Jonathan Elmer ON LINGERING and BEING LAST Race and Sovereignty in the New World On Lingering and Being Last ................. 16959$ $$FM 08-11-08 15:16:26 PS PAGE i ................. 16959$ $$FM 08-11-08 15:16:27 PS PAGE ii On Lingering and Being Last Race and Sovereignty in the New World Jonathan Elmer fordham university press new york 2008 ................. 16959$ $$FM 08-11-08 15:16:27 PS PAGE iii Copyright ᭧ 2008 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the publisher. Printed in the United States of America 10090854321 First edition ................. 16959$ $$FM 08-11-08 15:16:27 PS PAGE iv contents Acknowlegments vii Introduction 1 1. On Lingering and Being Last: Aphra Behn and the Deterritorialized Sovereign 21 2. The Future Perfect King: Olaudah Equiano and the Poetics of Experience 50 3. Was Billy Black? Herman Melville and the Captive King 78 4. Jefferson’s Convulsions: Archiving Logan 118 5. Sovereignty, Race, and Melancholy in the Transatlantic Romantic Novel 147 6. Treaties, Trauma, Trees: The Dream of Hadwin 187 Notes 219 Index 249 v ................. 16959$ CNTS 08-11-08 15:16:33 PS PAGE v acknowledgments I began work on this book a decade ago, during a year’s residence as a Fellow at Cornell’s Society for the Humanities. I thank the Society for its support, and especially Dominick LaCapra, Lyndsey Stonebridge, and Mary Jacobus for their advice and intellectual generosity during that year. I have also benefited over the years from the chance to share my work at many conferences and gatherings, and I thank hosts and interlocutors from Bielefeld, Germany, to Eugene, Oregon. I also spent several wonderful days at Dartmouth’s Futures of American Studies Institute. I thank Don Pease for the invitation, and for his encouragement and advice. I wish to thank Helen Tartar, for her continued interest in my work, and Fordham University Press. Some of what is now Chapter 4 was first pub- lished in diacritics 28.4 (1998) as ‘‘The Archive, the Native American, and Jefferson’s Convulsions.’’ Parts of Chapter 5 have also appeared in print, in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 40.1/2 (2007). I thank Len Tennenhouse for the invitation to contribute to this issue, and for general support. Indiana University was a wonderfully supportive institution during the writing of this book, twice offering me release time: I am grateful to the President’s Arts and Humanities Fellowship Committee, as well as the Col- lege Arts and Humanities Institute, for their support. Indiana is also an encouraging environment in which to pursue interdisciplinary discussion, and I have grown immeasurably through my conversations with colleagues at the Center for High-Energy Metaphysics, and at the Center for Eigh- teenth-Century Studies, this last generously supported by the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana. I have shared work-in-progress several times with the remarkable group of scholars and students at the Center. I wish to express a global thanks to this group and to the various visitors we have vii ................. 16959$ $ACK 08-11-08 15:16:37 PS PAGE vii viii Acknowledgments hosted at our annual May Workshops, for all the intellectual ferment they have provided. But I must also single out, as especially helpful to me at one point or another, my friends Kon Dierks, Constance Furey, Sarah Knott, Deidre Lynch, Richard Nash, Janet Sorensen, and last but not least Dror Wahrman, a dynamo of intellectual energy and institutional creativity. Other friends at Indiana have read and responded to earlier drafts of portions of this book and have offered essential companionship. I thank Ed Comentale, Jen Fleissner, Paul Gutjahr, George Hutchinson, Josh Kates, and Bill Rasch. I am especially grateful to Susan Gubar for her friendship, her encouragement, and the humane guidance she has offered over the past seventeen years at Indiana. I want to acknowledge four friends with whom I have shared not just ideas but life itself over the last decade and more. Mary Favret and Andrew Miller have been the best of colleagues, and much, much more, my entire time at Indiana: we have grown up together. I have enjoyed the consistently invigorating intellectual conversation of Elizabeth Maddock Dillon since graduate school days: without it, and all her encouragement and good advice, this book would not have been completed. Michel Chaouli I have known even longer, and for the past seven years I have been lucky to have him as a colleague at Indiana. Our weekly lunches, in which we talk about family and friends, jobs and writing, but mostly about ideas, have been a joy. This book has taken shape during a period of momentous change in my life. My parents, Glenn and Felicia Elmer, both passed away after I had begun this book and before I finished it. I am lucky to have two brothers, Tad and Jamie, with whom I can share all ups and downs, and who always manage to convey their belief in me, even when they have no idea what I am talking about. My wife, Alexandra, is an essential part of everything I am and do, my daily guide in the search for balance and perspective. Na- thaniel was in kindergarten and Lydia only two when I began work on this book in Ithaca. They are both now teenagers, and both already striking out on their own paths. They make me incredibly proud, and I dedicate this book to them. ................. 16959$ $ACK 08-11-08 15:16:37 PS PAGE viii On Lingering and Being Last ................. 16959$ HFTL 08-11-08 15:16:40 PS PAGE ix ................. 16959$ HFTL 08-11-08 15:16:40 PS PAGE x ................. 16959$ CNTS 08-11-08 15:16:33 PS PAGE vi Introduction Sovereignty seems to be everywhere these days, and no one is very happy about it. Political theorists, cultural observers, historians, scholars of inter- national relations, lawyers, anthropologists, literary critics—all approach the dilemmas of sovereign power with a mixture of urgency and frustration. Social theorist William Rasch titles his book Sovereignty and Its Discontents, and anthropologist Aihwa Ong worries about sovereignty’s ‘‘mutations.’’1 Political scientist Stephen D. Krasner uses the same phrase as Rasch to begin his exasperated introduction to what he calls the ‘‘organized hypoc- risy’’ of sovereignty.2 His discontent with sovereignty is that we never seem to know what we’re talking about when we use the term. Is sovereignty about (formal) legitimacy or (practical) authority? Does sovereignty require the ability to control the flow of people and goods across a territorial bor- der, is it primarily a principle of international recognition, or does its es- sence lie in its power to regulate the lives and welfare of a state’s citizens? According to Krasner, even the so-called Westphalian model, according to 1 ................. 16959$ INTR 08-11-08 15:16:44 PS PAGE 1 2 Introduction which sovereign states—originally the European absolutist states of the seventeenth century—tolerate and recognize each other internationally on the condition that each states’ internal affairs are protected from outside intervention, is of dubious analytical use: ‘‘The most important empirical conclusion of the present study,’’ he writes, ‘‘is that the principles associated with both Westphalian and international legal sovereignty have always been violated’’ (24). In other words, sovereignty names a fiction of state integrity that has never coincided with practice. Historian James J. Sheehan, dedicating his 2005 Presidential Address to the American Historical Association to ‘‘The Problem of Sovereignty in European History,’’ also points to the mystifications surrounding the con- cept of the state: ‘‘The state was and is not history’s natural telos. The emer- gence of states was neither inevitable nor uniform nor irreversible.’’ He urges that we ‘‘move beyond the handful of Western European states whose quite exceptional experience provides both our political vocabulary and our historiographical models.’’3 Sheehan thus joins a chorus of other voices who say that the fictions of state sovereignty have absorbed us for too long. ‘‘We all know the fascination that the love, or horror, of the state exercises today,’’ wrote Michel Foucault in 1977.4 It is a ‘‘fascination’’ ultimately with a poetic trope, Foucault suggests, with the personification of the ‘‘cold mon- ster we see confronting us’’ (220). Foucault’s attempt to extricate himself from this fascination is the burden of most of his research after Discipline and Punish. But even as he developed his analyses of biopower and govern- mentality as efforts to historicize and denaturalize the ‘‘cold monster’’ of state sovereignty, Foucault acknowledged that ‘‘sovereignty is far from being eliminated by the emergence of a new art of government . ; on the contrary, the problem of sovereignty is made more acute than ever’’ (218).5 Foucault confirms Sheehan’s view that because our very ‘‘political vocabu- lary’’ and ‘‘historiographical models’’ are bound up with this conceptually vague notion, it is well-nigh impossible to evade it altogether. Much of the criticism of the concept of sovereignty has come from those who, like Sheehan, see it as an expression of Eurocentrism.