Explorations and visions: a critical genealogy of america's colonial-imperial continuum

Abstract

This dissertation Explorations and Visions: A Critical Genealogy of America's Colonial-Imperial Continuum investigates a series of travel-exploration narratives that articulate responses to the landscape and indigenous peoples of America across time and space. These responses result from the encounter experience in which Europeans and Americans crafted a range of discourses and systems of representation of the Indian Other and the American landscape. By applying the insights of colonial/postcolonial discourse theory, a cultural studies approach, and other theoretical/methodological frameworks, this study sets out to expose the colonial-imperial strategies embedded in texts part of the travel-exploration genre that are not typically identified for their complicity in the colonial-imperial project. In addition, this dissertation addresses the issues of ambivalence and textual disunity as prominent aspects of the selected narratives. The study begins in the mid-sixteenth century with the Spanish conquistador Cabeza de Vaca and his encounter in the New World. A series of radical circumstances force him to alter his approach to conquest not only for the sake of his survival but also as part of his desire to advance the aims of empire. Chapter two investigates the early seventeenth century narrative of William Bradford which traces the colonial Pilgrim experience and effort to plot a different type of conquest. In the process, the Pilgrims establish a colonial fountainhead for future imperializing schemes in North America. Chapter three moves into the backcountry of colonial Virginia and North Carolina and William Byrd's 'mapping' of the Indian and the landscape. His Histories, written in the mid-eighteenth century expose the contested interests Byrd is compelled to negotiate: his provincial-creole status and his compulsion to serve the English imperial project. In chapter four Thomas Jefferson, a fellow Virginian, attempts to construct an American national consciousness in his Notes on the State of Virginia in the late eighteenth century during a period of revolutionary upheaval. He completes a vision hinted at by Byrd by moving beyond the colonial paradigm and toward national imperializing strategies that seek to place the North American continent under American dominance. Francis Parkman's The Oregon Trail, written in the middle of the nineteenth century, shifts the focus to the West. Under the imperialist program of Manifest Destiny, the U.S. expands to the Pacific Ocean. Parkman responds to the changing landscape and Indians he encounters through the prism of 'civilization's' westward march. His text, along with the other narratives in this study, negotiates between competing feelings of the Other, the landscape, 'civilization,' and identity. In the Coda, as well as in most of the chapters, various visual images such as paintings, maps, photographs, and sculptures, undergo analysis. The intent is to draw attention to various visual strategies that embrace the interests of colonialism and imperialism along with illustrating the intertexuality between the image and the word. Along with identifying the word/image dialectic, this dissertation exposes both blatant and subtle articulations of the colonial-imperial project in the selected texts under scrutiny, revealing the multiple strategies present in travel-exploration narratives. In addition, this study addresses issues relating to textual tension, instability, and the parameters of ambivalence white European-American male authors experienced during their encounters in the New World.