Crèvecœur: What is an American?

10-Minute Talks

J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur (1735-1813) was a farmer as well as a complex thinker of the contradictions of American identity as described in his famous Letters from an American Farmer and, more strikingly, in his French texts which develop his description and analysis of the New World and its peoples. Many readers of his English work have focused on his wishful story of the land of the free, a hospitable refuge to the dispossessed of Europe, a glorious melting pot where the American is born: a man who works hard, who can provide for his family, and be treated with respect whatever his origins and whatever his religious beliefs. Yet, as Judith Still discusses in this talk, Crèvecœur reveals in his French work the original sins of British colonization and of the new United States, sins which still haunt us today: genocide of indigenous peoples, enslavement of Africans and environmental devastation.

She is the author of Derrida and Other Animals: The Boundaries of the Human (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and ‘Slavery in Enlightenment America – Crèvecœur's Bilingual Approach’, Journal of Romance Studies (2018) 18:1, 103-29.