ABSTRACT
Experimenting with the role of language enabled James Fenimore Cooper to explore his relationship to the transatlantic slave system. Writing in response to the emancipation of slaves in the West Indies and the Missouri crisis, Cooper envisioned the American frontier as a discursive site where transatlantic problems became negotiable. Cooper's version of translation is anti-essentialist, and leaves out those aspects of language and culture that are so specific as to resist translation. Ultimately, Cooper performed a blanching of the Atlantic that, at its best, imagined translation as an egalitarian practice, and at its worst made translation a white prerogative. Cooper imagines a stage of language formation in which the specific has not yet become widely generalized. He himself performs that generalization, and in this passage enacts the process of language formation. Translation plays a dubious role in this scene. Translation enables the townspeople to understand the content of the missive.
