Looking for American Nationhood: A Study of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (original) (raw)
Related papers
Revising the Colonial Discourse in The Last of The Mohicans
Within the framework of postcolonial studies of Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Edward Said, the paper critically examines the entanglements of colonial and racial trajectories in The Last of the Mohicans in order to subvert traditional critical assumptions which categorized the novel as an adventure story or Indian Romance or travel narrative affiliated with a multi-ethnic frontier community. Negotiating the dynamics of colonialism, through the economy of its central trope, the Manichean allegory which creates boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, the paper argues that Cooper's novel, modeled on seventeenth-century captivity narratives, aims to exterminate or marginalize the indigenous American subaltern or associate him/her with a status of cultural decadence and savagery. The paper also illustrates that Cooper's fiction blends the legacies of the colonized and the colonizer to reconstruct a biased narrative integral to the authorial vision of the confrontations between the native Indian community and the European settlers during the American colonial era. Reluctant to introduce a balanced view of the situation on the western frontier, Cooper emphasizes crucial colonizer / colonized constructs engaging cultural trajectories which lead to conflict rather than dialogue between both sides.
Writers such as Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi and Octave Mannoni have used post-colonial psychoanalysis to analyse the interrelations between the political aspects of the colonial situation and the psychological conditions of the colonisers and colonised. However, there has been little research into the development of the national ‘psyche’ of the US as a post-colonial state during the nineteenth century in relation to its own brand of imperialism, namely Indian removal. This paper draws on the recent post-colonial psychoanalytic methodology of Ranjana Khanna to extrapolate how US nineteenth century fiction dealt with the legitimacy of national expansion and the American state pertaining to Indian displacement. I will discuss James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and Charles Montgomery Bird’s Nick of the Woods (1837), focusing on how they present historically revisionist accounts of US history according to ideological discourses such as stadialism, savagism and civilisation and Manifest Destiny. I argue that the inassimilable realities of Indian removal haunt the narratives of both novels in terms of melancholia, de-metaphorisation, spectrality and Gothicism despite their overt endorsement of the American nation as a divinely sanctified, civilised institution, distinguished from the hegemonies of Europe.
2016
This thesis interrogates the part played by the figure of ‘the Indian’ in the formation of the U.S. national consciousness as reflected in the nineteenth-century fictional works of James Fenimore Cooper, Robert Montgomery Bird, Lydia Maria Child, Helen Hunt Jackson and Herman Melville. I propose that new understandings can be reached concerning Indian representations and national identity in the selected texts via an approach that combines postcolonial and psychoanalytic theories, in particular as detailed by Ranjana Khanna in Dark Continents (2003). I explore how the national ideals articulated by Cooper, Bird, Child and Jackson are predicated on repression identifiable in historical revisionism, disavowal, ideological rhetoric, generic conventions and so forth, which reflects a melancholic nationalism more generally concerning the colonial subjugation of Native Americans. I demonstrate that where the national origins mythology of The Last of the Mohicans is ‘haunted’ by inassimila...