"Messy Beginnings offers a corrective to business as usual in postcolonial studies and is a welcome contribution to the field."-Russ Castronovo, author of Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States

When scholars imagine American postcolonialism, they think either of contemporary multiculturalism or imperialism since 1898. This narrow view has left more than the two prior centuries of colonizing literary and political culture unexamined.

Messy Beginnings challenges the idea of early America's immunity from issues of imperialism and of its separation from European colonialism. By addressing a range of literary texts and examining the work of key postcolonial theorists, the contributors to this volume explore the applicability of such models to early American culture. They argue against the idea that the colonization of what became the United States was simply a confrontation between European culture and a singular "other." Their analyses reveal that the formation of America resulted from messy or unstable negotiations of the idea of "nation."

The essays in this book forcefully show that the development of "Americanness" was a raced and classed phenomenon, achieved through a complex series of violent encounters, legal maneuvers, and political compromises. The complexity of early American colonization, where there was not one coherent "nation" to conquer, contradicts the simple label of imperialism used in other lands.

Malini Johar Schueller is a professor of English at the University of Florida and author of US Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790-1890. Edward Watts is an associate professor of American thought and language at Michigan State University and author of An American Colony: Regionalism and the Roots of Midwestern Culture.