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Quantifiable citizenship—in the form of birth certificates, census forms, and immigration quotas—is so ubiquitous that today it appears ahistorical. Yet before the modern colonial era, there was neither a word for “population” in the sense of numbers of people, nor agreement that monarchs should count their subjects. Much of the work of naturalizing the view that people can be represented as populations took place far outside government institutions and philosophical treatises. It occurred, instead, in the work of colonial writers such as Mary Rowlandson, who found, in the act of counting the “vast numbers” of Indians who held her captive, a way to imagine fixed boundaries between intermingling groups. This book explores the imaginative, personal, and narrative writings that performed the cultural work of normalizing the enumeration of bodies. By repositioning and unearthing a literary prehistory of population science, the book shows that representing individuals as numbers was a central element of colonial projects. Early colonial writings that describe routine, and even intimate, interactions offer a window into the way people wove the quantifiable forms of subjectivity made available by population counts into everyday life. Whether trying to make sense of plantation slavery, frontier warfare, rapid migration, or global commerce, writers framed questions about human relationships across different cultures and generations in terms of population.

Postcolonial historical fiction offers readers valuable resources for thinking the prehistory of our present. The genre’s treatment of colonialism as geographically omnivorous yet temporally “out of joint” with itself gives it a special purchase on the continuities between the colonial era and our own. These features also enable the genre to distill from our colonial pasts the evanescent, utopian intimations of a properly postcolonial future. Critique and Utopia in Postcolonial Historical Fiction arrives at these insights by juxtaposing novels from the Atlantic world with books from the Indian subcontinent. Attending to the links across these regions, Forter develops luminous readings of novels by Patrick Chamoiseau, J. G. Farrell, Amitav Ghosh, Marlon James, Hari Kunzru, Toni Morrison, Marlene van Niekerk, Arundhati Roy, Kamila Shamsie, and Barry Unsworth. He shows how these works not only transform our understanding of the colonial past and the futures that might issue from it, but also contribute to pressing debates in postcolonial theory—debates about the politics of literary forms, the links between cycles of capital accumulation and the emergence of new genres, the meaning of “working through” traumas in the postcolonial context, the relationship between colonial and panoptical power, the continued salience of hybridity and mimicry for the study of colonialism, and the tension between national liberation struggles and transnational forms of solidarity. Beautifully written and meticulously theorized, Critique and Utopia in Postcolonial Historical Fiction will be of interest to students of world literature, Marxist critics, postcolonial theorists, and thinkers of the utopian.

This book considers the extent to which the dispersal and circulation—indeed, the propagation—of information and opinion across the various media of the eighteenth century helped speed the flow of transatlantic republicanism. Long a pejorative word since its associations with flag—waving and jingoism, propaganda would hardly seem a useful concept for understanding democracy. After all, spreading false information, manipulating citizens, and other propaganda techniques are preferred by totalitarian states, not democratic ones. This book questions such conventional wisdom by examining how the formation of popular consent and public opinion in early America relied on the spirited dissemination of rumor, forgery, and invective. Instead of pinning meaning to Enlightenment rationality or national consensus, propaganda infused print culture with the ferment of transatlantic republicanism to widen political discourse beyond either the strictly empirical or official public opinion. The spread of Revolutionary material in the form of newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, letters, songs, and poems across British North America created multiple networks that spawned new and often radical ideas about political communication. These networks also encompassed the Caribbean and France after 1789, which became flash points for reflecting on the changing meanings of the American Revolution. Across the Atlantic of the late eighteenth century, communication itself became revolutionary in ways that revealed circulation to be propaganda’s most vital content. By examining the kinetic aspects of print culture, the book shows how the mobility of letters, pamphlets, and other text amounts to political activity par excellence.

This book argues that Asian American intellectuals have idealized Asian America, ignoring its saturation with capitalist practices. The idealization of Asian America means that Asian American intellectuals can neither grapple with Asian American ideological diversity nor recognize their own involvement with capitalist practices such as “panethnic entrepreneurship”, the selling of race and racial identity. The book's controversial thesis contradicts the widespread view among Asian American intellectuals — a class that includes academics, artists, politicians, and activists — that contemporary Asian America is a place of resistance to capitalist and racist exploitation. Making its case through a wide range of Asian American literature, which remains a critical arena of cultural production for Asian Americans, the book demonstrates that the literature embodies the complexities, conflicts, and potential future options of Asian American culture and politics.

From their earliest encounters in the Americas, Europeans struggled to make sense of the words spoken by the numerous indigenous tribes that surrounded them. Unscripted America recounts a colonial struggle between peoples of European descent who aspired to map native languages according to Christian and Enlightenment cosmologies and indigenous resistance to this ascribed meaning. Unscripted America reconstructs an archive of indigenous language texts in order to present a new account of their impact of comparative philology on the formation of US literary culture. American Indian language texts reveal poignant and contradictory histories of preservation through erasure: each stands as a record of colonial destruction as well as an archive ready for recovery and recuperation. Unscripted America places American Indian languages within transatlantic intellectual history, while also demonstrating how American letters emerged in the 1810s through 1830s via a complex and hitherto unexplored engagement with the legacies and aesthetic possibilities of indigenous words. What scholars have more traditionally understood through the Romantic ideology of the noble savage, a vessel of antiquity among dying populations, was in fact a palimpsest of still-living indigenous populations whose presence in American literature remains traceable through words.

This book explores the career and legacy of Don Luis de Velasco, an early modern indigenous translator of the sixteenth-century Atlantic world who traveled far and wide and experienced nearly a decade of Western civilization before acting decisively against European settlement. The book attends specifically to the interpretive and knowledge-producing roles played by Don Luis as a translator, acting not only in Native-European contact zones but in a complex arena of interindigenous transmission of information about the hemisphere. The book argues for the conceptual and literary significance of unsettlement, a term enlisted here both in its literal sense as the thwarting or destroying of settlement, and as a heuristic for understanding a wide range of texts related to settler colonialism, including those that recount the story of Don Luis as it is told and retold in a wide array of diplomatic, religious, historical, epistolary, and literary writings from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Tracing accounts of this elusive and complex unfounding father from the colonial era as they unfold across the centuries, This book addresses the problems of translation at the heart of his story and speculates on the implications of the broader, transhistorical afterlife of Don Luis for the present and future of hemispheric American studies.

Why has Revolutionary literary studies largely ignored the writings of those who opposed the American Rebellion? This study of the literature of politics reconsiders the place of the British American Loyalists in early American literary history. By imagining the Revolution as an episode in transatlantic literary history, it explores the relations between aesthetics and politics during a crucial transitional period in which both Loyalists and Patriots were redefining their respective relations to “English” culture. Rather than pointing the ambivalence expressed by Loyalists writings, however, it argues for the dislocation and alienation Loyalists experienced, and thereby challenges the traditional image of this group as the only true Anglophiles in British America. Each chapter goes on to discuss an important literary and aesthetic form that shaped—and was shaped by—Revolutionary politics. It recasts the literature of politics as the place where British Americans were also working out their cultural identities and identifications with the British nation.