American literary studies has shown that the symbolic exclusion of Native Americans from the Puritan and early national imaginaries was an essential component of the making of an American identity. This argument builds on reading practices that stress literary-historical contextualization. Our essay considers how M. Night Shyamalan's film The Village (2004) addresses the continuing relevance of Native American exclusion from the national imaginary not by faithfully representing “history” but by layering its narrative with multiple historical registers. Realized through editing, cinematography, and set design, these registers—seventeenth-century Puritan, turn-of-the-twentieth-century utopian, and “the present”—are stage-managed by a group of idealistic elders who wish to protect their community from the evils of the world outside. While most critics have reduced The Village to an allegory of post-9/11 United States political culture, we propose a viewing of the film as parable that marks historical collapses and exclusions as the limits of utopia.
Thomas Jefferson’s directions to Meriwether Lewis for the Lewis and Clark expedition commanded that the expedition members produce and preserve thorough written accounts. A wide array of texts resulted from a fervid embrace of Jefferson’s instructions. Focusing on textual forms that have been maligned, sidelined, and ignored – the expedition’s graffiti and the so-called “spurious” editions about the expedition – this essay analyzes the selective authorization of the earliest nineteenth-century Lewis and Clark materials. I argue that the expanded archive shows that the literary production Jefferson imagined would write the Louisiana Territory into the United States introduced a range of textual forms, authorial bodies, and territorial visions that challenges rather than consolidates the nation-building project.
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