3 results
14 - Ulster, 1785/Pennsylvania, 1817/ Ulster, 1845: James McHenry’s Pa limpsest of Anglo Settler Colonialism
- Edited by Edward Sugden, King's College London
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- Book:
- Crossings in Nineteenth-Century American Culture
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 26 November 2022
- Print publication:
- 30 June 2022, pp 222-245
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Summary
The literal and literary Atlantic crossings of the man billed as the first ‘Irish- American’ novelist (Fanning 1999: 43), James McHenry, provide a perhaps unique window on a long history of the ‘plantation’ of Anglo-Reform culture. That is, the going-on-a-millennium experiment in the exogenous installation of a culture projecting itself as the smartest form of Christian civilisation and thus both the worthiest of and tidiest at replication. That experiment began with the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman attempt to make over the Indigenous Irish way of life – of which an idiosyncratic Catholicism was an organic part but to which it is not reducible – with cutting-edge religious orders and agricultural schemes (Elliott 2001: 3–56; Gillingham 2000; Gillingham 2001: 27–9, 117–18; Montaño 2011); resumed in the sixteenth century with the freshly Protestant English (re)conquest of Ireland that presaged the colonisation of North America (Beers 1985; Canny 1988; Canny 2001; Ellis 1998; Horning 2013); and culminated in the nineteenth-century genesis of nothing less than a world – an ‘Anglo-World’ – through (1) ‘the settler revolution’, an unprecedented period of ‘explosive colonization’ (Belich 2009) predicated on the ‘elimination’ of Indigenous peoples (Kauanui 2016; Wolfe 2006) in what are now consequently known as Australia, Canada, the United States, and beyond; and (2) the first full subsumption of the original Anglo settler colony, Ireland, within the British empire under the 1800 Act of Union, a legacy that persists – for now – in the political subdivision of the island.
McHenry's cultural biography gave him a unique perspective on and stake in this centuries-long development of Anglo settler colonialism. He was a particular sort of ‘Irish-American’ – a tail-end participant in ‘the earliest example of European mass migration overseas’ (Belich 2009: 60): the relocation of Scots Presbyterians across a ‘long’ eighteenth century from one Anglo settler colony – the northern Irish province of Ulster – to another: North America, Pennsylvania in particular (Dolan 2008: 3–63; Griffin 2001; Ridner 2018). Isolated by rocky shores and a band of drumlins, Ulster has served as a cradle of Native Irish civilisation (Bardon 1992: 1–24).
Chapter 1 - The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism and the Case for the Americocene
- from Part I - America as Apocalypse
- Edited by John Hay, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
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- Book:
- Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture
- Published online:
- 03 December 2020
- Print publication:
- 17 December 2020, pp 17-29
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Summary
The intellectual territory of “apocalypse in American literature and culture” rightfully belongs to indigenous peoples as a result of their historical experiences of what historian Gerald Horne has recently called “the apocalypse of settler colonialism.” Indigenous speculative fiction occupies an epistemically privileged standpoint for historicizing and theorizing the planetary apocalypse that we all (and many nonhuman others besides) increasingly face in the form of biospheric deterioration—a deterioration so profound that it registers in the geologic record, prompting the formulation of a new epoch, the Anthropocene. This “end of the world” follows directly from the rapacious practices of dispossession and accumulation that ended indigenous worlds. This essay decolonizes the Anthropocene by coining the term Americocene to pinpoint a specific process of settler apotheosis as a key cause of our planetary plight. The designation Americocene traces the environmental degradation inscribed in the geologic record to the eschatological inscription of settler life into indigenous lands. Now more of us can see what indigenous peoples have always been in a position to see—namely, that the systems of production and social reproduction variously written into the earth by settler apotheosis promise not the advent of the millennium but the protraction of apocalypse.
Cosmic American Studies
- Jared Hickman
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- Journal:
- PMLA / Publications of the Modern Language Association of America / Volume 128 / Issue 4 / October 2013
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 23 October 2020, pp. 968-975
- Print publication:
- October 2013
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There is not only an existential poignancy but also an intellectual piquancy to the 1950 suicide note of F. O. Matthiessen, one of the founders of American studies: “I am depressed over world conditions. I am a Christian and a Socialist. I am against any order which interferes with that objective” (“F. O. Matthiessen”). Matthiessen attributed his fateful decision to a situation—the Cold War—in which it increasingly seemed difficult to assert credibly and pursue effectively a socialist agenda without being presumed or pressured to hold commitments to materialism, atheism, and secularism. The dominant narrative of American studies is that the Cold War gave the field its life—the ideological impetus and institutional infrastructure to produce and peddle a sophisticated version of American exceptionalism (Radway 47-49; Wise 308-12). But Matthiessen's tragic case suggests instead that the Cold War may have killed American studies, at least a possible version of it. Matthiessen's fatal dilemma, I want respectfully to suggest, might instruct us how to reconstruct the history and future of a field whose “bread-and-butter concerns” have always included religion (Stein and Murison 1; cf. Modern). Matthiessen's political credentials as a socialist were bona fide, and his intellectual inclinations were toward deep historicist analysis, but he couldn't commit to Marxism, despite his frank acknowledgment of its indispensable contribution not only to intellectual culture but also to his own thinking. Clearly, personal religious reasons played a role—“I am a Christian, not through upbringing but by conviction, and I find any materialism inadequate” (Matthiessen, “Education” 180). But I want to underscore Matthiessen's intellectual objections, which arose from the evidence of his historical inquiry into American literature and culture. That is to say, I want to distinguish between how his theological convictions may have prejudiced him against Marxism's secularist teleology and how his scholarly investigation of American literature and culture raised legitimate questions about Marxism's implicit secularization narrative. In reviews of the Marxist literary histories of his Americanist colleagues V. F. Calverton and Granville Hicks, Matthiessen complained of their inability to comprehend what he called “the main development of religious idealism from Edwards through the transcendental movement” and “the strain of affirmation of the ideal that runs from the seventeenth century to the twentieth” (Responsibilities 187, 195). The secularist premises of Marxist analysis—at least in the crude form espoused by Calverton and Hicks—seemed to Matthiessen blunt instruments with which to accomplish deep understanding of the pronounced “religious idealism” of American literature and culture.