This chapter moves beyond a captivity scholarship based almost entirely on the experiences of White or White-descent captives and their Indian captors to study an account of nineteenth-century borderland captivity in the US Southwest, where – contrary to what the plethora of Anglo captivity scholarship indicates – most captives were of Mexican and/or Indigenous descent. To do so, I read Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and the Goodness of God (1682) alongside María Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would’ve Thought It? (1872). This Mexican-American historical romance novel and, I would add, fictionalization of an Indian captivity narrative, retells the history of Mexican dispossession at the conclusion of the Mexican-American War through fictional Mohave captive and emerging Mexican American elite, Lola Medina. Within a broader rethinking of the captivity narrative genre, I argue that captivity narratives helped produced proto-Latinx subjects as racially discrete individuals, even while the factual condition of nineteenth-century captivity forced individuals of Latin-American descent into ambiguous relation with other racialized communities.

This chapter considers literary expressions of sovereignty in the nineteenth-century United States that underscore sovereignty’s oppositional nature and its productive potential, and it demonstrates how these literary expressions were, like public argument about sovereignty, constructed through the interplay between law and religion. Religious discourse provided a set of terms, examples, and motifs that shaped the nineteenth-century debate over political autonomy as it ranged across matters of territorial possession and the individual conscience. I first briefly address ideas of sovereignty that circulated in the long nineteenth century and informed US literature and public argument. Then I turn to competing visions of sovereignty expressed by the Cherokee Nation, the state of Georgia, the US federal government, and the US Supreme Court in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In the final section, I briefly turn to the figure of John Brown who, in linking the vision of Indigenous sovereignty expressed by the Cherokee Nation to the sovereign individuality espoused by Henry David Thoreau and the Transcendentals, serves as a harbinger of the contests over political sovereignty that ultimately led to the US Civil War.

Applying a science studies approach to early American literature means focusing on how early modern settler colonialism in the Americas, with all its violence and exploitation, was a knowledge-producing machine. Enslavers and colonizers stole the skills, labor, and resources from enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples, and in the process forged many of the empirical practices, forms of measurement and categorization, and stratification between types of expertise that we typically recognize as constituting scientific work. Research in early American literature investigates the complexity of particular representations of natural phenomena and traces their circulation within or against powerful narratives that organized culture. This shows how contemporary scientific understandings of natural phenomena are historically and culturally determined and calls attention to the settler colonial work scientific expertise can continue to do in the present and contributing to the project of imagining alternative uses for it. This chapter argues for an approach to reading nature in early American literature that is modeled on acts of translation rather than processes of decoding. This difference is as subtle as it is essential for opening up the present to simultaneous scrutiny as critics confront an archive produced by the violent structures of the past.

Chapter 6 traces the appearance of the Bible as a series of legal or forensic documents (book, scroll, certificate) in part one of Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) and then as a series of entertaining things (food, digestive, mirror) in part two (1684). The shift in appearance from legal document to entertaining thing shows Bunyan’s fiction moving through channels already carved out by the circulation of the scriptures in late-seventeenth-century England: a literary channel in which the Bible was held to be the supreme book of wisdom; a legal channel in which the Bible was used to justify state authority; and a domestic channel in which the Bible was used to speak the language of intimacy. This chapter also touches on writing about the Bible by John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and Mary Rowlandson to show how Bunyan uses scripture not to imagine life-after-death in the Celestial City but life on the outskirts of that City, here in this world.