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Postcolonialism and Material Culture in the Early United States
Kariann Yokota
| JACK P. Greene compellingly declares that the moment has arrived for colonialists to become "more imperial" and instigate a "massive reshaping" of American history.1 He envisions a plan of attack involving the introduction of two fields of theoretical literature—postcolonial theory and studies of state formation—that early American historians have yet to engage fully. He suggests that they can rewrite the history of the early United States as a particular type of settler-based postcolonial nation, loosely patched together from a variety of geographic, political, and legal components. The historical narratives, though, may be more thoroughly reshaped if early Americanists pushed the implications of postcolonial theory a bit harder and paired them with the insights of material culture studies, looking more closely at domains of power other than those of political institutions, whether national, state, or local. |
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Can the United States of America be included under the rubric of postcolonial studies? Though postcolonial theory has tended to focus on what have been called exploitation colonies in densely populated African, Asian, and Middle Eastern societies, there is, as Greene acknowledges, a subfield that focuses specifically on settler colonies. One of the unique challenges postcolonial settler populations faced was the dual task of constructing a sense of belonging, indeed of "indigeneity," while maintaining the power and privilege granted them by their European inheritance.2 This duality and the tensions it created have been noted in a variety of temporal and geographic locations and the postcolonial Americas were no exception. Though they may have unsettled the British Empire with their successful revolutionary bid for independence, the newly empowered settler population did not dismantle the newly evacuated structures of power and inequality they helped build under the imperial aegis when dealing with African Americans and Native Americans. On the contrary they were ready, willing, and able to move in and inhabit them. |
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Postcolonial scholars have offered ways to understand why, in the wake of hard-won formal independence, cultural decolonization does not occur. In general postcolonial theory is not principally engaged in the narrative of successful state building; if anything, it is a reckoning with the failure to achieve a thorough decolonization and therefore a new state formation.3 The interest of postcolonial scholars in unsuccessful attempts at state building largely stems from what this failure signals about persisting dissident forms falling outside formal political configurations. |
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One may wonder whether Greene's call to "raise state and provincial history to the same level as national history" is in essence a question of scale. Greene seems to regard individual state formation as relatively successful in constructing a distinctive corporate identity appropriate to their "geographic situation, the nature of their economy and social system, and the collective experiences of the inhabitants." He asserts that individual states were the "arenas in which most governance, most public life, and the domestic life of most Americans were principally centered."4 It seems as if hegemonic power was still located in individual states. Is Greene then suggesting that the creation of a cohesive American body politic, which he rightly deems impossible on a national level at the moment of conception, is best observed at the state or local level? Postcolonial theory has been strongest in analyzing the destabilization of power and its location outside the organized nation-state. With that in mind, though Greene's call for separate histories organized around the states of the union may add to current scholarly understanding of the nation's beginnings, it overprivileges institutions (nations as well as their component states) as the most salient form of historical analysis, if early Americanists are to take postcolonial insights seriously. |
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