Ethnology and Empire: Languages, Literature, and the Making of the North American Borderlands

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.