{"id":26144,"date":"2012-10-22T16:45:11","date_gmt":"2012-10-22T16:45:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=26144"},"modified":"2012-10-22T16:45:11","modified_gmt":"2012-10-22T16:45:11","slug":"remarkable-particulars-david-gamut-and-the-alchemy-of-race-in-the-last-of-the-mohicans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=26144","title":{"rendered":"Remarkable Particulars: David Gamut and the Alchemy of Race in The Last of the Mohicans"},"content":{"rendered":"

Remarkable Particulars: David Gamut and the Alchemy of Race in The Last of the Mohicans<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance<\/a>
\nVolume 58, Number 1, 2012<\/a> (No. 226 O.S.)
\npages 36-70
\nDOI: 10.1353\/esq.2012.0010<\/a><\/p>\n

Deidre Dallas Hall<\/a><\/strong>
\nUniversity of North Carolina, Greensboro<\/em><\/p>\n

David Gamut, the hapless psalmodist traveling with Major Heyward and his charges in The Last of the Mohicans<\/a><\/em>, could not appear less suited to life in the wilderness of upstate New York, a war zone fiercely contested by the French, the English, and the Indians. With a temperament \u201cgiven to mercy and love,\u201d the pious and pacific Gamut brandishes a pitch pipe instead of a rifle or a sword; according to the wily Hawk-eye, in a frontier fight, \u201cthis singer is as good as nothing.\u201d Hawk-eye\u2019s dismissal of Gamut mirrors critical neglect: as David Seed notes, \u201cto judge by Cooper<\/a> criticism David Gamut seems to be the most forgettable character\u201d in the 1826 novel. Within wider considerations of Cooper\u2019s text, Gamut appears only fleetingly as a figure of fun, a stock character \u201crepresenting the absurdity and pathos in the wilderness of men who will not touch a gun but take quite literally the Christian injunction to return good for evil.\u201d Such assessments stem from the ostensible \u201cincongruity of his presence in the wilderness,\u201d for \u201cas a psalmodist, he can scarcely have any conceivable connection with the novel\u2019s central themes of nostalgia for the disappearing Indian and anxiety over the question of miscegenation<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, I find the psalmodist more than \u201cconceivably connected\u201d to these themes. Complicating traditional readings that focus exclusively on the novel\u2019s rhetorical reinforcement of nineteenth-century race thinking, I argue that this quirky character enables The Last of the Mohicans<\/em> to introduce important exceptions to the racial rules. I read the body of David Gamut as a hybridized construction around which signs not only of the Puritan but also of the Indian and the Jew gather. This body increasingly emerges as a site of racial ambiguity, a screen upon which a drama of cultural flux unfolds\u2014a drama that points to the pull of the disappearing Indian and push of the arriving immigrant in Cooper\u2019s own time. Such representation suggests an active engagement, substantiated by retrospective reflections in Cooper\u2019s travel writing and late novels on the increasing prominence of Jews in the early republic, with the contemporary discourse of probationary whiteness. Described by Matthew Jacobson as a kind of \u201cracial alchemy,\u201d this discourse \u201cwhitened\u201d suspect Europeans such as Jews and Catholics through imaginary contrast with the Indian in the West and the slave in the South, facilitating a national consolidation of whiteness essential to the rhetoric of nonwhite removal and containment. With the astonishing survival of the hybridized, pseudo-Jewish Gamut, Cooper\u2019s text seems to anticipate the masses of immigrants that would flood ports in the North only a few years after the publication of The Last of the Mohicans<\/em>, but ultimately, this early work stands as uneasy witness to the discursive whitening of American Jews and questionable immigrants: when Cooper revisits the question of probationary whiteness in his last novel, The Oak Openings<\/em> (1848), that narrative\u2019s analogue to David Gamut quickly meets a violent end\u2014a clear corrective to the racial redefinitions suggested by The Last of the Mohicans<\/em>.
\n\u00a0
\nJews in America: David Gamut and the Confluence of Race Thinking<\/strong>
\n\u00a0
\nThe grotesquely attenuated figure of David Gamut appears in the opening moments of the narrative as a \u201cmarked exception\u201d to the bystanders watching the departure of a British detachment from the frontier stronghold of Fort Edward. As this mysterious stranger falls in with the Duncan Heyward party, the narrator withholds the newcomer\u2019s name and history, instead…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Remarkable Particulars: David Gamut and the Alchemy of Race in The Last of the Mohicans ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance Volume 58, Number 1, 2012 (No. 226 O.S.) pages 36-70 DOI: 10.1353\/esq.2012.0010 Deidre Dallas Hall University of North Carolina, Greensboro David Gamut, the hapless psalmodist traveling with Major Heyward and his charges in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8],"tags":[12573,12572,12574,2761],"class_list":["post-26144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","tag-deidre-d-hall","tag-deidre-dallas-hall","tag-deidre-hall","tag-esq-a-journal-of-the-american-renaissance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26144\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}