Status Updates From Heart of American Darkness:...

How the Cresaps & Schickellamys influenced the Revolution is critical to understanding the mysteries of Am’s founding…but their influence was more profound than that suggests. Turner was correct at least in one sense: the frontier helped make America. Just not in the ways he described.

What I’m interested in is how Conrad articulates empire. The images Conrad conjured to show us imperialism—groves of death, ships firing blindly, severed heads in pikes—are immediately recognizable in 18th c Am…People will lose their names, switch sides, fall from grace & experience the most unlikely redemption. Throughout several bloody border conflicts, “savages” b/c patriots & vice versa.

If Turner & Joseph Conrad were writing this story it would only be about the Cresaps…This book brings indig ppl into view.

Conrad’s refusal to depict any Congolese as true human beings in HoD has rightfully b/c the focus of stringent criticism… he was “a bloody racist,” China Achebe concluded…

This book confronts Conrad’s colossal blindness by doing its best to make indig ppl visible.

Heart of Am Darkness is an attempt to recover the FEELING of contingency, to get comfortable with and accept bewilderment, confusion & mystery as causative historical forces.

What follows is a story about how the exp of empire-making affected particular ppl. It traces not only the history of Schickellamys but of a colonial family, the Cresaps, as they wound their way thru river valleys of mid-Atlantic…

Those who followed Turner transformed his thesis into an “ideology of limitlessness” & used it to justify Am power all over the world. Settler colonialism by contrast suggests that U.S. should reconsider its global ambitions & come to terms w/how it became a superpower in the first place: via the conquest of a continent & the ppl who lived in NA. Turner’s interpretation celebrates; settler colonialism condemns.

Interpretations that leave little room for contingency, choice, biography & even irrationality & misperception ultimately do a disservice to ALL the ppl who lived thru imperial encounter & to ourselves as we try to make sense of its consequences.

More recent frame is that of “settler colonialism:” European settlers in Americas didn’t simply take land-resources from indig ppl but eliminated them after the fact by destroying their history & discrediting their way of life— posits a “double dispossession:” Euros did more than invade—they occupied.

Turner’s “frontier thesis: perennial rebirth, this fluidity of Am life, this expansion westward w/its new opportunities furnish the forces dominating Am character;” It was the secret that made the U.S. different from & better than every other nation.

Since the 1940s scholars have challenged Turner’s thesis: left out indig ppl, more complex in reality, instead of frontier, a liminal space w/ebb-flow of power