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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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Nonetheless postcolonial scholars raise vital and unavoidable questions about the cultural aspects of the colonial experience that can further the study of U.S. history. Their insights help Americanists understand the legacy of oppression of minority groups in the United States as well as illuminate the experience of Euro-American settlers, in particular the elites and Founding Fathers who felt marginalized within a larger transatlantic world. Viewed from this perspective, acts of oppression of the settler community are expressions of power and symptoms of powerlessness vis-à-vis larger economic and cultural systems still dominated by Europe and in particular by the mother country. |
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One iteration of the postcolonial project could prove useful for U. S. historians. Greene's recognition of the continuity across the political divide between colony and nation is shared by a strand of postcolonial scholarship that focuses on lingering forms of colonial dependence that postdate formal political independence. In early America the ability to replicate the civilizing and controlling force of the British state, even if exerted unevenly and with limited success, was crucial to the settlers' break from the empire. Greene points out that the adoption of the British systems of jurisprudence and racial subordination supplied "protections" for the rebelling settlers' self-interest. Though certainly helpful, this emphasis on formal centralizing forces and on "governance and law" can mask other equally important aspects of historical analysis.5 |
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Postcolonial scholarship draws attention to the importance of cultural aspects of the colonial experience and their political, social, and economic implications. As Ashis Nandy has aptly observed, "colonialism never seems to end with formal political freedom." Theorists such as Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak have used a range of theories, including deconstructionist literary criticism and psychoanalytic theory, to attack the model of center and periphery and the vesting of power only in the hands of the colonizer. They have emphasized instead the various forms of ambivalence that occur at the cultural level in colonial and postcolonial encounters. Though these authors focus mainly on literary texts and India, which offers only an inexact parallel with the United States, some of their ideas can be applied profitably to the United States in its early years. These scholars rightly point out that culture is a key phenomenon that can transcend state or other provincial boundaries, forming instead around regional, national, or even Atlantic and transnational communities.6 |
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In material culture studies in particular, postcolonialism can play a visible and even dominant role. Scholars in this field recognize that the objects people produced, consumed, and traded are valid sources of primary evidence, reflective and constitutive of historical actors' values, beliefs, and identities. Though historians are trained extensively to read texts, they are not taught to be visually and materially literate. They commonly treat objects and images as superfluous afterthoughts, mere illustrations to decorate jackets or add color to the center sections of their books. Yet these sources can offer unique, alternative perspectives on colonialism and its aftermath in ways that postcolonial scholars themselves have not fully recognized thus far. The circulation of objects as well as people and ideas across the Atlantic, from former center to former periphery, deserves more attention as a nexus for the formation of national identity and a theater for the performance of cultural ambivalence. The new nation's assertion of alterity in relation to the Old World was constantly undercut by Americans' desire for refined objects that could only be acquired from Europe. The consumption of fine fabrics, tasty tea, and delicate chinaware emblazoned with family crests, as well as basic textiles and farm tools, was so deeply embedded in American life that it was not going to be given up after independence. |
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Material culture studies pair well with postcolonial scholarship because each type fills potential analytic gaps in the other. The former may quell the discomfort that many historians have not only with postcolonial theory but also with theory in general, since theory is sometimes considered too abstract and thus not grounded in the documented reality of everyday life. Rightly or wrongly, postcolonial theory has been criticized by its detractors as being too textually based. Conversely, adding detailed historical context and theoretical structure to the more traditional object-centered work of museum curators and connoisseurs can create work that is useful to the general scholarly community. Taking seriously the contribution that material culture studies can make to the historical analysis of early America would add richness to scholars' understanding of the period.7 |
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Examining the meanings of material goods in postcolonial America helps establish a transnational perspective on national history, placing the new nation on the periphery of the bigger stage on which the first national leaders hoped to shine. From the other side of the water, the United States in many respects looked like a shabby imitation of European society located on the outer fringes of the transatlantic world. As they oppressed the Native American and African American populations, the Founding Fathers themselves felt marginalized within a larger world of goods and culture. |
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There is no simplistic dichotomy between metropole and periphery in which power emanates solely from the center, since that is precisely the notion postcolonial scholars have dispelled in the theories about contestation and interplay between the nodes of empire that Greene has illuminated in much of his own work. Negotiation and contestation, however, suggest a defensive side of American postcolonial nationalism in which creole elites felt the need to live up to the standards set in Great Britain. White Americans often accused people of color of incivility, violence, and lack of discipline. Yet whites who were engaged in transnational networks in person and in print were disturbingly aware that they were being maligned for the same things by the British who regarded them with disdain. This awareness engendered a craving for validation.8 |
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Postcolonial studies have emphasized the twin notions of ambivalence and hybridization of the colonized culture. These conditions profoundly manifested themselves in pre- and postrevolutionary America. One major defense against the charge of a lack of civility was the possession of refined imported goods and the knowledge of their proper use. Postcolonial concerns about the ability to measure up to the standards of the former colonizer are to a large extent generated by the material aspects of life. As Norbert Elias makes clear, civility is inseparable from the proper deployment of knives and forks rather than fingers dipped in communal trenchers. Though most postcolonial studies deal with issues of representation, it is important to see how dependence and political liberation are both substantiated by material culture. Continuing to trade raw materials for the cooked products of European workshops, American postcolonial elites invested in maintaining standards of civility that prolonged their dependence on Britain.9 This cultural ambivalence is the postcolonial paradox in which Americans found themselves. The same souls who identified American addiction to British luxuries as the cause of political oppression under the empire (labeled as a type of slavery) prided themselves on outfitting their families, homes, and cities with the latest in British trends or American imitations of them, to a large degree paid for with the profits of slave labor. |
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Though a more traditional historiography based on politics as governance and law highlights Americans' confidence in their political project and its fulfillment of Enlightenment goals, a focus on culture using material objects as a key form of primary evidence discloses a much less confident side to American independence. One example of the deep social and political implications involved in decisions concerning material culture is a discussion among the members of the first Congress about the controversial choice of the president's inaugural suit. In the spring of 1789, George Washington's final choice to have his garments tailored from wool broadcloth supplied by Daniel Hinsdale, an agent of the "Woolen Manufactory, Hartford," Connecticut, was mentioned in newspapers across the nation. Though one article stated that the president wore "a complete suit of Homespun Cloaths; the cloth was of a fine fabric and as handsomely finished as any European superfine cloth," textile scholars note that the texture could not compare with the more velvety feel of European broadcloth. Washington's sacrifice of comfort during that long inaugural day was a highly symbolic decision made after much public debate. Yet the choice was not as straightforward as it may seem. Senator William Maclay noted that Washington was "dressed in deep brown, with Metal buttons, with an Eagle on them" as well as silver buckles, "White stockings a Bag, and Sword" in the European style.10 This ensemble is a fitting example of what can be described as a postcolonial compromise. |
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Though the wholesale importation of postcolonial theory by Americanists is not possible given the obvious differences between the United States and other postcolonial sites of investigation, it can shed light on obscured aspects of American history. Greene has usefully argued that the familiar histories of the early decades of the United States focus too much on heroic master narratives of the nation. Merging postcolonial and material culture studies is another way to explore what Partha Chatterjee has (in another context) called "the nation and its fragments."11 |
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Kariann Yokota is an assistant professor in the American Studies and History Departments at Yale University. The author is grateful to David Waldstreicher for valuable insights and suggestions. She also thanks David Lloyd for his insights and useful advice as well as Mridu Rai and Jean-Frédéric Schaub for their suggestions.
Notes
1 Jack P. Greene, "Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 64, no. 2 (April 2007): 235.
2 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, 2d ed. (London, 2002), 134.
3 Here, work such as Ian S. Lustick's rumination on several instances of the failed state can be illuminating (Lustick, Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank-Gaza [Ithaca, N.Y., 1993]).
4 Greene, WMQ 64: 249, 248.
5 Ibid., 247, 250. A second strand of postcolonial scholarship, akin to what has become known as subaltern studies, focuses on social movements that seek emancipation from the state rather than the replication and appropriation of the same centralizing formations that revolutionaries fight to topple. Historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker offer an example (Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic [Boston, 2000]). The authors present a sweeping transnational history tracing subversive forces that resisted and challenged state control. The activities of various dispossessed groups crossed the temporal and geographic boundaries that have commonly served as the frameworks of historical narratives, transcending the disruptions of nations and emancipations and continuing across political revolution. This approach merges well with one of the most suggestive points of Greene's essay, "a recognition of the profound continuities between the colonial and national segments of the American past" (Greene, WMQ 64: 248–49). Works such as Partha Chatterjee's classic Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World argue that the discourse of independence in decolonizing movements in fact derives from what it seeks to repudiate, since it depends on reproducing forms of nationalism for its success (Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse [London, 1986]).
