Turbulent Waters, or the Sublime Object of Subalternity

Mark Twain’s “Day at Niagara” (1869) concludes with a notorious moment of misrecognition, in which Twain’s buffoonish narrator mistakes a group of Irish immigrants for Indigenous people. This essay argues that this misrecognition and its contradictory reception history exemplify representational dilemmas that continue to haunt contemporary scholarship. The three monographs under review, all of which are authored by white scholars engaged with ethnic and Indigenous studies, are indicative of these ongoing quandaries. Rifkin, Stanciu, and Zaborskis strive to navigate a treacherous course between liberal modes of representation and a romanticized refusal to represent subaltern agency as they engage with wide-ranging archives of texts produced by racialized and/or Indigenous people. In their successes and failures in this endeavor, they dramatize some of American studies’ most profound unresolved tensions.