated, even when readers and writers are trying to obey the repeated argument of the new national literary canonists that "Americans should read and buy American books" (11). Thus, while institutional criteria such as place of official birth, place of publication, and so forth, may give the national public of the new nation (and Davidson herself) the identity marks to determine the first "American novel," it is ironic that today the very "transatlantic disavowal" that helped solidify the "American" novel is already replaced by a happy marriage of British and American literature (housed in English departments) as the national literatures of the United States.