Timothy Donahue
Oakland University
Tim Donahue is Assistant Professor of English at Oakland University, where he teaches and researches nineteenth-century literatures of the U.S. and the Americas. He received his Ph.D. in 2015 from Columbia University, where his dissertation was awarded honorable mention for the M.C. Cohen prize for best dissertation written in the Department of English & Comparative Literature. He is currently at work on a book project that explores the interrelations of literary and political forms in the borderlands of nineteenth-century North America. An essay drawn from this project appeared in the Fall 2016 issue of J19.
My paper reads Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona (1884) as a portrait of how U.S. government institutions managed indigenous populations amidst the settler colonialism of nineteenth-century California. Jackson, I suggest, finds... [ view full abstract ]
My paper reads Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona (1884) as a portrait of how U.S. government institutions managed indigenous populations amidst the settler colonialism of nineteenth-century California. Jackson, I suggest, finds such population management to occur via the production of particular experiences of time. Crucial to Ramona's account of these temporal orchestrations is the character Alessandro who, Jackson writes, "was made old before his time" by the demands of leading his Temecula Indian community – an interplay of temporality, sexuality, and social reproduction that we now call, following Dana Luciano, chronobiopolitics.
I argue that Jackson's novel diagnoses how U.S. institutions employ an unexpected temporal politics as they complicate the reproduction of indigenous populations: Ramona shows how indigenous people are prevented from cohering as an ongoing population not via the compulsory assimilation to a standardized temporality, as recent temporal turn scholarship might lead us to expect, but rather by the production of anachronic experiences that hold bodies apart.
Jackson's account of chronobiopolitics foregrounds the incompetence of those staffing U.S. settler institutions. As such, Ramona casts the anachronic experiences that fragment indigenous populations as effects not just of willful state racism but also of administrative ineptitude. The novel thus helps us refine prevailing Foucauldian models of biopolitics, which tend to presuppose calculative, volitional, and effective governance.
