The Race for America: Blackness, Belonging, and Empire in The
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THE RACE FOR AMERICA: BLACKNESS, BELONGING, AND EMPIRE IN THE TRANSAMERICAN NINETEENTH CENTURY By RJ Boutelle Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English August, 2016 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Vera M. Kutzinski, Ph.D. (chair) Teresa A. Goddu, Ph.D. Ifeoma C.K. Nwankwo, Ph.D. Ruth Hill, Ph.D. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS…………………………………………………………………….…iii LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………………...xii Chapter Introduction: “If I Were Not Here, I Would Have to be Invented: Hemispheric America and the Black Body..…………………………………………………………………………...1 The Race for America..........………………………………………………........................4 Race and the Transnational Turn………………………………………………………...13 The Structure of the Study……………………………………………………………….27 1. “Greater Still in Death”: Race, Repetition, and Reanimation in the Curious Case of Juan Placido………………..38 La Escalera and the Shot Heard ‘Round the Atlantic World………….…...……………44 Translating and Transmuting Race…………………………………….…...……………60 The Afterlives of Juan Placido…………………………………………………………...73 Blake, or the Reanimation of Juan Placido………………………………………………88 Conclusion: From “The Black Man” to The Black Man…………………………………99 2. Liberia through the Looking Glass: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Daniel H. Peterson, and Manifest Destiny East………………104 Manifest Destiny and the Destination for Afro USAmericans: Haiti or Liberia?...........107 Manifest Destiny East and the Invention of Afro USAmerican Imperialism…………..119 Topsy the Missionary, Topsy the Trickster…………………………………………….126 Liberia through The Looking-Glass…………………………………………………….143 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...162 3. Nonhistorical Fiction and the Futures of Coloured Trinidadians in Adolphus and The Slave Son………………………………………………………....165 Nonhistorical Fiction: A Theory………………………………………………………..170 Trinidad in the Age of Emigration……………………………………………………...176 The Mulatto in Black and White in Adolphus………………………………………….188 Adolphus, The Slave Son, and Greater Anglo America………………………………...201 The Color of Black Liberation in The Slave Son……………………………………….206 i The Vanishing Indian and the Vanishing Mulatto……………………………………...218 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...238 4. Breaking Bad Science: E.G. Squier, James McCune Smith, and the Genres of Nicaraguan Ethnography……..240 “To Gird the World as with a Hoop”: Squier’s Nicaragua and USAmerican Empire…245 James McCune Smith’s Response: The Anthropological Gaze and the Untrained Eye..260 Waikna and the Fictionalization of Anthropology……………………………………...276 His Man Antonio: Indigenous Homoerotics, Native Nationalism, and Manifest Destiny………………………………………………………………………………….292 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...314 AFTERWORD………………………………………………………………………………….317 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………324 ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS As a first-generation college student, I find it difficult to put into words the tremendous personal significance of completing this project, even as, ironically, finding fitting phrasing for such challenging feelings has now become my vocation. In lieu of a satisfactory expression, I submit this lengthy reflection on the many, many individuals and institutions that have made this endeavor possible, pleasurable, and productive for me. While these professions of appreciation will never match the support they seek to gratify, and while I may (I’m sure will) forget many who have made contributions both modest and massive to my development, my hope is that these acknowledgments will proffer the wonderfully collegial, collaborative, and compassionate environments in which I have had the immense privilege to incubate this project and myself. As an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst, I benefited from remarkable instruction and mentorship from faculty who recognized the potential in my work long before I did. Joselyn Almeida Beveridge and Peggy Woods were early boosters of my writing. Arthur Kinney and Maria Tymozcko, who cooperatively directed my verbose, multi- chapter honors thesis on William Faulkner (an exceptional indulgence of an undergraduate student), began teaching me the conventions of academic writing, the pitfalls of purple prose, and how to manage a long-term research project—lessons still very much in progress. I’m also grateful to Haivan Hoang, under whose guidance I worked as a tutor in the UMass Writing Center and who taught me the precious value of extensive revision and quality feedback. Joe Skerrett encouraged me to begin an academic career in the twilight of his own and imparted indispensable advice, such as applying