Messy Beginnings challenges the idea of early America’s immunity from issues of imperialism, that its history is not as “clean” as European colonialism.  By addressing  the literature ranging from the diaries of American women missionaries in the Middle East to the work of Benjamin Franklin and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and through appraisals of key postcolonial theorists such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, the contributors to this volume explore the applicability of their models to early American culture. 

Making a joyful noise: William Apess and the search for postcolonial method(ism) / Laura Donaldson
Seeing with Ezekeil's eyes: Indian "resurrection" in transatlantic colonial writings / Kristina Bross
Casualties of the rod: rebelling children, disciplining Indians, and the critique of colonial authority in Puritan New England / Anna Mae Duane
"If Indians can have treaties, why cannot we have one too?": the whiskey rebellion and the colonization of the West / Edward Watts
Colonial planter to American farmer: South, nation, and decolonization in Cre¿vecoeur / Jennifer Rae Greeson
Hawthorne's desert: "wakefield" and the imagination of colonial space / Geoffrey Sanborn
The periphery within: internal colonialism and the rhetoric of U.S. nation building / Michelle Burnham
Nation, missionary women, and the race of true womanhood / Malini Johar Schueller
Brigands and nuns: the vernacular sociology of collectivity after the Haitian revolution / Michael Drexler
Turning identity upside down: Benjamin Franklin's antipodean cosmopolitanism / Jim Egan
"The science of lying" / David S. Shields
Colonization, Black freemasonry, and the rehabilitation of Africa / Joanna Brooks

Edited by Malini Johar Schueller and Edward Watts