Coda

This coda considers how and why it is that the emergent worlds chronicled in this book have become legible to us now. It seeks to reflect on the contemporary conditions that have made the testimonies and archives covered across the three chapters comprehensible on their own terms, rather than through the lens of a later modernity. It concludes that we now live in a comparably interstitial age as the worlds that make up this book. More precisely, it studies Ishmael in the water at the end of Moby-Dick and suggests that this episode represents a point after a threshold, where he had left the chaotic Pacific and had entered into the beginnings of American modernity. In and around 2001, that era of modernity began to decline, and a new period of systemic uncertainty, our own, began. Ishmael is at the entrance, we at the exit to that age. Ishmael, as he drifts in the water, thus gestures toward anterior ages of transition but also to our future, warning us of the catastrophic consequences of failing to take advantage of these moments of historical promise.

Introduction

This introduction provides a synoptic overview of the project as a whole concentrating on how it relates to the crisis of identity in the study of the nineteenth-century Americas that has evolved in the years since 2001. It begins with an extended analysis of the overlooked second and third clauses of Moby-Dick—“Some years ago—never mind how long precisely”—and shows how they contain a model for history, geography, politics, and form, as well as how these areas relate to issues of field definition. From this close reading, it defines the central structural terms of the book, namely, the “interstitial state,” the “oceanic geoculture,” the “dissonant time,” and the “archival form.”

Threshold States in the Immigrant Atlantic, 1789–1857

This chapter places the US Americas in the zone after the Atlantic revolutions of the era of world crisis but before the realization of a true democracy. In positioning them as such, it argues that in the first half of the nineteenth century the US Americas were neither an old nor a new world but some intermixture of the two. The figure of the radical immigrant emblematized this threshold state. These immigrants found the US Americas to be a zone that was on the verge of transformation into a fully realized democratic social polity but not quite there yet. As such, they created a formulation of citizenship that allegorized this midstate—“living death”—that reflected their sense of being between a subject and national, democratic citizen. It was the job of a German American genre—the “immigrant gothic”—involving canonical fiction like Herman Melville’s Pierre, German-language city mysteries, and reactionary nativist fantasias, to imagine what the redeemed social world desired by immigrant radicals might look like. Although these fictions found it comparatively easy to imagine the apocalypse, a completely redeemed democracy proved elusive. Instead, they came to dwell on the limited capacity of fiction to bring about radical historical transformation.

Suspended States in the Long Caribbean, 1791–1861

This chapter examines the suspended state between colonial slavery and postcolonial independence in the “long Caribbean.” Involving the Caribbean, especially Haiti, and other equivalent experiments in black self-rule in Sierra Leone and Liberia, this incomplete transition from slavery to freedom challenged progressivist accounts of a world tending ever closer to emancipation. Instead, it seemed that history had come to an unexpected halt. As such, many individuals conceived of the citizen and sovereign in static terms and grappled with a form of paused political time in which history appeared to have stopped. The “black counterfactual,” which includes “Benito Cereno,” “The Heroic Slave,” Blake; or, The Huts of America, Liberia, and the first Haitian novel, Stella, emerged from this world. This genre, which considered the perils and possibilities of black self-rule and freedom, attempted to imagine the black state into existence. It aimed to intervene in the past to create a cause-and-effect chain of events that would inevitably lead to a better world. However, these fictions found narrative to be every bit as recalcitrant as the long Caribbean world itself. Overall, this chapter challenges a redemptionist note of black historiography, in which eventual liberation orients racial struggles in the nineteenth century.

Transition States in the Chaotic Pacific, 1812–1848

This chapter explores the historical fold between a declining Spanish colonialism and a coming but not inevitable US imperial nation-state. Terming this midzone the “transition state,” it shows how critical narratives often falsely read the Pacific between 1812 and 1848 in terms of the transformations that occurred subsequently. Before that, individuals who theorized the Pacific gave voice to various transitional forms of consciousness—how they reckoned time, formulated space, or articulated their politics. In each of these domains, they imagined that the world could still be remade into new social forms. A personage the chapter terms the “queer migrant” emerged and embodied these transitional energies. The coming of the United States into the region closed down this space of potential. For those writers who sought to imagine the early Pacific world, such as Herman Melville and James Fenimore Cooper, this was a tragedy. They therefore developed a form—the Pacific elegy—that mourned the loss of this world yet, in mourning it, archived it so that future readers could reactivate it. Overall, this argument challenges the narrative of westward-tending imperialism that has dominated American studies.