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Americana: The Americas in the World, around 1850 (or ‘Seeing the Elephant’ as the Theme for an Imaginary Western)

2002; Duke University Press; Volume: 82; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-82-4-774

1527-1900

Felipe Fernández‐Armesto,

Cuban History and Society

James Dunkerley’s prodigious and unprecedented new book opens with three epigraphs, each addressed to a different dedicatee. One, in English replete with sexual imagery, evokes New Orleans, which is a minor setting of the book. The others are in untranslated Welsh and Quechua. You may not be able to understand the epigraphs, but you get their message at once: proceed at your peril.This book is self-branded as a work of art, not merely of scholarship; of adventure, not of mere improvement. Dunkerley told colleagues that “they weren’t going to get a secure and sensible supplement to the scholarly corpus” (p. 622). Has any academic ever recommended his work on such grounds before? It sounds, at first, like a grand-scale captatio benevolentiae. At 642 pages and nearly 1,400 footnotes, the book looks—if not secure and sensible—at least solid and substantial. Every page is alive with evidence of the depth of the author’s academic vocation: his insatiable curiosity, his relentless scholarship, his reflective habits, his discursive tastes, his broad knowledge, his bibliographical mastery, his teacher’s tricks of intrigue and tease. But the relentless experimentation will mask these virtues for many readers. Some will leave Dunkerley’s gauntlet abandoned in the dust. Those who raise it, however, should enjoy the challenge, transcend the difficulties and exploit the experience.Though various uneasily compatible levels of possible coherence are suggested at different times, Americana is really a collection of discrete works, puzzlingly interwoven. The core of the book is a devastatingly critical essay on U.S. exceptionalism and Latin American dependency theory: selected episodes in the history of the U.S. in the mid-nineteenth century are dazzlingly illuminated by a contextual or comparative approach that takes in other parts of the Americas. Secondly, and much less resolutely, Dunkerley advertises an excursion in marxist nostalgia—a post-marxist search for “what had been lost” (p. xxiii). The search focuses on an era that prefigures the disillusionment of Dunkerley’s generation, when the U.S., according to Marx’s predictions, should have emerged as the vanguard-land of socialism. Thirdly, the book encloses an Atlanticist essay, which ties American and Irish history together, sometimes with parallels, sometimes with connections. Dunkerley’s conclusion that Ireland is “peculiarly American” (p. 37) is typical of his technique: typically perverse, typically provocative, typically trenchant, typically tantalizing.Finally, there are detailed, percipient, source-based studies of notable but neglected court cases of the period, one from Britain, one from the U.S., one from Bolivia: all—it must be said, too obliquely or remotely for the reader’s comfort— involve Irish connections, and raise questions about treason and identity. The author leaves the reader to spot overarching themes, if any there be, inviting the comment Méndez Bejarano offered on Blanco White’s Cartas de Inglaterra: “no se advierte más ley de unidad que la encuadernación.” A 49-page poem justifies the synchronic approach, though the most obvious justification is overlooked: the Mexican War demonstrated the preponderance of the U.S. in the New American Order of the mid-century: previously—but never again since—the most powerful, wealthy, populous, and influential states and civilizations of the hemisphere had been in Mesoamerica or South America.Once the curtain is up, Dunkerley narrates the first of his courtroom dramas: the case of the Irish nationalist hero, John Mitchell, convicted of sedition by a British court in 1848. He fled, ultimately to the U.S., where he defended slavery as “the best state of existence for the Negro” (p. 91), threw in his lot with the Confederacy, and faced treason charges before returning to election to parliament in Ireland, and death in his moment of triumph. Here is a hero after Dunkerley’s heart: liminal, mercurial, ambivalent, trangressive, irreducible, frankly unintelligible, and, above all, tragic, as the peripeteia of life turn ambitions to failures and successes to frustrations.But how, except in this representative fashion, does the story relate to the rest of the book? When the narrative ends and the argument resumes, Dunkerley tackles some themes illustrative of a series of dependent relationships, common to the mid-century Americas, and foreshadowed—albeit patchily and faintly—in Mitchell’s saga: the attitudes of opinion-formers and decision-takers towards the church, slaves, “savages,” the mob, and women. Each of these apparently ill-assorted categories is a source of images for the characterization of America, both in nineteenth-century sources and historiographical tradition; but