Keri Holt

All Parts of the Union I Considered My Home: Federal Literacy in The Algerine Captive

My ardent wish is that my fellow citizens may profit by my misfortunes. If they peruse these pages with attention they will perceive the necessity of uniting our federal strength to enforce a due respect among other nations. Let us, one and all, endeavor to sustain the general government. . . . Our first object is union among ourselves. For to no nation besides the United States can that antient saying be more emphatically applied: BY UNITING WE STAND, BY DIVIDING WE FALL. —Royall Tyler, The Algerine Captive (1797)

Formations of United States Colonialism

(104) and the novel “strives to imagine ways to combat imperialism’s destructive legacies and projects that will not generate reformulated colonial assumptions and relationships” (109). Another corrective reading, this time of Get a Life by Nadine Gordimer, sees the chief protagonist, Paul, whose “incrementally changing perspective yields... a more optimistic reading of his character and its significance,” and as a result Paul “cannot permanently suppress a growing awareness of the impossibility of separating conservation and social interests ... He is part of the current circumstances from which a new order might be born,” (132). It is good to see some attention paid to this relatively underestimated text. The final and most successful chapter, “The Nature of Violence,” recalls Ken Saro-Wiwa’s activist writings and compares these with recent Niger Delta poetry by Tanure Ojaide and Ogaga Ifowodo, as well as an older text, Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God. The transhistorical conceptions of place and notions of collective identities in Saro-Wiwa’s writing are highlighted through a contrapuntal comparative reading of works from earlier and later periods. While Saro-Wiwa’s texts are seen (positively) as explicating environmental injustices resulting from uneven economic and political relations, Achebe’s text is presented as offering a critique of historical notions of place and identity. Nevertheless, Caminero-Santangelo recognizes the strategic value of relying on such notions for the purposes of mobilizing effective resistance. This groundbreaking study marks a beginning, not an end. Therefore, any criticism that the book could have covered more texts should be dismissed out of hand. The clear and instructive interdisciplinarity of the work serves as a model for potentially rich analyses of additional Anglophone African texts as well as texts in other languages.

Dana Leibsohn and Barbara B. Mundy, editors. Vistas, 1520-1820: Visual Culture in SpanishAmerica/Cultura Visual de Hispanoamérica

even general readers are likely to catch occasional “howlers” in this book, such as the author’s references to “the Machu Picchu Pizarro conquered in 1536” or to Española, New Mexico, as “the first Spanish colonial settlement in what is now the United States” (68, 45). Some readers may also take exception to the author’s style, which ranges from the highly colloquial—in personal anecdotes about his “cousin Eddie,” for example—to the overly dramatic in passages that mix historical/critical scholarship with creative writing of historical fiction (for instance, a “recollection of a near genocide flashed within him [Villagrá], spiraling inward with the force of a vortex, pulling the writer toward nightmare images of eviscerated bodies piled in a tangle” [94]). Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that Padilla’s book brings alive for his modern readers Villagrá’s four-hundred-year-old epic through sympathetic, sensitive, thoughtful, and engaging readings. As such, it is a valuable contribution to the scholarship on Villagrá and the Latino/a literary heritage in the United States more broadly.

Double-Crossings: The Trans-American Patriotism of Francis Berrian

“Double-Crossings: The Trans-American Patriotism of Francis Berrian” examines Timothy Flint’s unusual novel Francis Berrian, or The Mexican Patriot (1826), which tells the story of an itinerant New Englander who joins in the Mexican struggle for independence from Spain. By tracing Berrian’s border-crossing adventures, this essay shows how Flint’s novel re-orients US citizenship in relation to the history and culture of the newly emerging Mexican republic, a move which ultimately encouraged readers to imagine American identity in more hemispheric and multinational terms.