Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: John Neal, John Dunn Hunter, and the Red and White Republic of Fredonia


For a few months in early 1827, a man named John Dunn Hunter led a few thousand Indians and white settlers around Nacogdoches, in east Texas, in what they proclaimed as the “Red and White Republic of Fredonia.” Hunter had been celebrated as the author of a captivity narrative, in which he claimed to have been taken captive at age 2 and raised entirely by a series of Plains Indian tribes. Having made his way back into white society, he learned English, wrote his Narrative, and made his way to England, where he became famous, friends to aristocracy, and to Robert Owen, with whom he traveled down the Ohio upon his return to America, Owen on his way to take possession of his utopian experiment in New Harmony, Indiana, Hunter to try to secure some land for Indians from the Mexican government. Hunter soon became caught in diplomatic maneuvering between America, England, the Mexican government, and Stephen Austin, the locally powerful empresario of the Texas territory. It was Austin, probably, who arranged to have Hunter assassinated.

When John Neal arrived in London in 1824, determined to make a name for himself and to proclaim American cultural independence, he lodged in the same boarding house with Hunter. It must have seemed to Neal as if his own fictional creation had come to life: in Logan: A Family History (1822), the Byronic hero, Harold, is culturally Indian, although his father is white. He comes to England and argues eloquently before Parliament for Indian territorial claims. Hunter had been making similar appeals, though somewhat less quietly.

Neal had been quite close to Hunter for a brief while, and indeed claims to have been asked by Hunter to join his plans to found an empire in the West on behalf of displaced Indians. But when Hunter was attacked in the press for having fabricated his life story, Neal joined the fray. Neal remained in a rivalrous relation to Hunter even after the latter’s death, writing at the request of Samuel Goodrich a satirical sketch called “The Adventurer,” in which he makes Hunter over into a type of New England con man he understood himself to be.

In this paper, I propose to explore this strange episode as a way to sketch out one version of the American political imaginary in the era of the Monroe Doctrine, an imaginary in which selfhood and sovereignty were so tightly interwoven that individuals could found states and empires, an imaginary that could stretch from utopian experimentalists like Owen to the filibusters that stud antebellum political culture. But both Hunter’s end and the Hunter-Neal rivalry further demonstrate that the coincidence of selfhood and sovereignty was at once enabled and disturbed by what can be called a de-territorialized Indian identity.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Expositions of social contract theory generally assume that all individuals in the hypothetical or historical state of nature had the capacity and opportunity to be parties to the social contract. Yet both Carol Pateman and Charles Mills have challenged that assertion, claiming that either a sexual or a racial contract preceded the social contract, thereby compromising the ability of women and people of color to be parties to the contract. This paper expands upon the claims by Pateman and Mills, arguing that by exploring John Locke’s views on reason and intersubjectivity, one can gain a critical understanding of the deeper biases within the social contract tradition, revealing a set of institutions and principles that are not inclusive, but exclude many participants from within its domain.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In addition to his variegated acting roles in movies, John Leguizamo has, to date, written and starred in four one-man Broadway plays. In these performances, Leguizamo engages in a great deal of Latino culturally intimate humor: humor that targets the foibles and folkways of Latino culture he grew up with in New York City.

Given Leguizamo’s fairly significant crossover success with this material, it is instructive, then, to see how his work is perceived by both Latinos and non-Latinos. In particular, how are his multidimensional prototypes are perceived – as subversive representations of Latino life or mere variations on age-old Latino stereotypes? With this in mind, I discuss the notion of Latino humor, perform content analyses of two of his one-man shows, Mambo Mouth and Freak, and then scrutinize the responses of 196 college students that watched the performances.

As expected, Latinos were more familiar with Leguizamo’s work and expressed significantly more appreciation for Leguizamo’s comedy than non-Latinos. Latinos were also more likely to appreciate the “culturally-intimate” elements of his performances, as well as their realism. However, in contradiction to my hypotheses, a very substantial majority of both Latinos and non-Latinos overwhelmingly thought Leguizamo portrayed Latinos in a negative fashion. I attribute this to the fact that Leguizamo exudes a working-class perspective, the inherently problematic nature of comic forms, and the overall lack of Latino visibility in popular culture.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Throughout North America, moving picture shows first appeared and proliferated in the first decade of the twentieth century. The content of the shows was nearly identical across the continent, combining mass-produced and mass-distributed short films and illustrated songs. Early five-cent shows were seen as an obviously modern amusement, founded upon technology and electricity. The social and commercial context of profit-seeking showmanship was seen as a threat to the local domains of religious and family life, prompting calls for stricter regulation. In general, modern innovations in bureaucratic governance matched the modern character of the novelty amusement. The impulse to regulate picture shows in Newfoundland took a relatively parochial form, however, informal and largely without new legislation. The movies thus allow a concise synopsis of how civic governance in St. John’s balanced modern influences with a parochialism that was perhaps singular within North America. This calls into question the character of St. John’s metropolitan relationship to the rest of Newfoundland. Indeed, the case of film regulation illustrates that many requirements of urban governance were able to remain unlegislated, and thus not formally apply throughout the colony.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The issue of “inalienable rights” forms the basis of most modern liberal democracies in the West, both in the sense that the rights precede government, and are the ends towards which government is directed. But from whence do these rights arise? Are they inherent, or imposed, arbitrary, or ephemeral? This paper enters into the rights’ dialogue by examining one aspect of the historical roots of the discussion: the biblical basis to a conception of rights in the political philosophy of John Locke.

This paper will argue that Locke’s conception of property (as understood as life, liberty, and estate), is based on a biblical conception of the specific rights with which the Creator endows humanity. This is especially evident in Locke’s argument against Sir Robert Filmer’s theory of the divine right of kings, and in Locke’s historical argument of the way in which property develops from that which is held in common to a more private or individualistic notion. The biblical basis for Locke’s theory suggests that the inalienable rights are not purely “self evident” or derived from an understanding of our capacities as humans, but understood through a biblical lens which sees a benevolent Creator as endowing humans with certain rights and responsibilities.