ENGL 585 B1: The Politics of Misrecognition: the Literary Activism of William Apess

C. Bracken

In May of 1833, while preaching to his “brethren” in Scituate and Kingston, in the face of opposition from “the whites around them,” William Apess was asked why he did not visit Mashpee, then the largest Indigenous community in Massachusetts. Some said the congregation there were well served by their Harvard-appointed minister. “Others,” that they were “much abused.” Apess, a circuit-rider for the Protestant Methodist Church, decided to see for himself. His activism got him arrested (for a logging blockade) and drew the attention of the abolitionist movement). Of mixed race (white, Indigenous, African), Apess was raised as a Pequot in early nineteenth century New England. He spent his youth as an indentured servant and at the age of thirteen, caught up in the second Great Awakening, converted to Methodism, then the religion of the oppressed. Between 1829 and 1838, he published six works, including an autobiography, speeches, sermons, a Eulogy for King Philip (Metacom) and an archive of the events at Mashpee. “Taken, collectively,” remarks Andy Doolen, “the six texts constitute one of the period’s most powerful rebukes to U.S. imperial authority. Over the course of his brief career, Apess fashioned [a project for] a racially inclusive democracy that challenged mainstream Jacksonian America and its practices of racial domination.” The course will have three aims. 1) We will review Apess’s complete works, which have been collected in a single volume by Barry O’Connell. One point of focus will be Apess’ rhetoric and politics of misrecognition, a nineteenth century alternative to the politics of recognition memorably critiqued by Glen Coulthard. 2) We will examine Apess’s major sources. According Doolen, “the basis of Apess’s democratic politics” can be traced to the protest rhetoric of William Lloyd Garrison, whose Thoughts on African Colonization became a guide for abolitionism, and David Walker, whose “incendiary” Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World “ignited a national emergency” in the United States in 1829. 3) Apess was a “revisionist” historian who rewrote the story of the calamitous “King Philip’s War.” He reinterprets Metacom (King Philip) as a martyr whose cause was as just as the American revolution. As we study the literature of the removal era, we will have an opportunity to assess the new Indigenous history that, in the words of one scholar, is giving historical studies in United States “a new look.” What happens when we read Apess through this lens? How does the new Indigenous history transform the writing of literary history?

Probable Texts (to be selected from):

Apess, On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess (ed., O’Connell)
Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West
Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks
Any Doolen, Fugitive Empire: Locating Early American Imperialism
William Lloyd Garrison, Thoughts on African Colonization
Kierkegaard, The Principle of Irony
Alanis Obomsawin (dir.), Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance
Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory
David Walker, An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World
Essays by Brooks, Clifford, Lepore, Peyer, Warrior, etc.