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Robert S. Levine , Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism . Robert S. Levine. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Pp. x+322.

2012; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 109; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/663600

1545-6951

Christopher Castiglia,

American Literature and Humor Studies

Previous articleNext article FreeRobert S. Levine, Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism. Robert S. Levine. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Pp. x+322.Christopher CastigliaChristopher CastigliaPennsylvania State University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreOver the past decade, numerous critics have reminded us that “race” and “nation” are ill-defined concepts, rendered unstable by histories of migration, colonization, cosmopolitanism, global economics, and their attendant intermarriages, rapes, and dispossessions. The intrinsic relationship among these dislocations since the very founding of the United States becomes uncontrovertibly clear in Robert S. Levine’s astute Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism. Throughout his lucidly compelling study, Levine shows how a hemispheric approach to conventional US literary nationalism generates—for contemporary critics as for writers in the early Republic—what Levine calls “a wise bafflement about the meaning, trajectories, and plots of the unfolding narratives of history” (2). Rather than resolving tensions or contradictions into positions pro- or antinationalism, for or against racial identity, Levine allows the fractures, fissures, and flip-flops of early national literature to reveal the complexity and range to the ongoing project of building and racializing a national literary canon. In a series of surprising and carefully crafted readings of four historical “episodes”—Charles Brockden Brown and his writings on the 1803 Louisiana Purchase; David Walker and his response to the 1820 Missouri Compromise; the challenge posed throughout the 1850s to nationalizing conceptions of racial purity and uninterrupted bloodlines by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Hannah Crafts; and Frederick Douglass’s career-long fascination with Haiti—Levine cogently illuminates the complex relationships to race and nationhood held by these important literary figures. Arguing against a “critical binary that typically presents whites as generally complicitous in, and blacks (and other minorities) as generally subversive of, dominant national formations” (5), Levine shows that these writers drew significant power from their ability to deploy dominant constructions of US nationalism while simultaneously looking beyond the nation’s borders for opportunities to reinterpret and revise prevailing understandings of race and revolution, collectivity and citizenship, and ultimately nationalism itself.Levine’s study begins with one of the new nation’s earliest writers, Charles Brockden Brown. Although in several of his political writings of 1803 Brown “attempted to articulate a coherent notion of American national identity” (26), Levine shows that Brown also critiqued national exceptionalism and imperialism, “not through explicit statement but through the ironies of narrative performance” (39). Levine’s shrewd readings of Brown’s novels center on what he calls “the Brownian moment”: “a destabilization or collapse of the binaries that uphold the identity and coherence of self and republican nation—a destabilization or collapse that typically has everything to do with human frailty (and stupidity)” (46). For Levine, the Brownian moment, challenging binaries such as virtue/immorality, self/other, civilized/savage, also destabilizes a nationalism upheld and naturalized by those binaries. Most important, from Levine’s perspective, “what is collapsed” in Brown’s writings “stays collapsed and is not reconstituted into some sort of coherent national allegory” (47). Working within the debates about national territory and racial citizenship that erupted before and after the Louisiana Purchase, Brown, according to Levine, “never sought historical or theoretical closure because he was acutely aware of contingency—the unfinished business (with all of its uncertainty, conflict, and debate), of his contemporary moment” (59).While contingency is the key word in Levine’s reading of Brown, circulation animates his persuasive reinterpretation of David Walker’s career as a writer through his lesser known stint as authorized agent for the first African American newspaper in the United States, Freedom’s Journal. Building on Benedict Anderson’s analysis of how the circulation of print—particularly newspapers—builds the “imagined community” of nationalism, Levine shows Walker’s involvement with African American newspapers as an appropriation of print nationalism but with important differences. Walker expands “nationalism” beyond the United States, linking “the disparate and scattered African American communities of the early Republic” (71) into a haunting counternation. Levine demonstrates how the Missouri Compromise, which dramatically increased the political power of the slave interest, and the 1822 Denmark Vesey revolt, which brought to national attention Northern abolitionist and Southern proslavery sentiments, shattered any faith Walker might have had in a coherent American identity. At the same time, these events offered Walker an opportunity to develop and publicize African Americans “as a constitutive part of a public sphere that is anything but monolithic” (101). Just as Walker worked within and against nationalism, he also criticized “race” as “a concept that is imposed on peoples of color by the whites in power” (104), even as he argued for the connection between people of color throughout the American hemisphere, a “brotherhood” forged and strengthened through the circulation of print and populations.Walker was not alone in casting “race” as a highly unpredictable and inscrutable, if strategically useful, category. In The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Levine shows Hawthorne’s “demystifying narrative, ironic scopic strategies, and insistence on the difficulties of tracing bloodlines subversively dislocates race and nation,” revealing in the process “the fictiveness of insularity and purity” (123). Rather than expanding definitions of blackness, as Walker had done, Hawthorne mocks the Pyncheon family’s imperialist presumption of generally transmitted character in order to challenge “assumptions about whiteness that were at the heart of the expansionist ideologies of the 1840s and 1850s” (124). Hawthorne’s critique of pure white nationhood operates within and against the logic of Young Americanists like the author’s friend and editor Evert Duyckinck, who, beginning in the mid-1840s, put forth theories of polygenesis in order to present the United States as an “unmixed” Anglo-Saxon state and to call for a canon of white nationalist literature. Against such nativists, Hawthorne, like Melville and Crafts after him, expressed “remarkable skepticism about conceptions of historical progress that imagine a coherent and unbroken movement toward a racially inscribed telos” (133). Instead, Hawthorne’s focus in House is on “how bloodlines in human populations become too mixed-up, too hidden, to account in clear ways for the behavior that supposedly is passed along through a house or ‘race’” (140). This skepticism continues to animate work such as Herman Melville’s Pierre (1852), in which the eponymous hero wrestles with his own racial genealogy after the appearance of an exotic, “dark” half sister, and Crafts’s Bondwoman’s Narrative (2002), in which a slave-holding mistress is tormented by a man who knows that she is, in fact, of mixed-race parentage. These works demonstrate, Levine contends, that whiteness and blackness cannot be discerned or distinguished as unfailing or unmixed racial histories or identities, an awareness that haunts most genealogical fictions of the 1850s.Levine’s final chapter focuses on three concerns of Frederick Douglass’s late career—his interest in Haitian emigration (1857–61), his support for Santo Domingo annexation (1871), and his conjoined interest in Rome and Haiti between 1886–93—to offer an alternative to Douglass’s supposedly abiding faith in US nationalism, especially in the wake of his break with the Garrisonians. Instead, Levine describes Douglass as deeply interested in uniting the dispersed black populations of the southern hemisphere. While readers might question whether Haiti—much less Rome—constitutes a “hemispheric” interest, Levine convincingly reveals Douglass’s “more contestatory, capacious, and complex relationship to the American Revolutionary and American nationalist tradition” (187) than has been acknowledged. In a suggestive coda, Levine argues that between the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott and 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decisions, a range of US writers, black and white (including Frances Harper, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, Charles Chestnutt, and Pauline Hopkins), “dislocated” race and nation by featuring plots of racial “passing” and “mixing.” These novels form an important alternative to literary canons that rely on and create “fixed ideas of the nation” through the presumption of stable and easily discernible racial identities (241).Readers of Dislocating Race and Nation will profit from these fresh (and, to my mind, more fair-minded) readings of familiar figures and texts. Perhaps more important, they will learn how much is to be gained from a hemispheric perspective on nineteenth-century literature, which becomes again as legible in the critically transnational and complexly multiracial texts as it was in its day. Levine surpasses many critics who have taken up a hemispheric or transnational approach in his passionate claims for what such perspectives offer our current world. In recovering “a sense of the tenuousness, provisionality, even fictiveness of the connection between race and nation” (7) in the past, Levine contends, we enhance our capacities for rethinking those connections in our own moment, releasing us from “a conviction that our own histories are in various ways overdetermined and that hopes for change at the current moment are gone” (11). The present, Levine contends, cannot be overdetermined by a past that was itself various, contradictory, and ill defined, and just as those fissures and instabilities opened possibilities for new definitions and unpredictable alliances in the past, so they may do so for us. Or, as Levine rightly asserts, “if we wish to look to the past as a way of fashioning a better future, we need to recover a sense of possibility (and provisionality and contingency) in the past that will help us to reconceive our own moment as a time of possibility (and provisionality and contingency)” (11–12). Drawing on counterfactual theory to argue that “what we share with the past is a chaotic, even anarchic, sense of possibility that demands responsible choices and action” (13), Levine demonstrates with exemplary clarity, erudition, and even optimism that “alternative histories are always immanent in particular cultural moments” (12). 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