Imperial literary culture

JOHN CARLOS ROWE, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 377, cloth, $55.00, paper, $19.95.

In his preface to Literary Culture and LLS. Imperialism, John Carlos Rowe acknowledges his "profound debt to Edward Said," whom he considers "an important teacher," even though he was never actually taught by Said (xiii). In particular, Rowe's book develops Said's perception in Culture and Imperialism that the "discourse insisting upon American specialness, altruism, and opportunity" has tended systematically to exclude any discussion of imperialism within US culture and history (xiii). In this sense, Rowe's new study is commensurate with the interest in reconceptualizing US narratives within a wider global framework that manifests itself in Postnationalist American Studies, a volume Rowe edited in 2000 for the University of California Press. In both books, there is a concern to examine the United States as an "anti-colonial" power (3) whose dedication to a "rhetoric of ,emancipation"' (5) has served ironically to induce an equally coercive ideology of freedom, an ideology that has underwritten the consolidation and expansion of US nationhood. US imperialism, in other words, derives its authority from presenting itself as antiimperialist, from mythologizing itself as a perpetual renovator of corrupt Old World values. We witness this representation of American freedom as an innocent, naturalized phenomenon in the politics of Manifest Destiny during the nineteenth century and, more recently, in relation to the values of laissez-faire capitalism, which has sought "to convert people into consumers and thereby expand markets" (xi).

One of the strands running throughout this book turns on the notion of "internal colonization," the way in which various groups within the US were subjugated according to the "hierarchies of race, class, and gender" (7). Yet, in a subtle and compelling reading of Edgar Allan Poe's story, "The Journal of Julius Rodman," Rowe analyzes how such subordination was frequently a paradoxical affair, dependent upon the widespread reproduction and circulation of national myths of emancipation. Poe's frontier narrative engages in a stylistic pastiche of the Lewis and Clark journals so as to play with the idea of western discovery and liberation, even while maintaining, as Rowe says, an "imperialist unconscious" (69). In general, this book is very good on those texts where this kind of doublebind emerges, where the romance of manifest destiny and the darker aspects of cultural imperialism cavort as uneasy doppelgangers of each other.

There is, clearly, an engaged and politicized critical sensibility at work here. In a discussion of Zora Neale Hurston's interest in the revolutionary heritage of Afro-Caribbean traditions and the "rights of other nations to their own emancipatory struggles against colonial powers," Rowe draws an analogy with the efforts by "antiwar activists in the Vietnam era to condemn U.S. opposition to another struggle against colonialism" (291). The author has written elsewhere about the significance of Vietnam to modern US culture, and this book carries some of that same radical charge. However, there is also a more traditional side to Rowe's work, signaled here by the first word of the book's title: he had apparently thought originally to call it simply "Culture and U.S. Imperialism," but the publisher's title is more accurate, for, despite opening and closing sections that are more overtly theoretical, the other ten chapters set about practically applying this imperialist paradigm to eight canonical writers-Poe, Charles Brockden Brown, Melville, Twain, Stephen Crane, Henry Adams, Du Bois, and Hurston-along with two more marginal figures, John Rollen Ridge and Nick Black Elk.

Despite, for example, explicitly taking issue with what he calls "strictly literary approaches to the Black Elk narratives" (225), a practice that he regards as another contribution to cultural imperialism, Rowe appears to invest specific literary texts with a certain power of agency, a capacity to resist the more amorphous dispersals and commodifications of imperialist discourse. This leads to a critical discrimination among authors in terms of their purchase upon a particular style of radical will. Thus, in a chapter on Typee, Rowe applauds Melville's "emancipatory and progressive" purposes (79), while, conversely, writing about The Education of Henry Adams, he sees its narrator as ultimately less the "liberal ironist" than the alter ego of his friend John Hay, secretary of state under President McKinley, since both Adams and Hay "basically favored U.S. expansionism by way of developing commercial trade routes, opening foreign markets favorable to the United States, and controlling regions by way of 'spheres of influence'"(176). There is a belated echo of formalism in this kind of attribution of good citizenship to certain kinds of literary works; the idiom is in some ways closer to that of F.O. Matthiessen than to, say, Walter Benn Michaels, for whom language manifestly fails to estrange itself from the culture of which it is part. Indeed, Rowe's attempt to "transvalue the cultural heritage of US democracy for the sake of greater inclusiveness and thus justice" (216)-an ambition he associates with W.E.B. Du Bois-has the effect of introducing an implicitly utopian dime sion to his project. One effect of this is to emphasize, in the same way as Matthiessen did, the significance and importance of studying American literature as a civic responsibility, and Rowe chooses deliberately to point out "the pedagogical potential of the materials in this book" (297). On a more abstract level, though, I begin to wonder if this recapitulation of American liberal ideals of "inclusiveness" and "justice" might not in itself constitute a more emollient form of American cultural imperialism, an ideology extrapolated from and directly related to the tenets of US nationalism, which continues, despite everything, to constitute one of the underlying dynamics within Rowe's argument. The old neoplatonic shadow of what Emerson in "The Transcendentalist" calls an "optative mood," reconciling textual particular and idealist consciousness, is not as far away here as one might initially imagine.

Nevertheless, this is a rich and powerful book, which effectively reconfigures the older virtues of textual analysis within a sophisticated framework of cutting-edge cultural theory. Admittedly, there is relatively little consideration of gender-only one chapter here on a woman writer, Zora Neale Hurston-and, as I have indicated, I am not sure if the book fully achieves a critical perspective upon US imperialism rather than, at some level, also being implicated within it. Still, it is a long book, as intelligent as it is wide-ranging, whose plethora of provocative and pedagogically useful material will make it entirely indispensable for academic libraries. In his preface, Rowe describes this work as "an extended introduction to my next book, which will focus centrally on U.S. neoimperialism in the postWorld War II period and deal with the many different media-film, television, music, literature, and computer technology-that have contributed to and at times challenged the global authority of the United States" (ix); this reinforces the sense of the continuity of Rowe's critical writing over the last twenty years, the way he has expanded outward from a textual center to encompass ever-widening spheres of American cultural life. From his study of defamiliarization in nineteenth-century American literature in Through the Custom House (1982) to his redescription of Transcendentalism as a comparative phenomenon in At Emerson's Tomb (1997), Rowe has been concerned to marry the study of canonical US literature with more expansive cultural and theoretical concerns, and his new book expertly continues this concentric design.

PAUL GILES, University of Cambridge

Copyright Novel, Inc. Fall 2001
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved