UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Persistent Futures of Bermudas Past: Genres of Geography and Race in Early America Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4vm6s6f0 Author Fosbury, Timothy Publication Date 2021 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Persistent Futures of Bermudas Past Genres of Geography and Race in Early America A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Timothy Fosbury 2021 © Copyright by Timothy Fosbury 2021 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Persistent Futures of Bermudas Past Genres of Geography and Race in Early America by Timothy Fosbury Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Los Angeles, 2021 Professor Marissa K. López, Chair Persistent Futures of Bermudas Past: Genres of Geography and Race in Early America re- historicizes the construction and contestation of colonial racialization processes in the Anglophone Americas from the perspective of Bermuda. This dissertation establishes the understudied archipelago as a literary and material gateway to the hemisphere that profoundly impacted how race and the future were imagined from North America to the Caribbean. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, writers and settlers positioned Bermuda as the enabling condition of their incessant revisions of whiteness, indigeneity, and historical rights of habitation in their projects of conquest and dispossession throughout America. Writers from John Smith to J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur sustained a literary network of supposed English exceptionalism they believed was revealed by Bermuda’s uniqueness. Across colonial documents, sermons, poems, letters, early histories, proposals, and fiction, scores of writers ii proposed that Bermuda magnified this so-called English extraordinariness and opened colonial and religious futures never before imaginable. Ultimately, colonizers seized upon these aesthetic idealizations of Bermuda to consolidate their power and territorial control in the hemisphere, and, in turn, their narrative hold on who might inhabit America’s possible futures. While Persistent Futures of Bermudas Past is about Bermuda primarily, it is not about Bermuda exclusively. In the first two case studies, I employ comparative methodologies to re- center the archipelago in the histories of settlement and race in the English colonization of the hemisphere in the seventeenth century. In the latter half of the dissertation, I excavate how Bermuda’s colonial history impacted the development of racialized discourses in the early U.S. nation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this manner, Persistent Futures of Bermudas Past shifts the literary and geographic terrains of early American analyses to an understudied location to reject the teleologies of colonial and national triumphs in favor of an anticolonial approach that dismantles the fragile fictions of settler colonialism. This dissertation’s historical and methodological unsettlements magnify the glaring incompleteness of the so-called new world’s historical record and offer new opportunities for confronting the myths of occupation at the moments of their emergence in colonial and early national narratives. iii The dissertation of Timothy Fosbury is approved. Carrie Hyde Christopher Looby Richard A. Yarborough Marissa K. López, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2021 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Prefatory Materials…………………...............................................................................ii-x Introduction…………………………..............................................................................1-25 Chapter One: Richard Norwood and the Natural Genres of a Bermudian America……26-80 Chapter Two: No Vacancy, No Future………………………………………………….81-129 Chapter Three: The Distant Futures of a Bermudian Eighteenth Century……………...130-171 Epilogue: Pauline Hopkins at Bermuda’s End.................................................................172-199 Bibliography.....................................................................................................................200-209 v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS At long last, Persistent Futures of Bermudas Past: Genres of Geography and Race in Early America is completed. It has been a long, winding journey of exploring, starting, stopping, and questioning everything. Along the way, I’ve learned and grown in ways I never expected. Academic labor by nature is largely solitary but never once did I feel isolated in my research and writing. My committee members have been an inspiration. I came to UCLA as a scholar of the novel in the early twentieth century. In his “Post-Reconstruction/Pre-Harlem Renaissance” seminar, Richard Yarborough asked me to think a bit more about why Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces (1900), a novel about Boston at the end of the nineteenth century, begins in eighteenth-century Bermuda. My attempt at an answer became this dissertation, and Richard’s probing questions led me here. The GSRM Chris Looby and I completed together on the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s relationship with Bermuda convinced me to at last commit to early America. Chris’s methodological rigor in historical analysis has been a consistent model of excellence. Carrie Hyde has been an impeccable reader of countless drafts from the prospectus to this final version. Her suggestions on structure, evidence, and language have made me a far better writer than I ever imagined I could be. Marissa López has been the ideal chair. She has spent countless hours helping me work through vague ideas, offering meticulous feedback on my writing, and challenging me to always confront what America even is in the first place. She understands the humanity and precarity of completing graduate studies at this moment in history, and this dissertation would not have happened without her. My research was made possible by generous financial support from UCLA and several other institutions. At UCLA, two Graduate Summer Research Fellowships, a Graduate Research vi Mentorship, and two Dissertation Fellowships gave me the resources to explore my first ideas and the time to finish this project in its latter stages. Other Languages, Other Americas, the Summer Seminar in the History of the Book in American Culture led by Kirsten Silva Gruesz and Anna Brickhouse at the American Antiquarian Society, provided the momentum I needed to begin writing. Short-term research fellowships at the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Grace M. Hunt Fellowship, and the American Antiquarian Society brought me to the archives necessary to actually make this thing happen. My year-long residential fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies was irreplaceable in my development as an early Americanist and crucial in so many ways to the completion of Persistent Futures of Bermudas Past. Portions of the first and third chapters were published as “Bermuda’s Persistent Futures” in American Literary History. I am eternally grateful to Gordon Hutner for his generous comments and suggestions that gave me the perspective I desperately needed to figure out what is I was saying. I completed this dissertation under tumultuous historical and material conditions. Trump has come and gone, but the white nationalism he emboldened persists and will likely grow more insidious in the coming years. COVID-19 has irrevocably entered our disease ecology. Environmental apocalypse looms. The academic job market has collapsed, and it is not clear if this profession will exist as we have known it in five or ten years. As a scholar of empire’s historical futures, it is not lost on me that we live in a time when the future so often feels disheartening. In all this precarity and turmoil, however, I have been surrounded by friends and colleagues who have offered their unwavering support and made the world a bit brighter every day. vii At UCLA, Dan Couch, Sam Sommers, Will Clark, and Jordan Wingate embraced this confused Americanist in his first year of graduate school and showed him the ropes. Jay Jin has been a fantastic friend for years. Our lunches, basketball games, and walks around campus made graduate school so much more bearable. Shouhei Tanaka has probably read more of my writing at every stage than anyone else. He has offered invaluable feedback, but I still won’t let him drive left on the court. My friends in the Futures Group, Samantha Morse and Mike Vignola, were there at the beginning and really got my first two chapters moving. When I met my cohort in 2014, it was like we’d been friends our whole lives. Elizabeth, Jessica, Chelsea, Yangjung, Comfort, Becky, Abraham, and Joe, I couldn’t have done this without you. The McNeil Center was where I really became an early Americanist. Many thanks to Dan Richter and Laura Keenan Spero for the opportunity and the enlightening conferences and seminars. Amy Baxter-Bellamy and Barbara Natello were always available to answer my millions of questions. My fellow fellows Zara, Michael, Casey, Liz, Ittai, Kyle, Kellan, Lila, Elise, Ajay, Nicole, Peter, and Simeon were an inspiration every day at the center. I am forever grateful for everything I learned from all of you at official events, in the bro corner, and around the table at our informal happy hours. In spring 2020, some friends had the brilliant idea for a project that became Insurrect! Radical Thinking in Early American