Ethnology and Empire

Languages, Literature, and the Making of the North American Borderlands

By: Robert Lawrence Gunn

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Hardcover | 15 November 2015

At a Glance

Hardcover
304 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.9 x 15.3 x 1.91

Hardcover

RRP $193.00

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Winner, The Early American Literature Book Prize
Ethnology and Empire tells stories about words and ideas, and ideas about
words that developed in concert with shifting conceptions about Native peoples
and western spaces in the nineteenth-century United States. Contextualizing the
emergence of Native American linguistics as both a professionalized research
discipline and as popular literary concern of American culture prior to the
U.S.-Mexico War, Robert Lawrence Gunn reveals the manner in
which relays between the developing research practices of ethnology, works of
fiction, autobiography, travel narratives, Native oratory, and sign languages
gave imaginative shape to imperial activity in the western borderlands.

In literary and
performative settings that range from the U.S./Mexico borderlands to the Great
Lakes region of Tecumseh's Pan-Indian Confederacy and the hallowed halls of
learned societies in New York and Philadelphia, Ethnology and Empire models
an interdisciplinary approach to networks of peoples, spaces, and communication
practices that transformed the boundaries of U.S. empire through a
transnational and scientific archive. Emphasizing the culturally transformative
impacts western expansionism and Indian Removal, Ethnology and Empire reimagines
U.S. literary and cultural production for future conceptions of hemispheric
American literatures.

Industry Reviews

A superb work. Summing Up: Highly recommended. * Choice *
Ethnology and Empire demonstrates the power and flexibility of postmodern approaches to the study of colonial relationships. * American Quarterly *
An original, beautifully written book on the rapidly changing ideas about language in American culture during the early nineteenth century. Ethnology and Empireengages the social history of the borderlands and linguistics to introduce a new way of looking at the formation of ideas about race and ethnography in the antebellum period. A fascinating read. -- Kirsten Silva Gruesz,author of Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing
Through masterful engagement with nineteenth century literary production and ethnology, Robert Gunn underscores how the cultural work of linguistic contact is vital to our understanding of the ideologies of empire that slowly gained force in the evolving U.S. nation-state.Ethnology and Empiremakes a significant contribution in the hemispheric turn in American studies, threading together little-known histories that advance the field and push our thinking about borderlands in innovative ways. -- Robert David Aguirre,author of Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture

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