Sorting Disciplinary Boundaries

Bibliographic Data

ID9450475
AuthorsCatherine A Corman (corresponding author)
Year2000
Volume52
Issue3
Pages567-576
Publication date2000-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0003-0678 • E-ISSN: 1080-6490
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/aq.2000.0030
OpenAlexW2079915084
LanguageEN
References cited13

The Insistence of the Indian: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Culture. By Susan Scheckel. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. 197 pages. $29.50 (cloth). $16.95 (paper). In 1978, Robert J. Berkhofer, Jr., published The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present. A landmark text in the fields of intellectual history and American studies, The White Man's Indian was the first synthetic work to demonstrate that "Indian" is culturally constructed, a product of historically situated imaginations rather than being a fixed category with biological determinants. Like so many of the big books of the myth-symbol school, The White Man's Indian eschewed study of specific individuals and events and instead scrutinized specific texts, looking to them to gauge popular belief. Berkhofer anticipated readers' possible frustration with this approach when, in his introduction, he wrote that "[i]f ideas seem disembodied from the social groups holding them, . . . this results as much from lacunae in the literature as from my proclivity to concentrate on the quintessential patterns of White understanding of the first Americans." 1 Much has changed in the intervening two decades since Berkhofer published The White Man's Indian. White men have become "Euro-Americans" deserving their own studies of identity construction and cultural relativism. 2 The generic category of "the Indian" has dissolved into a multiplicity of individual identities, each with sufficient agency [End Page 567] and voice to tell specific, local stories about what Indians thought of themselves, not just about what whites thought of them. 3 Scholars who trade in written texts have incorporated methodological insights and techniques from diverse fields including history of the book, material culture analysis, ethnography, reader response theory, social history, and performance studies in an effort to reconnect ideas to the persons who may actually have thought them. 4 In short, the trend in the past twenty-two years has been to fill in the lacunae and at least metaphorically embody the ideas, rather than to concentrate on what Berkhofer refers to as "quintessential patterns." That said, the tension between searching for embodiment and identifying patterns continues to surface in some of the most provocative new works in cultural studies. As Susan Scheckel's new book demonstrates, those of us trying to get a handle on what our forebears thought and believed continue to struggle to find ways to use convincing evidence. Scheckel's study led me to consider three other recently published works that further explore the ways scholars respond to such tensions. I found that the way the authors of these works approach the desire to identify big patterns and embody ideas is, in many ways, determined by disciplinary boundaries. Or, perhaps better said: if we ever wonder how to tell who among us belongs in the English department and who in history, we might do well to inspect our attitudes towards the concept of embodying ideas. I have focused on The Insistence of the Indian to highlight a particular strategy concerning literary texts, and I will offer, by comparison, glimpses of three other new studies of nationalism and identity that seem to me particularly helpful in delineating the disciplinary division I am trying to describe: Laura Rigal's The American Manufactory, Phil Deloria's Playing Indian, and David Waldstreicher's In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes. All four works are concerned with issues of race, class, and politics, but the latter two, which define themselves as "histories," are more preoccupied with embodying those ideas than the first two, which declare themselves to be literary studies. Although she has traveled a world away from the formalist criticism of Berkhofer's generation, Susan Scheckel nevertheless finds herself in Berkhofer's backyard, more interested in "quintessential patterns" than in specific bodies with particular ideas. An assistant professor of English at the University of Memphis, Scheckel practices a decidedly New Historicist brand of literary criticism in The Insistence of the [End Page 568] Indian, in which she finds intriguing ways to construct exchanges

Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy · Art · Discipline · Epistemology · Identity (music · Mythology · Relativism · Social science · Sociology · Symbol (formal · White (mutation · Anthropology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Classics · Gender Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Philosophy

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