Bodily Pain and Nation Making: Catholics and Indians in the Protestant Historical Imagination

 

Dr. Kathleen Kennedy
Associate Professor of Literature
Western Washington University

This essay explores how historical narratives turned the wounds of bodily violation into words that marked particular bodies as uniquely suitable for citizenship and others as unfit for participation in "America." It focuses on Cotton Mather's history of King William's War, Deennium Luctuosum (1699) and Frances Parkman's history of New France, The Jesuits of New France in the Seventeenth Century (1867). I am especially interested in how Mather and Parkman utilized representations of bodily violence and pain to draw together Catholics and Indians as the primary threats to European and European American identity. Historians have generally neglected the relationship between anti-Catholicism and the formation of race in American history. I am not arguing that the origins of American racial thinking are in anti-Catholicism, but instead I am exploring how anti-Catholicism provided a discursive context for the formation of American ideas about race in general and Indian-ness in particular.

 

PDF of Article