William Boelhower

“I'll teach you how to flow”: On figuring out Atlantic studies

Beginning with two exemplary scenes from Shakespeare and Olaudah Equiano, this essay discusses the rise of the circum-Atlantic world as a fundamental order and a critical space that remains centerless and ultimately unstructured. It relies on the figura of the ocean-going ship and the mappemonde as semiotic operators that are instrumental in creating, measuring, and representing Atlantic space. It then explores Edward Saids dialectic of filiation and affiliation by tracing his career-long interest in the “figural” work of Auerbach and Vico, and suggests that the latters insights in Scienza nuova make him not only Saids contemporary but also Equianos.

Saving Saukenuk: How Black Hawk Won the War and Opened the Way to Ethnic Semiotics

If you went looking for traces of the Sauk village where Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak (or Black Sparrow Hawk) was born and which, in his refusal to give it up, became the ultimate cause of the Black Hawk War in 1832 – the last Indian war east of the Mississippi – you would not find much: a few smart allusions to the great Sauk warrior on storefront signs and other such promotion gestures over on Rock Island, Iowa, but no archeological evidence at the juncture of the Rock and Mississippi rivers to suggest that the village ever existed. And yet, according to Cecil Eby, by 1790 Saukenuk was “the most imposing town in the Northwest, Indian or white, with more than 100 wickeups (many extending 60 feet in length) and from April to October inhabited by some 3,000 Sauk.” There are, however, scattered verbal signs that might draw the archeologist or historian back and forth over other tableaux of potential Sauk geography, like Sac City in Sac County, Iowa, and Black Hawk County due West of Dubuque. Then there is Prairie du Sac and Sauk City on the Wisconsin River, Wisconsin, two historically vibrant sites which novelist August Derleth turned to good use in his saga of Wisconsin. But when it comes to dealing with a defeated people who also happen to belong to the red race, the names themselves often become signs of cultural obscurantism, if not commemorative oblivion. In list form the available nomenclature amuses: Sacs, Saukies (which the Indians themselves used), Sockeys, Socks, Sacques, Saucs, Sakis. This embarrassing take-your-pick liberality clearly enough sets forth a problem of transliteration; it also evokes the more complex issue of cultural translation tout court: us/them, inside/outside, center/periphery, hegemonic culture/minority culture, structure/chaos.

Shifting Forms of Sovereignty

Relying on contemporary immigrant, migrant, and ethnic autobiographies, this essay deals with a crucial aspect of the gift economy, namely the dynamics of giving and receiving under the negative biopolitical condition of being treated as an alien in an often hostile culture. While I am interested in the notions of gratitude, indebtedness, and the obligation to reciprocate that obtains between parents and children and benefactors and their wards, I also focus on the shifting forms of sovereignty that they provide. In the next section I will glance at Japanese-American autobiographies in order to discuss the creative ways in which this ethnic group responded to the harsh and extremely humiliating conditions of the detainment camps during World War II; and will present examples from other ethnic groups to suggest ways in which the gift economy works to shore up peoples communal sovereignty in a way that complements mere democratic citizenship.

Colloquy with Marcus Rediker on The Slave Ship: A Human History

On the last afternoon of the Society of Early Americanists’ most recent biennial conference, sixty-plus colleagues gathered to hear an interdisciplinary panel of scholars focusing on historian Marcus Rediker’s book The Slave Ship: A Human History. In accepting my invitation, Rediker had agreed to be one voice among several, rather than serving simply as the respondent. Four of the participants in this follow-up roundtable were each very much a part of that session: Emma Christopher, Sean Goudie, Marcus Rediker and Karen Salt had each agreed to make a brief opening statement describing issues and questions that the book raises, which they hoped the audience and panelists would then discuss. The two other participants here, Ned Blackhawk and William Boelhower, were not at the table, but each has agreed to participate in this continuation of that afternoon’s conversation. Indeed, once the discussion began, Professor Blackhawk raised the stakes by bringing up the Barry Unsworth novel Sacred Hunger and, along with it, issues of genocide that involve Native Americans who were living, and dying by the hundreds of thousands, during the period that The Slave Ship historicizes. The other panelist here had originally been on the panel (as had Vincent Carretta) but was not able to be at the conference. Upon returning from Bermuda, I contacted him and described how substantive, and at moments moving the discussion had been; when I asked if there might be space in the pages of Atlantic Studies for a follow-up article along the lines that the roundtable had laid out, he agreed. He also agreed to contribute the commentary, here, with which he would have participated in that afternoon’s opening comments. The following comments serve, then, as a richly fleshed-out version of what one would have heard in early March 2009 at that session in a hotel in Bermuda, in the middle of the metaphorical space that Paul Gilroy and Joseph Roach have taught us to see as the Black Atlantic and the circum-Atlantic. Each of these participants has continued reflecting on the book The Slave Ship and on ways it helps us place the eighteenth century’s Atlantic slave trade in a perspective that has meaning in our time. A significant difference here is the addition of the comments by Professors Boelhower and Blackhawk, comments that frame those by panelists Goudie, Salt and Christopher (which appear, here, in the sequence in which each one spoke at the colloquy). Another difference is that, this time around, Marcus Rediker has agreed to contribute a coda, drawing on the others’ observations and expanded comments.

When Passion Makes Ideas Travel In Memory of Katharine Newman

In the early eighties in Europe, Dorothy Skardal (Norway) and William Boelhower (Italy) began actively collaborating with the MELUS organization and publishing in its journal. When Wayne Miller, then the journals editor, came to Italy and Boelhower was appointed book review editor in 1982, ties between scholars of ethnic literatures in the United States and Europe began to thicken. Beginning with the 1980s, Dorothy Skardal and William Boelhower inaugurated a series of EAAS (European Association of American Studies) workshops on immigrant literatures within the larger biennial conference format and these encouraged further dialogue between European and American scholars. This forum became what we might call the first MELUS outpost in Europe when workshop members decided to set up their own European journal; In Their Own Words, under the editorship of Boelhower, had a short but intense life of four issues over as many years. Behind all these efforts, of course, was Katharine Newman, who repeatedly encouraged Skardal and Boelhower to start MELUS-type activities in Europe. Through letters and mutual