6 Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi, India, 1983), 3 (quotation). For deconstructionist literary criticism and psychoanalytic theory, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York, 1987); Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London, 1990); Bhahba, The Location of Culture (London, 1994). David Waldstreicher considered the ambivalences of early national culture and politics in Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997). Sean X. Goudie suggests the use of the term "paracolonialism" to analyze the unique relationship between the emerging American nation and the West Indies (Goudie, Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic [Philadelphia, 2006], 11). By making this distinction, he stresses the point that one cannot simply import and apply postcolonial theory to the U.S. context. Andy Doolen argues that, in the eighteenth century, slavery, war, and territorial expansion were integral components of a continuing imperial context in America (Doolen, Fugitive Empire: Locating Early American Imperialism [Minneapolis, Minn., 2005]). Note also that the chronology of his study extends from the late colonial to the early national period. Ed White argues for the importance of the racialized backcountry developed during the colonial period in creating the nation (White, The Backcountry and the City: Colonization and Conflict in Early America [Minneapolis, Minn., 2005]). David Kazanjian looks at the cultural and political process through which America went from settler colony to neocolonial power (Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America [Minneapolis, Minn., 2003]). The work of earlier historians such as William Appleman Williams and Richard W. Van Alstyne and have obvious purchase here as well, insofar as they defined the new nation as imperial in its origins (see Williams, The Contours of American History [Cleveland, Ohio, 1961]; Van Alstyne, Empire and Independence: The International History of the American Revolution [New York, 1965]). See also Marc Egnal, A Mighty Empire: The Origins of the American Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988); Francis Jennings, The Creation of America: Through Revolution to Empire (Cambridge, 2000).
7 The best work produced by material culture scholars is grounded in detailed historical research. Often, when someone's primary goal is establishing the provenance of a valuable object, historical context is sorely missing. In other cases, however, historians could learn a great deal from the work of material culture scholars and museum curators who produce first-rate scholarship in exhibition catalogs. Historians such as Richard Bushman, John Demos, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich have led the way in applying the insights of material culture to studies of early America, peering under the lids of chest drawers usually encased in museum displays or hidden in family attics. Though these scholars did not address questions of American postcolonialism, their work sheds light on the social, economic, political, and cultural concerns of colonial and postcolonial Americans that remain elusive in textual sources.
8 In several of his pieces, Jack P. Greene has emphasized the dynamic nature of exchange between colony and metropole. See Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens, Ga., 1986); Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial, Political, and Constitutional History (Charlottesville, Va., 1994); Amy Turner Bushnell and Greene, "Peripheries, Centers, and the Construction of Early Modern American Empires: An Introduction," in Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820, ed. Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy (New York, 2002), 1–14. Speaking specifically about the realm of literature, the authors of the collection The Empire Writes Back assert that "since the codes are European there is an impulse to compete, on Europe's terms, for literary recognition which will validate the New World in the eyes of the Old" (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Empire Writes Back, 135).
9 My forthcoming book uses material culture to examine how struggles for independence moved from battlefield to breakfast table as postrevolutionary Americans grappled with the problem of cobbling together a national identity from their British inheritance (Kariann Yokota, "Unbecoming British: Culture and National Identity in Post-Revolutionary America"). As David Lloyd has shown in regard to Ireland, the nationalist movement followed a different temporal course than those of other movements such as gender, labor, and manufacturing (Lloyd, "Regarding Ireland in a Postcolonial Framework," in Ireland After History [Notre Dame, Ind., 1999]). Commenting on a similar pattern in a different place and time, Frantz Fanon closed The Wretched of the Earth with the following plea: "Come, then, comrades, the European game has finally ended; we must find something different. We today can do everything, so long as we do not imitate Europe, so long as we are not obsessed by the desire to catch up with Europe" (Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth [Grove Press, N.Y., 1963], 252–53).
10 "Weavers and Scriblers," [Hartford] Connecticut Courant, and Weekly Intelligencer, Oct. 27, 1788, 4; Kenneth R. Bowling and Helen E. Veit, eds., The Diary of William Maclay and other Notes on Senate Debates, vol. 9, Documentary History of the First Federal Congress of the United States of America: 4 March 1789–3 March 1791 (Baltimore, 1988), 13. On the production of broadcloth, see Florence M. Montgomery, Textiles in America, 1650–1870 ... (New York, 1984), 177–79. On the symbolism of wearing homespun in lieu of European cloth, see Linda Baumgarten, What Clothes Reveal: The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America (New Haven, Conn., 2002), 76, 96.
11 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, N.J., 1993).
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