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REVIEWS Wasserman, Renata R. Mautner. Exotic Nations: Literature and Cultural Identity in the United States and Brazil, 1830-1930. Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994. 288 pp. Cloth: $39.95. Paper: $16.95. As the American Revolution was just getting underway, a curious thing happened to a British army tune full of stinging anti-American verses ("Dolly Bushel let a Fart/Jenny Jones she found it," runs a pair of lines in one particularly scurrilous version): taken over by the colonists, it was used to taunt their foes and soon to champion the rebels and the emergent nation for which they fought. "Yankee Doodle," as Kenneth Silverman explains in his Cultural History of the American Revolution (1976), "from a song of derision became a song of defiance" (p. 275). Renata R. Mautner Wasserman undertakes to trace a larger, more complex pattern that at heart copies this one. She rightly notes that post-colonial societies (in her case, settler-colonial societies, though the point would apply to other kinds as well) carry on a running battle with the imagery thrust upon them by their old masters. Generalizing thus far from Edward Said's formulations regarding Western promulgations of the "Oriental," Wasserman seeks to modulate his theory so as to suggest a less starkly divisive mythography. To be sure, she recognizes that in attempting to domesticate the exoticism in which they have been previously dressed, post-colonial societies run some risk of assenting to the original, or seeming to assent to it; but even more, that they run the risk of accepting the agenda that comes ready-made with the exotic imagery, even if the content of the imagery is rejected outright. But she is aware, too, that any language is always-already constructed, and at the same time remains capable of nuanced equivocation and irony on the part of its belated speakers and writers. In the case of American nations (here, specifically , the United States and Brazil), European imagery associated the New World with "nature," to its detriment as well as advantage; Americans were inclined to accept this association even when doing so meant that they were themselves familiar with the high culture venues in which the association was often forged. Indeed, in the special case of the American writers whose works she discusses at considerable length (James Fenimore Cooper and the Brazilians José de Alencar and Mario de Andrade), much of their art was generated out of the agenda of this association even as the specific works she discusses sought to vindicate the claims of the United States or Brazil to serious consideration as "cultured" (i.e., European-style) nations. This is a widely allusive book not capable of easy summary. It makes its points about the transatlantic web of influence and mutual construction and deconstruction in part by tracing out a theory of the exotic, especially in the context of literary nationalism, and then by showing how, in a series of se- 238Reviews lected texts, European thinkers and writers set up a mythology that Cooper inevitably "had to" engage. In turn, Cooper set an agenda for later European exoticists up to Karl May, but also for Latin American writers such as Alencar, whose "Indian" novels (O Guarini [1857], Iracema [1865], and Ubiraiara [1874]) drew on the Leather-stocking Tales as well as Cooper's own "sources," such as Scott and Chateaubriand. The intriguing point as Wasserman sketches such webs of influence is that mere influence is not the key issue; rather, it is the idiom of the exotic that matters, an idiom first created by Europeans as a means of distancing the colonial periphery from the homeland. As with "Yankee Doodle," however, the idiom evolved into a means of self-representation and circulated among the writers of the periphery, giving them the means of achieving fame there and abroad. The terms in which Wasserman traces this circulation are more novel than is the substance of what she describes. Nowhere does she muster the kind of detail and inclusiveness that would make her account and her explanation as comp

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