Assimilation and Subversion in Earlier American Literature is a
collection of essays that explores the complex interplay between
dominance and oppression. Spanning the "long" early American
period, the collection considers texts written from the seventeenth
through the nineteenth centuries. Native Americans, Puritan
ministers and Puritan "whores," Barbadian and transatlantic slaves:
the early American figures who populate these essays are talking
about power, and creating-in writing-a dynamic and complicated
relationship between the mainstream and the margin. The essays in
this collection offer a collective paradigm for thinking about
these issues, one in which "assimilation" and "subversion" are not
so much oppositional as they are closely aligned, codependent, and
mutually defining. Though these essays do maintain the dialectical
play between the two terms, they offer new ways to think about
dialectic itself. The goal of the collection is to give readers
useful models for approaching texts by nondominant subjects, models
that consider the polyphonic flow of power and the possibility of
simultaneous multiple, conflicting, and even oppositional effects
of oppression.The collection begins by looking at complex
representations of the Christianized Native American, moves through
a discussion of "creolized" West Indian and "converted" African
slave narratives, explores the ironic uses of sentimentality in a
nineteenth-century novel about slavery, and ends with a study of
female criminality and the way that it both subverted and
reinscribed dominant Puritan orthodoxy. The liminal spaces where
assimilation becomes subversion (and vice versa) go by many
difference names in this collection: the contact zone, the
transcultured, the hybrid, the syncretic, the zombie, the pardodic,
the parabolic, the transgressive, the framed. Each of the
contributors works to find ways to describe this space without
simultaneously closing it down. It can be a significant rhetorical
challenge to articulate what might ultimately be a paradox, but
this collection aims not only to look at familiar texts in new
ways, but also to think about the critical process in a new way. In
what ways does the critic's own explication of a text undermine and
stabilize the text's coherent meaning? This is, in many ways, a
collection that investigates this methodological question even as
it focuses on the nature of power and how "the oppressed" write
their way into and out of their own oppression.Contributors include
John J. Kucich, Ann M. Brunjes, Nicole N. Aljoe, Robin DeRosa, Mary
Getchell, and Kristina Lucenko.
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