Reviews of Books

"Identities," Stuart Hall tells us, "are . . . always based on excluding something and establishing a violent hierarchy between the two resultant poles." An identity, Hall adds, is not "a point of origin and stability but . . . is . . . constantly destabilized by what it leaves out" (Hall, "Who Needs 'Identity'?" in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Hall and Paul Du Gay [London, 1996], 33). Feminist philosopher Judith Butler concurs: "Identities operate . . . through the discursive construction of a constitutive outside . . . of abjected and marginalized subjects . . . which return to trouble and unsettle the foreclosures which we prematurely call identities." Identities, she continues, "are phantasmatic efforts at alignment" (Butler, Bodies That Matter [London, 1993], 22). This is especially true, Joseph Roach argues, of identities produced through genocide and other "acts of unspeakable violence"—as was the case in the United States. "Officially forgotten," acts of "unspeakable violence" can never be successfully repressed. Haunting the living, they linger as "memor[ies] imperfectly deferred" (Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance [New York, 1996], 4).	1
Renee Bergland's The National Uncanny explores Euro-Americans' production of Native Americans as "abjected and marginalized" others who, ghostly markers of memories "imperfectly deferred," haunt the Euro-American imagination and American literature. From Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative to Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, Native Americans appear as the un-living who will not depart the land. Focusing her analysis on such canonical writers as Rowlandson, Philip Freneau, Charles Brockden Brown, Lydia Maria Child, James Fenimore Cooper, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bergland insists on the centrality of spectral Native Americans to the production of an "American" national literature. "Indian stories," especially stories of Native American ghosts, "Americanize American letters, afford[ing] them a unique claim to classic status" (p. 153). Representing Native Americans as ghosts serves Euro-American nationalism and nationalist literature well. It effaces Native Americans who survived genocidal warfare and removal and replaces them with romantic figures from a long dead past. In so doing, such writing celebrates Euro-Americans' triumph over Native American tribes, while permitting equally romantic expressions of guilt for past atrocities that can only be mourned, not undone. Lastly, Bergland points out, the invocation of long-dead Native Americans permits Euro-American writers to declare their independence from British letters. The ghostly presence of Native Americans in Euro-American literature and the Euro-American imaginary, however, was not simply strategic. It was unsettling, proclaiming not only the disappearance of Native Americans but also the "phantasmatic," "unsettled" nature of white America's national identity.	2
The National Uncanny is divided into three chronological sections, each structured around a series of binary oppositions. Part one contrasts the Puritans' religious perspective with Philip Freneau's Enlightenment vision and Brown's darker gothic imaginary. Puritan texts represent Native Americans simultaneously as powerful earthly enemies and as metaphorical figuras of the evil each Saint carried within. Could Saints ever be certain that a ghostly demonic presence did not secretly possess their souls? How different was the Enlightenment vision presented in Freneau's "Lines Occasioned by a Visit to an Old Indian Burying Ground." Puritan demons are banished and with them Native Americans. Freneau, Bergland tells us, "assumes a natural philosopher's detached view of interred Native American bodies as . . . objects for contemplation. . . . he assumes that Indian Removal has already been completed" (pp. 41–42). By the poem's end, however, Freneau's "enlightened detachment crumbles"; Native American ghosts return. Their spectral forms eliciting "erotic desire," delivering "vengeful" (p. 42) curses, they threaten the new republic's claims to rational order. True of Freneau's poem, this is doubly true of Brown's dark gothic novel, Edgar Huntly, which, Bergland insists, questions "the use of the written word as a vehicle for rationalized authority, . . . question[s as well] the sanity and presumed reasonableness of the [Euro-American] narrator and . . . the American nation itself" (p. 51).	. . .