Ethnology and Empire

In the 19th-century, as the American frontier stretched inexorably towards the Pacific coast and conceptions about Native peoples and western spaces began to shift, the study of Native American linguistics also shifted to become both a professionalized research discipline and a popular literary concern of American culture. In Ethnology and Empire, Robert Lawrence Gunn contextualizes the developing political, scientific, and literary networks that connected ideas, languages, and Native peoples in light of westward expansionism. Offering a literary and archival survey of the manifold practices that constituted ethnology as an intellectual enterprise in the first half of the 19th century, Gunn reveals the manner in which developing research practices became standardized and how works of fiction, travel and captivity narratives, and Native oratory and sign language gave imaginative shape to imperial activity in the western borderlands. Through a transnational archive of U.S. literary, scientific, and cultural production, Gunn emphasizes the geographical and culturally transformative impacts of western expansionism and Indian removal for future conceptions of hemispheric American literatures. By telling stories about the traffic of words and ideas in the American borderlands, Ethnology and Empire unveils the network of peoples, spaces, and communication practices that shaped and transformed the boundaries of U.S. empire.