A Mixed Race: Ethnicity in Early America.

This collection of thirteen original essays by some of our best critics of early American culture is an important contribution to the topical and energetic debate over ethnicity. The contributors seek to extend a self-conscious consideration of ethnicity to the formerly neglected period of our ethic founding during the years before 1800. Although several of the essays focus on Euro-American cultural groups and on Native Americans, five of the essays concentrate on African Americans, and several other essays include substantial discussions of early African American writings and representations of blacks in white colonial discourse. These essays examine the cultural conditions, the rich and interactive ethnic mix, and the textual signs of ethnic difference that fundamentally defined and determined the multicultural nation that America had already become by the early nineteenth century. The contributors to this collection show that the shaping of our culture by responses to ethnic and racial difference is at the base of American history, not merely a modern circumstance, as most traditional scholarship has tended to assume. To fail to understand the contradictory values of confrontation and assimilation inherent in America's ethnic founding is to risk the simplistic misconception that later immigration was a contamination of some supposed original ethnic purity.

A Mixed Race extends the recent work of ethnographic critics, such as James Clifford (The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art [1988]), and such literary critics as Werner Sollors (Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture [1986]) and William Boelhower (Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature [1987]). These critics have argued that ethnicity is not located solely in an essential cultural identity, continuity, or tradition, and that texts should not be understood as mimetic descriptions of an essential, unchanging ethnic difference (even though that is often the pretense of these texts). Rather, the center of ethnicity should be seen as a dynamic relation between cultural groups, and their texts as orchestrations of multivocal exchanges among these groups as they transform themselves (the hegemonic group included) in the process of confronting others. Thus, ethnicity is performance, a group's continually changing self-understanding in relation to a changing larger world, a struggle for control over narratives, values, and the self. Furthermore, this process of ethnicity is carried on by means of signs and codes that are generated by the groups to negotiate relationships with other hostile or accommodating groups. So, to understand more fully the ethnic foundation of our culture, we must recognize ethnic semiosis in colonial texts. Such clarifying views have enabled the scholars in this volume to consider the circumstances, rhetorical negotiations, and representation of ethnic formation in early America.

The first section, "Questions of Race and Ethnicity," includes three essays with substantial discussion about African Americans. In "Economies of Morality and Power: Reading 'Race' in Two Colonial Contexts," Dana D. Nelson examines the strategies and contradictions of Cotton Mather and William Byrd, who dissented from the prominent racist theorizing in American colonial discourse by resisting the growing power of social fictions that justified the subjugation of one "kind" of people in order to maintain the dominance of another. For Nelson, the key question regarding dissenting texts like Mather's The Negro Christianized becomes this: "Given that the colonial author can never write outside the power motives of colonial discourse, what are the results of the interplay between resistance and consent?" Taking Bakhtin's point that culture is formed out of consensus and dissent, what he calls "heteroglossia," Nelson uses Mather's text to analyze and reassess the complexities of heteroglossic early American attitudes on race. By doing so, she uncovers the inevitably political and economic motivations that undermine the attempt by Mather (as by Byrd) to subvert racial tropes and that result in the compelling tension in such texts. Despite Mather's laudable good intentions for the slaves in New England, his text is overwhelmed by the language and color imagery available to him and by his perhaps unconscious acquiescence to colonialist financial self-interest.

The two final essays in the first section of this book examine inaugural voices in what Henry Louis Gates calls "the black tradition in English literature." In "Red, White, and Black: Indian Captivities, Colonial Printers, and the Early African-American Narrative," John Sekora seeks to understand how black writing began in America by examining the circumstances surrounding the publication of the Narrative of the Uncommon Suffering & Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon (1760), the earliest slave narrative. In light of the historical context of the Seven Years' War, the publishing history of several Boston printers, and the generic models of Indian captivity narratives, Sekora reveals the conditions under which a black voice could be produced. He also demonstrates how black writers reshaped the captivity narrative, a form used by white Americans as a symbolic pattern for inventing a cultural history of a nation that would be free. As Sekora says, "One kind of mythmaking likewise teaches another," and so former slaves learned to turn the tale of Indian captivity into alternative life stories for other slaves and thus create the "moral history of American slavery."

