Ruthless Democracy: A Multicultural Interpretation of the American Renaissance

Abstract

This book follows the standard formula. The thesis: that American history is multicultural, not monocultural. The topic: generally, white violence (actual and discursive) upon non whites; specifically, the erasure of nonwhites and women by nineteenthcentury writers. The argument: readings of selected canonical and noncanonical texts, with some historical context thrown in. The result: a mixture of tendentious description, derivative thinking, and quasimoral interpretations of plots and characters. Timothy B. Powell devotes chapters largely to six works and their historical setting : Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (1851); Ireneo Paz, The Life and Adventures of the Celebrated Bandit, Joaquin Murri eta, translated by Frances P. Belle (1925); Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854); Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852); William Wells Brown, Clotel (1853); and Herman Melville, MobyDick (1851). Between the chapters he places “Historical Interludes” detailing events such as the 1786 murder of a Shawnee chief by soldiers, the 1848 founding of Liberia, and the 1840 census. The episodes of butchery and mayhem, of “cultural aphasia” and “the United States' conflicted will to empire,” stack the deck such that every text becomes a parable of victimization. The parable is validated by citations of critics—“As so andso remarks,” “Soandso has argued”— who affirm the multiculturalist outlook and whom Powell treats as truth givers.