John Rollin Ridge's Aboriginal Transatlanticisms

Karah MitchellUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel HillAbstract: Although scholars such as Virginia Jackson and Meredith McGill have begun directing our attention to transatlantic networks in nineteenth-century poetry, this... [ view full abstract ]

Karah Mitchell

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Abstract: 

Although scholars such as Virginia Jackson and Meredith McGill have begun directing our attention to transatlantic networks in nineteenth-century poetry, this growing field of inquiry has not yet given sustained focus to Native American poets who critically engaged British—and derivative American—Romantic poetic forms and themes. Nineteenth-century Cherokee poet John Rollin Ridge stands out as one particularly adept Native poet who did exactly this kind of work, and who thus forms an important, and understudied, counterpart to such “American Romantics” as Bryant and Longfellow.  Adopting a range of approaches to the Romantic tradition, especially in its ostensibly “Americanized” form, Ridge also self-consciously navigated three different nationalities, namely Cherokee, American, and British: his poetics thus displays an interest in cross-cultural circulation as both a prerequisite to and condition for undermining nation-building. Building on underdeveloped claims that Ridge channeled British Romanticism and used his poetry to think globally as opposed to nationally, I wish to argue that what might be mistaken as Ridge’s “conventionality” or lack of “aboriginality” is actually an important attempt to invent an American poetics that depends upon the interaction of cultural climates and, in the process, simultaneously maps out and questions what a really “native” American poetry would look like.  If “Native texts [are] fields of conflict and contestation rather than the result of the imposition of something foreign, something European on an indigenous population unfamiliar with its value,” as Hilary Wyss points out, then Ridge’s poetry reveals a site of struggle in which a distinctively American poetics is created, and questioned, anew.