Robert Woods Sayre’s Modernity and Its Other: The Encounter with North American Indians in the Eighteenth Century is a revision and translation of La modernité et son autre: Récits de la rencontre avec l’Indien en Amérique du Nord au XVIIIe siècle, published in 2008. In its literary analysis of a handful of Euro-American writers, “Indian points of view appear . . . only indirectly by refraction” (xiii).
Modernity and Its Other proceeds from the premise that “two fundamental and interrelated developments characterized early American history,” particularly in the eighteenth century. These were the “unfolding confrontation between European and indigenous societies and the coming of modernity in the social fabric of the former” (1). By “modernity,” Sayre clearly states that he means “capitalist economic structures” (xiii). In this view, the eighteenth-century British colonies and later United States were capitalist, Native peoples were not, and the quasi-feudal French habitants of Canada...
