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This will be a long thread so want to open with the most important part. If you study/care about US lit, go buy this book, or ask your library to order it. It's fantastic and has transformed my understanding of US culture and politics. https://ugapress.org/book/9780820358369/medieval-america/
It was written by my friend @RabieeYusef. Rob is a contingent faculty member at @TempleUniv, which did nothing to support his research. Like so many contingent folks, Rob wrote it while teaching a load that would terrify most tenured faculty, & doing union organizing work.
But despite all that, it's brilliant. Rob takes on an aspect of American exceptionalism taken as a given even by that ideology's critics: the notion that the US somehow bypassed the dialectic struggle between feudalism and liberalism.
By reading for residual feudal tropes in US literature, the book draws out, in a careful Marxist critique, how these tropes are not merely fanciful, but rather indexing ideological struggles about US sovereignty and political economy that occurred over the course of c19.
To take one example from a reading that really shaped my thinking. In the chapter on Cooper and the anti-rent wars, he draws out how Cooper's defense of the Mohawk Valley landlords drew on the legal and political legacy of feudalism rather than liberalism to make its case.
Building on the readings of Deloria et al, who have noted the performative politics of "playing Indian" among the anti-rent agitators, Rob tracks how *both* the anti-rent agitators and Cooper's defense relied on a symbolic re-conquest of Indigenous sovereignty.