Dunkerley deliberately underplays the links and affects a mazey, meandering style that twists and obscures the reader’s path through the material. We suddenly find we are back in Marx’s company, without knowing how we got there, except by way of Paul Julian Smith’s dubious claim that “Like woman . . . Latin America marks that threshold of marginality beyond which theory fears to tread” (p. 226). A rewarding excursion follows on the sources of Marx’s New American Cyclopædia article on Bolívar.A sudden disjuncture precipitates us into Dunkerley’s second case, which is all about another kind of ambiguity: bigamy. Below the surface of the steamy, seedy complexities of the story of Zulime Carrière’s love life lurks another issue: the disposal of the property fortune of one of her “husbands” in New Orleans real estate. Below that again lies the well-buried level of an even darker saga, which Dunkerley teases from the sources, of that husband’s involvement in the political machinations of Aaron Burr and James Wilkinson. One of the great turning points of the history of the Americas—the Louisiana Purchase, which guaranteed the ascent of the U.S. to primacy in the hemisphere—is intimately linked with private lives in New Orleans. For the struggling reader, Dunkerley’s methods may seem torturous, but this is scholarship of a very high order, in which microhistory grows global wings.Zulime’s case takes us into a world which even hard-nosed historians can understand: the world of money and power. The pages that follow deal with historians’ claims that the divergent histories of Anglo-America and Latin America were economic in origin. Though cast misleadingly as a rebuttal of some well-known— and, in Dunkerley’s summary, unfairly traduced—views of Christopher Platt’s, this section of the book is a persuasive grinding-down of assumptions about “starkly contrasting Anglo prosperity and Latin stagnation” (p. 343). Next, the final court case is introduced. Again, the transition to narrative mode is abrupt; again, the case is fascinating, but the reasons for selecting it are elusive. Unlike the previous cases, moreover, that of Mariano Donato Muñoz—charged at Sucre in 1850 with exceeding his prefect’s powers by releasing a prisoner without trial in compliance with a Good Friday tradition—is told briefly, by direct transcription of the sources. The “Hibernian dimension” (p. 463) gets tenuous: one of the principal figures in Zulime’s case was born in Sligo; Muñoz’s office of prefect had been held by Feargus O’Connor’s brother, with whom, the author confesses “I can find no documentary link” (p. 464) to the case. But the story of the Pilate of Tarija gives Dunkerley an opportunity to trace Muñoz’s subsequent history as the henchman of the iresponsible dictator, Mariano Melgarejo. In a twist typical of the stories Dunkerley tells, the tyrant, who died of a bullet wound in a private brawl, is today mistaken for a saint: an exvoto reported by Dunkerley himself says, “Gracias, Hermanito Mariano, por los favores recibidos” (p. 480).After this interlude, the author turns to the subject of what the U.S. did, in the sphere of inter-American politics, with the hemispherewide supremacy acquired in the period. The stories he plucks contrast private adventurism in Nicaragua with the Mexican War. The latter, Dunkerley claims, “remains poorly known inside the USA” (p. 489). His analysis of this event is clearly crucial to the book’s main theme. He highlights interesting aspects—gringo perceptions of the enemy as ‘elephant’, the deficiencies of U.S. policy and strategy—but he struggles to explain U.S. superiority in training and technology: the northerners’ “guns,” he says, “were not so much qualitatively superior but rather more advanced” (p. 524). At the end of the long book, we realize we have witnessed brilliantly critical and creative, rather than constructive, writing. The main problems addressed remain unresolved. Why the histories of the moieties of the New World have diverged; how “the barbarians of the North” (p. 551) became the masters of the hemisphere; and why, in these latter days, the two northernmost states of the New World have been so much richer, more powerful and more stable than the rest: Dunkerley has contextualized, perspectivized, unpicked, unpacked, reformulated, and revised these problems but neither explained nor exploded them.The several parts of the book might have worked better in some ways if they had been separated. The essays would have been more persuasive standing on their own. The case studies would have been more conspicuous. The masterly storytelling would have made gripping volumes; the ingenuity in argument would have animated superb free-standing articles. But to divide the elements of the book would have been a meek solution, which would have sacrificed so much artistry and ambition. Dunkerley has been daring enough to write truly thrilling history— passionate, intelligent, compulsive, impressive. It is sui generis—a one-off, worthy of attracting admirers, but unlikely to command imitators.