Reviews of Books

For all the seeming trendiness of its title, this volume has been a long time coming. It began as a conference co-sponsored by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, held at the University of Pennsylvania in June 1994. Like most major conferences, it took two years to plan--years in which, Robert St. George tells us, "the focus of this book moved from a vague interest in various trajectories within cultural studies and poststructural methodologies to its present focus on the negotiative processes of 'becoming colonial'" (p. xi). Precisely because so much work went into it, and precisely because the essays contained here are so well-polished, Possible Pasts asks to be considered as more than another conference book. Like it or not (and, as usual with such volumes, there are reasons to like it and reasons not), it is a bellwether for the progress, achievements, and limitations of an early American history attentive to what St. George names variously as "recent critical theory," post-structuralism, and cultural studies.	1
The first three of the eighteen essays tell us why these developments in the humanities will help us understand neglected aspects of colonial America and for this reason are the most valuable parts of the book, read as a single text with a unifying theme. In a substantial and thoughtful introduction, which does not deign merely to summarize (or even really to foreshadow) the essays that follow, St. George argues that "becoming colonial" was an ineluctably cultural process. Colonial projects, he insists, are peculiarly symbolic and representational in nature. (St. George does not acknowledge that this same argument has been made and often persuasively for politics, law, war, science, sex, and race and class relations, for virtually everything that historians study, except perhaps demography.) The colonial experience, or "situation," is "negotiative," filled with ambiguity, shot through with power relations, and implicated in a present still in the thrall of colonialism's legacy. Taking the cultural processes of colonialism seriously opens up the possibility of getting beyond colonialism's own myths (the myths of colonial powers about themselves) and getting at the silenced expressions of the colonized. The two efforts, in fact, are inescapably linked, for the movement of practices and strategies, the "arts of the contact zone," is always up and down, from top to bottom and from bottom to top (Mary Louise Pratt, "Arts of the Contact Zone," Profession, 91 [1991], 37). For the editor, this requires us to be not just self-conscious about our own position as interpreters but also reflective about the nature of our sources; their hybrid, contested, multiply inflected natures become the evidence for the phenomena of colonialism. A longtime proponent of material culture studies for early Americanists, St. George also promotes nontextual sources to get beyond the Eurocentric biases of the archive, for becoming colonial "did not happen strictly at the level of discourse alone" (p. 28).	2
Peter Hulme and Michael Warner do us the great favor of clarifying where early America fits and does not fit an already venerable body of "postcolonial" criticism. Even though a succession of influential theorists and literary critics from Edward W. Said (Orientalism [1978]; Culture and Imperialism [1993]) to Anne McClintock (Imperial Leather [1995]) have neglected the first British and French empires in their desire to bring the story of colonialism and racism as close as possible to the present, there is all the more reason to realize that the larger project of telling the colonial story must rest on a reconsideration of Europe's expansion during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. For Hulme, postcolonial theory must not be confused with postmodernism or even with a discursive or linguistic turn. It insists on the truth of what really happened, beyond what was said about it by history's putative winners, and it insists on the local and the particular--making a postcolonial history exactly what traditional, and empirical, scholarship must seek. Warner, while ultimately most concerned with what a postcolonialist early American literature would look like, gives us a characteristically searching meditation on what such familiar historical problems as "territorialization," provincial identity, and creole nationalism look like when their "colonial" natures are reasserted.	. . .