Styles of Sovereignty: Parataxis, Settler–Indigenous Difference, and the Transnationalisms of the Great Basin

Abstract

This essay shows how literary parataxis serves as an engine of transnational thought in the nineteenth-century North American West. I focus, in particular, on how Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872) and Sarah Winnemucca’s Life Among the Piutes (1883) employ paratactic forms to present the Great Basin as a space where no single nation rules as sovereign. Amidst US settler colonialism, I argue, such paratactic aesthetics prove politically double-edged. While parataxis’ tendency to destabilize hierarchies allows the form to undermine US claims to sovereignty, the same deconstructive proclivity can occlude Indigenous political distinction and historical priority. Twain and Winnemucca respond to this aesthetic scenario differently, and their writing, consequently, presents competing conceptions of transnationalism. Twain’s unchecked embrace of paratactic forms yields a transnational vision whose emphasis on social movement and mixture proves antithetical to Indigenous sovereignty. Winnemucca, by contrast, employs a modulated parataxis in order to locate the transnational in collisions of countervailing polities and thereby better represents the political standing and agency of the Paiute people. Winnemucca’s accounts of her work as a translator, I further argue, suggest that amidst such collisions, political sovereignty takes a distinctive shape, as a relational and comparative project.