Reviewed by Bruce Greenfield | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.2

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Reviewed by Bruce Greenfield | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Bruce Greenfield, Dalhousie University

The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity. By Ralph Bauer. Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 310 pages. $65.00 (cloth).
Some of what postcolonial scholarship has learned about how the empire "writes back" Ralph Bauer deploys here in a study of how the Spanish and English empires wrote to and about themselves. This excellent book is a distinguished addition to the comparative studies that have been one strength of the Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture series. Bauer considers the transatlantic empires of Spain and England during the three centuries in which their colonies were founded and grew to the point of redefinition as autonomous nations, with attention to their centers and peripheries. He compares imperial systems and traces common threads of mercantilist economics and "New Science." How was knowledge produced and deployed? What genres structured written discourse? In particular, how did figures on the peripheries participate as writers in the conversation about empire? Lurking throughout the book are an old story and some familiar characters: plucky settlers and their offspring struggling to find their voices as colonial subjects. Bauer's thorough renovation of this topos of New World creole narrative, however, is something of a tour de force. It brings to bear not only postcolonial theory but also accounts of early modern epistemology and the foundations of modern historiography, consideration of recent decades of work on the formation of nation states and modern subjectivities, and scholarship on the history of printing. Throughout, Bauer draws on scholarly writings in English and Spanish. Anyone interested in the settler/creole subject in the Americas will find this book exciting and richly informative.	1
Bauer reads examples of colonial narrative in terms of their participation in the structuring power struggles of the Spanish and British New World empires. He summarizes the struggle, in political and economic terms, as the rise of mercantilism: "Whereas the first conquests and colonizations of the New World had largely depended on private initiative, with the European monarchies ready to grant individuals quasi-feudal contractual relationships as incentives, the monarchies, in a 'second conquest,' subsequently attempted to centralize the political administration over the newly conquered territories in order to channel the economic profits ... in ways most profitable to the imperial metro-pole" (3).	2
Part and parcel of this struggle "was the question of how knowledge could be centrally produced and controlled" (3) in an expanding imperial system spanning the Atlantic Ocean and three continents, where the reporters of New World knowledge acted at great geographic and cultural distances from the centers. Though reportage from the Americas "unleashed an unprecedented inflation in the value of empirical forms of knowledge," an "epistemic mercantilism" evolved based on "a division of intellectual labor between imperial peripheries and centers" (3), with colonial subjects supplying raw facts that were theorized and ordered at the center. Bauer's discussions of particular texts deal with "the poetics of this mercantilist production of knowledge" (3–4), especially creole reactions to their own effacement as colonial subjects within such a system. Bauer's command of the scholarship on this subject is impressive, and his deployment of these ideas results in a richly historicized poetics of colonial creole writing. His writers are alive in their own time. This prospect is compelling for anyone who wants to take seriously the subject position and voice of the colonial, reclaimed from long service in the cause of founding narratives of New World nation states.	. . .

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