Benilde Montgomery's ironically titled essay "Recapturing John Marrant" provides a new reading of Marrant's captivity narrative (1785) by examining the relevance of the Indian captivity experience for the representation of African American ethnicity. Marrant's is described as a voice discovering itself, as the author comes to understand the equation of freedom and language that characterizes much African American discourse. Montgomery's reading also shows this text to be "a clear example of an emerging, polyethnic American identity." Thus, for some of his contemporaries, he was either too "red" or too "black," and for others (and perhaps for some modern readers) he was too "white," so his narrative remained largely unread until recently. Marrant's resistance to any single set of ethnic categories makes his text significant as an icon of the transethnic possibilities that seem once to have been central to American culture but have somehow gotten lost.

The second section of the volume, "Varieties of Ethnic Representation," contains two essays that deal in part with the representation of African Americans within the context of two major genres of popular literature in early America, jest books and gallows narratives. As part of a wide-ranging survey of ethnic confrontation in jest books from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Robert Secor examines how the colonists began shaping racist stories and jokes to protect their social order and superior status by marginalizing the outsiders, such as transplanted Africans, whom they would exploit most in building their country. The simpleton Sambo representation in particular is examined as a way that white Americans assuaged their guilt for enslaving Africans by conveying the notion that blacks were by nature inferior beings.

Daniel Williams, too, considers ethnic stereotypes in "The Gratification of That Corrupt and Lawless Passion: Character Types and Themes in Early New England Rape Narratives." In one of the narratives examined, The Life and Dying Speech of Arthur (1768), the rapist is a slave. Williams shows how the narrative entangles ethnic prejudices with textual conventions that marginalize Arthur because he represented a lack of self-control and thus was a threat to hierarchical authority and a disruption of the social order. His final repentance, confession, and execution are conventions of the genre that reassert control over the runaway rapist and dramatize a return to the dominant order. Pointing out that the narrative attributes Arthur's incorrigibility to a weak, inferior nature inherent in his blackness, Williams notes that Arthur sets the foundation for the stereotype of the immoral, hypersexual black unable to control his prodigal lusts and vicious impulses.

The final section, "Individual Confrontations," contains essays focusing on ethnicity in the discourse of three of the period's major writers: Wheatley, Crevecoeur, and Jefferson. Betsy Erkkila's "Phillis Wheatley and the Black American Revolution" is an especially valuable addition to this collection because it brings together questions of both ethnic and gender difference, positions of social marginalization that give rise to similar and often collaborative strategies of resistance to white masculine authority. Erkkila contends that Wheatley "transformed the discourse of liberty, natural rights, and human nature into a subtle critique of the color code and the oppressive racial structures of revolutionary America." Wheatley, according to Erkkila, uses irony and ambiguity to undermine the attitudes and ideals of the dominant racist, sexist culture that she appears to reinforce, while actually suggesting the revolutionary possibility of a society defined in terms of the creativity of all its participants, black as well as white, and female as well as male.

Crevecoeur's ambiguous attitude toward the slave situation is looked at by Doreen Alvarez Saar in "The Heritage of American Ethnicity in Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer." Her careful reading of Letters reveals that slaves, like Native Americans, were seen as being outside the melting pot process of Americanization and denied the central immigrant experience of working toward success. Although Crevecoeur abhors slavery, Saar points out that he acknowledges the covert exclusion of Africans from the work ethic and so from the ethnic blend that made up eighteenth-century Anglocentric American ethnicity.

The last essay, Frank Shuffelton's own "Thomas Jefferson: Race, Culture, and the Failure of Anthropological Method," attempts to explain a paradox concerning Jefferson's contrasting attitudes toward two racially different groups, American Indians and people of African descent. Going beyond the traditional explanation that Jefferson was rebutting Buffon's position on America's degenerative biological influences, Shuffelton suggests that Jefferson was blinded to the genuine creativity of African Americans by the social code of slavery, and was trapped by the limitations of Enlightenment anthropological and anatomical discourses on racial categories.

While the essays in this collection are not, and do not aim to be, an encyclopedic account of all the ethnic groups who participated in the multiethnic founding of America, they do open up the possibilities of understanding that can be gained from examining early American culture from the perspectives of the new scholarship on ethnicity.