{"id":40514,"date":"2015-03-19T02:01:05","date_gmt":"2015-03-19T02:01:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=40514"},"modified":"2015-03-19T02:01:05","modified_gmt":"2015-03-19T02:01:05","slug":"john-rollin-ridges-joaquin-murieta-sensation-hispanicism-and-cosmopolitanism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=40514","title":{"rendered":"John Rollin Ridge\u2019s Joaqu\u00edn Murieta: Sensation, Hispanicism, and Cosmopolitanism"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Rollin Ridge\u2019s Joaqu\u00edn Murieta: Sensation, Hispanicism, and Cosmopolitanism<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Western American Literature<\/a>
\nVolume 49, Number 4, Winter 2015 <\/a>
\npages 321-349
\nDOI: 10.1353\/wal.2015.0008<\/a><\/p>\n

John C. Havard<\/strong><\/a>, Assistant Professor
\nDepartment of English and Philosophy
\nAuburn University, Montgomery, Alabama<\/em><\/p>\n

The mixed-race Cherokee<\/a> poet, journalist, and novelist John Rollin Ridge\u2019s<\/a> The Life and Adventures of Joaqu\u00edn Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit<\/em><\/a> (1854) is a sensation novel about racial upheaval in 1850s California<\/a>. The work has become prominent in the study of US ethnic literatures largely because it is the first novel authored by a Native American. Many thus read it as a commentary on Indian Removal<\/a> politics, with Ridge allegorizing his experience as a Cherokee through Joaqu\u00edn\u2019s sufferings. Several factors support this reading. The byline features Ridge\u2019s tribal name, Yellow Bird, instead of his Anglicized name. Moreover, the publisher\u2019s preface emphasizes Ridge\u2019s ancestry and the Cherokee Nation\u2019s plight in the years following the Trail of Tears<\/a>. These framing moves played upon the marketable curiosity of a Cherokee novelist. They also prompted readers to draw a parallel between Cherokee Removal<\/a> and the novel\u2019s more ostensible concern for the dispossession of Mexicans in California. Moreover, Ridge\u2019s characterization of Murieta as dashing, romantic, and vengeful reflects Ridge\u2019s own reputation and self-image. Finally, the Westernized Murieta embodies the Cherokee adoption of Western social and political structures, a process that Ridge followed his family in promoting.<\/p>\n

Readings elaborating these connections reflect Indian literary identity politics, nationalism, and indigenism. According to the often-overlapping nationalist and indigenist positions, Native authors ought to view literature as a valuable medium through which to speak with subtlety and nuance for the concerns of particular Indian nations and for the general human dignity of Indigenous peoples. Critics, likewise, are exhorted to explicate the specifically national, Indigenous aspects of Indian literature. As advocate for this movement Simon J. Ortiz<\/a> explains,<\/p>\n

Too much is at stake for easy, convenient images to adequately and appropriately represent Indigenous people, much less to bring attention to conditions and circumstances that need to be brought to light. Indigenous writers and poets such as myself can undertake this task to the best of our abilities by creating and composing literature.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What is at stake here, of course, is Native America\u2019s need to protect its cultural and legal sovereignty against the legacies of European colonialism. As Ortiz claims, that struggle \u201chas given substance to what is authentic\u201d in Native literatures, animating the Indigenous, national consciousness of the surge in Native literary production since the 1970s (\u201cTowards\u201d 9, 11\u201312). Although Louis Owens<\/a> is known for a hybridist account of Indian identity that is frequently contrasted to nationalist perspectives, he echoes a basic element of Ortiz\u2019s premise in claiming that \u201cfor the contemporary Indian novelist . . . [the question of tensions between US American and Native American] identit[ies] is the central issue and theme\u201d (5). For many critics, including Owens, Ridge\u2019s novel prefigures contemporary Indian fiction in its pursuit of this theme.<\/p>\n

I offer a non\u2013mutually exclusive alternative interpretation that elaborates the novel\u2019s cosmopolitanism<\/a>. This cosmopolitanism, I argue in my first subsection, takes shape in Joaqu\u00edn Murieta\u2019s form. Often considered inchoate, the novel is, in fact, purposefully organized. This becomes apparent if we read it as a sensation novel. That Ridge put sensation to cosmopolitan purposes may seem surprising. Sensation is often associated with racist clich\u00e9, particularly in contrast to late-nineteenth-century social realism, which was commonly used to combat racial prejudice. However, in Ridge\u2019s formulation, whereas social realism tends to imagine the nation in terms of the particularity of typical national actors, the sensation novel imagines the commonality of the peoples who meet in a narrative. If much sensation relies on racialist conventions, Ridge cleverly manipulates such conventions to propound his cosmopolitanism to his readers. This cosmopolitanism informs a critique of what can be termed Hispanicism, the discourse by which US imperialists bound the United States to liberalism by contrasting Americans with illiberal Hispanophone<\/a> peoples. Through this strategy US imperialists rejected Hispanic claims to national sovereignty on the basis of a supposed Hispanic aversion to social and economic progress, an aversion exhibited in a rejection of liberal, democratic self-government. As I formulate this point in my second subsection, Ridge contests Hispanicism\u2019s discursive violence by characterizing Murieta as a good liberal in contrast to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Rollin Ridge\u2019s Joaqu\u00edn Murieta: Sensation, Hispanicism, and Cosmopolitanism Western American Literature Volume 49, Number 4, Winter 2015 pages 321-349 DOI: 10.1353\/wal.2015.0008 John C. Havard, Assistant Professor Department of English and Philosophy Auburn University, Montgomery, Alabama The mixed-race Cherokee poet, journalist, and novelist John Rollin Ridge\u2019s The Life and Adventures of Joaqu\u00edn Murieta, the Celebrated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,14646,1196,8,20],"tags":[455,19688,19378,19686,19687,16537,7328,19376],"class_list":["post-40514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-latino","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-california","tag-cherokees","tag-joaquin-murieta","tag-john-c-havard","tag-john-havard","tag-john-rollin-ridge","tag-western-american-literature","tag-yellow-bird"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40514","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=40514"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40514\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}