Nancy Shoemaker. Native American Whalemen and the World

Herman Melville’s character Tashtego, “an unmixed Indian from Gay Head” (Moby Dick, chap. 25), is never so very distant from the horizon in Nancy Shoemaker’s important and challenging new book Native American Whalemen and the World: Indigenous Encounters and the Contingency of Race. Characters like Tashtego inspire examinations into the lived experiences and historical memory of Native American whalemen as they prospected the south seas for the viscous fluid that illuminated and lubricated nineteenth-century American homes and industry. And so in a fluidly written tour de force of deep research and analysis (notably a massive database that she created using her research), Nancy Shoemaker follows those whalemen on ship and land, in grog houses and beach redoubts, and at home, wherever that turned out to be. As with Moby Dick, whaling in Native American Whalemen and the World serves as a backdrop for much deeper ruminations. One of our most insightful historians of race and colonialism, Shoemaker now turns her keen analytical eye to “variable configurations of race that nineteenth-century New England whalemen encountered” (6). She thus focuses on “the uneven and often contrary application of racial assertions in different settings, and the consequent disjunctures between racial ideas and lived experience” (6), and joins a vibrant conversation unraveling relationships between situation and condition, where race is configured and reconfigured through location and time. Like James J. Buss and Coll Thrush (to mention just two), Shoemaker is interested in the ways that language, history-making, and history-telling shape and sustain colonial projects.

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Contingency · Epistemology · Genealogy · Indigenous · Manifest destiny · Native american · Political science · Politics · Race (biology) · Sociology · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies