Customer Reviews

Gone to Croatan: Origins of North American Dropout Culture

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This excellent anthology explores Colonial Subject Peoples abandoning civilization and creating tribal units with American Indians, creating vital, nonimperial creole cultures. The book is crucial in uncovering intercultural contact that was decisively against the colonialist directions of American history. This book is part of a general movement to create and discover anarcho-tribal connections across cultures. By exploring "Tri-Racial Communities" of disenfranchized Europeans, runaway Africans, and displaced American Indians, it shows the reality of human community outside of imperialist, nationalist dogma, and opens the possibility for fomenting an anti-imperial, polyethnic primal revival in the present.

... and informative to boot!

Students of divergent historical, political, & sociological subjects will all find something of interest in this collection; from the African diaspora in America to the seeds of U.S. Outlaw culture to forgotten social experiments that may have been hundreds of years ahead of their time- all are interwoven and flesh out lost details long ignored by establishment accounts of history.

If you're at all interested in American history, this study of "Dropout Culture" is an amazing read. I had NO idea that there was such a vivid and thriving counterculture back 100 or 200 years or more: Americans who walked away from all the norms and mores of early American capitalism and sought a different reality. This sometimes reads like a William S Burroughs fantasy of anarchist utopia-- "Cities of the Red Night" or "The Western Lands" or "The Place of Dead Roads"-- where "pirates" make their own compacts and live without laws and governments.

I loved this odd and compelling look at an alternate past I had never imagined existed.

"America" was founded as a land of drop-outs. Almost at once it began to produce its own dissidents - visionairies, utopians, Maroons (escaped slaves), white and black "Indians," sailors and bucaneers, tax rebels, angry women, crank reformers, "tri-racial isolate" communities - all on the lam from Babylon, from control. Their self-liberation was carried out under the sign of Wild(er)ness and its guardians, the "Natives." Having disappeared from "History," they have ever since been ignored by the Concensus and its guardians, the academics.

Now Here they are again, coming back at you, claiming to have been the real "America" all along. They speak from the past, through the mediumship of radical historians, and in the present, in their own voices. They are speaking of other possibilities - speaking for a romantic becoming - for an insurrectionary moment - for a restoration of the unknown. -- from book's back cover.

Gone to Croatan restarts American history from different revolutionary pasts in vibrant stories of people liberating themselves, not for the State, but for their lives. The essays remind us how inventive and beautiful people's efforts at living well with one another can be, as well as how endangered those efforts have always been. That so many of these stories are virtually unknown, outside certain alternative activist/scholarly circles, creates a sort of culture shock with one's "own" history, when the authors essentially give American history back to us. When the book came out, I was amazed at what I did not know, and how much richer the pool of usable American pasts had become. I've taught the book many times since then, and its effect in classrooms is refreshing. Rich Kees' essay on Metis history is often the first and only time students have heard that there *is* an American Metis history. As important as the content, students (and other readers) value the invitation to be full participants in a history that isn't closed to urgent needs and dreams. It's a great, crazy, wonderful read.

Forgotten from American history we should say. This is a quick, easy reading book that is clearly in love with the pirate utopias of the imagination, and sees somethings surprising close to them in the hidden corners of the United States over the last few hundred year. In many ways, including links here on amazon, this is the historical realization of the Temporary Autonomous Zones of the book of that title.

Can I quibble and wish that there were more and clearer references within the book?