An important book by a prestigious scholar, This Violent Empire argues that violence against external Others inheres in American national identity. This penchant for violent aggression, forged during the early national period, would endure as a continuous phenomenon in American history, as it reflected the nation's deep-seated and unresolved contradictions and psychic crises. “To fear and dehumanize alien Others,” Carroll Smith-Rosenberg boldly proclaims, “to ruthlessly hunt them down, is truly American” (x).

The argument is provocative, yet not as original as Smith-Rosenberg implies. Other scholars have analyzed violence against external Others as a quintessentially American project.Footnote ¹ Smith-Rosenberg either is unaware of the studies that preceded her own or chose not to cite them, which unfortunately impedes collective efforts to examine the violence inherent in American national identity.

It is both a strength and a weakness of Smith-Rosenberg's book that she confines the study to the history of the early republic. Her close analysis of a rich variety of sources – especially political magazines and novels – illuminates the post-Revolutionary era but also insulates it. Hence Rosenberg argues that the violence inherent in American national identity emerged during this period when abundant evidence suggests that the aggression was culturally embedded well before the actual birth of the nation. Similarly, while she asserts that violent aggression against Others continues to characterize American national identity to the present day, she offers little evidence insofar as her analysis ends in the early republic. She will thus doubtlessly be accused of writing a polemic that extends beyond her source base, but such charges go with the territory in the intensely nationalistic United States.

In the wake of the Revolution, Americans were “a people with no common heritage – deeply divided along racial, regional, and religious lines” (21). They faced the daunting task of forging a new national identity, as well as both domestic and foreign threats, and moreover confronted the profound contradiction between extolling universal liberty and keeping slaves, cleansing the land of Indians, and policing a variety of gendered constructions. These unresolved conflicts produced “exclusion, violence, xenophobia, and paranoia” (22) directed against “all who threatened the new American's delicate psychological and ideological balance” (205). The targets included “effeminate men, transgressive women, Native Americans,” all of whom “became objects of rage and violence” (205).

Smith-Rosenberg divides the book into three sections, each of which “explores a central aspect of the imagined new American identity” (41). Each opens with a historical or literary vignette and proceeds to establish the process of identifying enemy Others and subjecting them to violent control. Section I focusses on Western farmers and women; Section II on Native Americans; and Section III on men, women, and enslaved Africans.

In the United States, Smith-Rosenberg argues, a “rigid hierarchy of social and even more fundamental racial distinctions established identities and social order” (204–5). The author of Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (1986), Smith-Rosenberg is especially acute in her analysis of gendered constructions and their relationship with violent demonization of the Other. Like many others she comprehends race and the emerging scientific racism as foundational to the psychic crisis of a republic founded on freedom while practicing violent oppression based on constructions of racial difference.

Smith-Rosenberg reaches back into the pre-Revolutionary era, and wisely so, in her analysis of what amounts to about three centuries of American Indian removal, a project that was, of course, replete with violence. Influenced by her colleague Philip DeLoria, among others, Smith-Rosenberg analyzes American efforts to incorporate the traits of the noble savage even while cleansing him from the land. “European Americans not only desired the Native Americans' land and name. They desired the Native Americans' idealized self,” she explains (204).

Notably absent from Rosenberg's analysis, or at least lacking in emphasis, is the relationship between religiosity and American national identity. “Manifest Destiny,” although a trope usually associated with the antebellum era, was profoundly implicated in the construction of a violent national identity well before the American Revolution. Rosenberg also focusses her attention on internal Others – women, Africans, and Indians – rather than foreign foes who also drove a violent US national identification.

In a brief conclusion, Smith-Rosenberg argues that the central contradiction of American history lies in the collective denial of the incompatibility of the “dueling visions” of universal freedom and imperial aggression. As a result, “an inherently contradictory, unstable national identity never quite at peace with itself” (466) drives “our need to punish the Others who will not help us resolve our national, our U. S., dilemma” (466–67).

The argument is persuasive, and though it is not entirely original Smith-Rosenberg nonetheless deserves immense credit for subjecting herself to a “vigorous project of analytic retraining” (xiii) in literary analysis and cultural and postcolonial studies (though she does not appear to have dug so deeply into the latter of these). It is not a simple matter to incorporate cultural theory with traditional sources and Smith-Rosenberg often blends the two unevenly and tediously.

Like many such works (including my own), Smith-Rosenberg risks reinscribing the very discourse she condemns – American exceptionalism – by focussing exclusively on the US “violent empire.” An emerging and stimulating literature on settler colonialism can provide a foundation for much-needed comparative analysis.Footnote ²

In the final analysis this provocative book on “this violent empire” reflects a commendable desire that many of us share to “seek to understand the tie between nationalism and violence” and especially “the drive to violently exclude others” (1). Smith-Rosenberg has advanced the project yet clearly much work remains to be done.