Reflections on Freedom and Poverty in Sansay's _Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo_

Throughout Sansay’s Secret History, and especially after the flight from the Cape, I kept noticing the repeated praise for the hospitality of the people of Cuba despite their extreme poverty.  This sentiment is, of course, a common one travelers often repeat even today upon returning from the so-called “developing world” (or even the Southern Appalachian region, where the median income is roughly $15,000 per family among rural counties).  Why this constant underscoring of hospitality as a point of reflection from our narrator(s)?

Upon arriving in Barracoa, Mary writes to Burr, “[we] were surprised to see such extreme want in this abode of hospitality” and further reflecting on the state of the Barracoans despite their “want,” says “these good people are happy, for they are contented.  Their poverty is not rendered hideous by the contrast of insolent pride or unfeeling luxury.  Thy dose away their lives in a peaceful obscurity, which if I do not envy, I cannot despise” (107).  Does she wish she envied them?  In other points in the novel, Mary expresses her desire for Clara to find “peace,” and I wonder if this helps paint this story as a reflection on class consciousness amid trauma.  Seemingly, their entire purpose for having relocated to St. Domingo (and further justification for staying on Hispaniola even amid the revolution) involves St. Louis’s desire to make more money, and we see that his avarice does not lead to happiness or hope.  Sansay also draws our attention to the corrupt order of Franciscans, who are supposed to emblemize the virtues of poverty and simplicity (the opposite of “insolent pride and unfeeling luxury”).  There are the noted references to the “savages” and the demand for literature depicting racial violence at the turn of the 19^th century, but isn’t there just as much (or at least quite a lot of) attention to socio-economic disparities and what those differences yield?

As Drexler points out, we see in the Haitian Revolution a confluence of notions of freedom: American as “autonomy,” French as “natural right” where “liberty and equality were conjoined” (14), and Haitian as “freedom from domination” (19).  However, I also see an idea of freedom prevalent in popular religious teaching of the time as “freedom from temptation” or “freedom from sin,” as opposed to the more contemporary popular notion of freedom as something like “being able to do whatever I want.”  Is Clara, in fact, unfree by virtue of more than the obvious domination of her husband and the label of “coquette” Mary laments a great deal? In undeniably reflecting on the notion of freedom as it is shifting in Haiti, I see Sansay also drawing attention to a lack or freedom inherent  in the social caste of which Mary and Clara are a part, and while we rightly see this concept of freedom as having profoundly less at stake than the Haitian revolutionaries, this particular story with this particular narrative perspective seems to wonder if freedom actually lies in economic prosperity that contrasts with the impoverished peoples of the Caribbean.  

Of Difference and the Exceptionalist Fallacy

            Reading this week’s articles (especially the piece by Traister), I had an epiphany that may or may not be true but nevertheless earned the title of “epiphany” in my thinking about American/US Literary scholarship: there is no greater sin in a piece of literature than to make a statement that may or may not be construed as exceptionalism.  I use the word “sin” not because I want to make fun of the zeal with which the field has attacked American exceptionalism, which I think remains an interesting phenomenon that seems to inform a great deal of US literature and, as Traister contends, American Studies scholarship.  I say “sin” because in the process of American cultural critique, it seems we have developed our own preferred dogmas and values (“liberal democracy” for Traister) that we check all objects of critique against with what Paul Riceour, speaking more broadly, rightly called a “hermeneutics of suspicion”.  We (often including me) are often suspicious of any marker in scholarship that claims exceptionalism, but the question I want to raise is whether claims that acknowledge a difference between nations or cultures necessarily leads to exceptionalism.  Does a multicultural framework inevitably lead to exceptionalism, as scholars such as Walter Benn Michaels have suggested in their critiques of “diversity”?

            Traister points to the disciplinary schism between “American Studies” and “Comparative Literature” as a way to demonstrate how the transnational shift in American Studies seems to find cultural difference in itself exceptionalist: “With its pedagogical and critical dependence on national traditions whose integrity is assumed as a point of departure, comp. lit. embodies the problems of nationally identified critical practice that the transnationalization of American Studies seeks to solve” (18).  As the ALH special issue articles demonstrate, nobody seems to be making the argument that the nation does not still hold at least some value in discussing texts transnationally. However, in pointing to Comparative Lit as a discipline that is by definition transnational, I see an acknowledgement of difference among “national traditions” that makes the “full” transnationalization of American Studies difficult for a practitioner to adopt: the “national tradition” of language.  In American Studies, the common language of English, while scholars often include passages in other languages, predominates the transnational discussions, whereas in Comparative Literature, scholars are routinely expected to have fluency in multiple languages relevant to their research interests and read journals and publish in those languages. 

            Maybe one point of agreement, and what Traister seems to be driving at in claiming that some aspects of Transnational American Studies amount to “academic imperialism,” involves universal claims about “Americanness” that, while often sexy and potentially impressive to a reader, tend to ignore at least some group, literary form, or cultural expression that would need to be included in order for such a claim to be universal.  And admitting this limitation in our work admits our own limitations as scholars with the specific sitz im leben we were discussing last week in relation to the “anxiety” of the transnational turn, for me that was something like “Appalachian Suburban.”  Yet, this doesn’t mean that we should not look for and acknowledge the transnational influences on the perhaps regionally distinctive literature we may be inclined to read.  As for me, now is probably as good a time as any to look into some Spanish lessons.

The Borders of Postnationalism

            The term “postnationalism” seemed to jump out at me more than any other oft-used word among the eleven articles we read for this week, each of them charting a new (or “new”) future for American Studies that does not take for granted that nations are fixed entities with essential (if undiscovered) features.  I will admit that I am fairly late to the postnationalism party and have much to learn, having only recently learned of Habermas’s book on the subject and numerous others in various fields.  Yet, one question dogs me regarding the use of postnationalism as a guiding assumption and/or foundation for these lines of inquiry into Early US literature: What is the relationship between the current 21^st Century development toward a globalized, postnational world and our studies of Early American writing?  I wonder if we are not at some level projecting these developments of globalization (with developments in mass media, global commerce, international judicial bodies, and monetary regulation) onto the very different context of the Early American period.

Paula Moya and Ramon Saldivar, in their introduction to the 2003 special issue of Modern Fiction Studies, address the question of postnationalism (and other “post-”s like it) squarely: 

“Despite the current fascination in our disciplinary field for ‘posts’ of all sorts, and despite the need to rethink the presumed integrity and impenetrability of national borders, we argue that the category of the national is still salient for the study of modern literature” (4).  

If there were not some sense of cultural, political, and geographic phenomena demonstrating some striking similarities of behavior and custom among a particular group of people, the notions of hybridity and transnationalism would be null and void.  There would be nothing to hybridize or transverse. Yet Moya and Saldivar note that even Benedict Anderson, in making the bold claim that nations are social constructs, or Imagined Communities, writes that the “idea of the national” is still, “the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time” (4).  To put it another way, how can we be postnational when our Twitter feeds and Facebook profiles still carry national affiliations?  I am looking forward to learning how this process works, as we continue through this course, where we recognize difference while acknowledging the contributions of different American cultures to what we now call US Literature.

I'm looking forward to posting my thoughts on this semester's readings and having this dialogue with my colleagues online!