Berserk Violence, Racial Vengeance, and Settler Colonialism in American Writing from Franklin to Melville

Berserk Violence, Racial Vengeance, and Settler Colonialism in American Writing from Franklin to Melville studies the literary and cultural tradition of the “Indian Hater” in American writing from the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. In dozens of short stories, novels, poems, plays, and historical publications, Indian Haters were white settlers on the western frontier who to kill all “Indians” to avenge the deaths of family members at the hands of a few. As they engage their episodes in racial violence, they attain transcendent racial powers based in traditions of historical white barbarism and the powers of the legendary berserker, the crazed Nordic super-warrior. Indian Haters' obsession with genocidal retribution reflected and participated in important conversations in the new nation about race, violence, nation, and masculinity, as well as the role of the emergent mass print culture in the distribution of propaganda, disinformation, and misrepresentation. At the same time, many authors used Indian Haters to represent the moral failure of the new nation, profoundly critiquing its ambitions and assumptions. Using theories and methods drawn from studies of settler colonialism, nationalism, media, sociology, trauma, and literary history, Edward Watts excavates dozens of long-lost Indian Hater accounts, as well as better known ones from Benjamin Franklin, Charles Brockden Brown, James Hall, Robert Montgomery Bird, and Herman Melville to tell the story of a story, and how that story exposes the complex machinations of the role of print culture's interactions with the violence of settler colonialism.

Edward Watts is Professor Emeritus of English at Michigan State University. His first book, Writing and Postcolonialism in the Early Republic (1998), began a career in scholarship in early American Studies. Later projects developed an interest in early western American writing. His most recent book is Colonizing the Past: Myth-Making and Pre-Columbian Whites in American Writing, 1760-1860 (2020), which was listed as an Outstanding Academic Title by CHOICE.