Localizing the Early Republic: Washington Irving and Blackface Culture‪.‬

The process of decolonization in the early American republic was a struggle in which the former colonies gradually asserted political, cultural, and artistic independence from England in particular and Europe in general. Yet, as the early republicans attempted to stabilize the new nation and create a cohesive national identity, they relied on colonial models of social stratification and centralized power, while ignoring the realities of the postcolonial condition. Part of this condition was the proliferation of diverse cultures at the local level, what Partha Chatterjee has, in another context, called "communities," that is, fuzzy, democratic entities that resist the national narrative. In the western mid-Atlantic, the racially mixed festival and market cultures that would eventually coalesce into blackface minstrelsy functioned as such communities. Alive with local energy and hybrid diversity, the communities of nascent blackface belied republican notions of a culturally stable, homogenous nation, while evincing the emergence of postcolonial identity in the early national period. Americanists have acknowledged how the interplay between the local and the (inter)national helps explain formations of early American selfhood. Dana D. Nelson argues that in the post-Constitutional era, white men identified with a sense of "national manhood" that abstracted them from locally created identities, while Edward Watts reveals how early republicans used imperial paradigms to create a facade of national coherence that American authors exposed by exploring the diversity of post-Independence communities. More recently, Malini Johar Schueller and Watts suggest that early America consisted of multiple, often contradictory, narratives wherein the imperial and the local interacted and overlapped. American identities, they argue, were "constantly negotiated through strategic identification and disidentification with Europeans, on the one hand, and American Indians, African Americans, and other nonwhite populations, on the other" (2). These scholars all address how (inter)national and local cultural assertions shape and destabilize early American selfhood.