to Vanderbilt. iii During my graduate studies, I benefited from eclectic seminars that challenged the boundaries of my knowledge and pushed me to consider the merits and drawbacks to a wide variety of methodological approaches to literature. Kathryn Schwarz, Hortense Spillers, and Mark Wollaeger taught critical theory with clarity and institutional context; Jane Landers showed me how historians think, read, and write, and she still occasionally emails me books and archival materials that remind her of my project; Colin Dayan encouraged me to take risks in my writing and pursue inchoate ideas without knowing the destination; Houston Baker and Cecilia Tichi, whose conviviality never let me lose sight of the human element of the humanities, also helped me develop readings and critiques that currently inform this project. Most of all I am thankful to my committee, who have been fierce critics and passionate supporters of this project from the beginning. Ruth Hill was the first to encourage me to explore the transamerican dimensions of scientific racism, and her extensive, almost encyclopedic knowledge of USAmericanist and Latin Americanist scholarship has proved invaluable to the framing of this dissertation. Her course on narratives of nation building in the Americas put me in conversation with a remarkable cohort of Latin Americanist graduate students, whose probing questions and literary-historical field knowledge not only enhanced my readings of class materials, but also continue to enrich my scholarship. Ifeoma Nwankwo has always been two steps ahead of me in seeing what this project and its interventions were. She consistently reminds me of the urgency of my work, regularly pushes me to reconsider more conservative articulations of my scholarship, and above all, has taught me that all research is collaborative and all citations are political. In other words, she is to blame for the length of this Acknowledgments page. Teresa Goddu taught me how to make academic arguments and she has never let me hide an unclear thesis behind lofty jargon. She also taught me the indispensable skill of developing a iv research methodology for archival work—I like to tease her that being her research assistant has shown me how to do things right the first time so I don’t have to do it again later, but the truth is that its shown me how to do things right. As my first-year mentor, she encouraged me to form a five-year plan and helped me to imagine the most ambitious and successful version of my work and myself. She has been a tireless advocate for me in our frequent emails, in our department, and in the field. Finally, Vera Kutzinski has been an exceptional mentor, teacher, and critic from day one. In my interventions into such presentist fields as Hemispheric American Studies and Black Studies, she has always insisted I return to formative, early works in order to better understand the oft-overlooked genealogies of those fields. She taught me how to work within and against troublesome paradigms. She imparted on me the mantra, “There are no canonical works, only canonical readings of works.” Her always direct and often brutally candid feedback on my writing has been perhaps the most singularly influential force on this project because, and this is important, it was always undergirded by her unbending support of my intellectual development. She has read every segment of this dissertation multiple times in multiple forms and has offered, at every stage, thoughtful, insightful, and incisive criticism. As a mentor, she has been more generous with her time than I ever could have imagined, and I will spend my entire academic career trying to generate appropriate dividends on her immense investment. At Vanderbilt, I also benefited from conscientious and collegial colleagues, my daily interactions with whom have contributed an often invisible, but nevertheless tangible impact on my work. My scholarship had many readers in Vera’s monthly works-in-progress reading groups: Elizabeth Barnett, Annie Castro, Hubert Cook, Tatiana McInnis, Lucy Mensah, Marzia Milazzo, and Aubrey Porterfield. Thank you all for your feedback, for sharing your own exciting scholarship, and for never making me feel guilty about having seconds of whatever delicious v baked good Vera prepared for us. The English Graduate Committee (Mark Wollaeger, Colin Dayan, Ifeoma Nwankwo, Leah Marcus, and Humberto Garcia) provided an intense, but persuasive and productive critique of my first chapter that became formative to this project’s current iteration. They also awarded me a Martha Rivers Ingram Dissertation Completion Fellowship, which provided me essential teaching relief during my final year of writing. Other Vanderbilt colleagues generously agreed to read sections of this project at different stages, including Michael Alijewicz, Andy Hines, Shelby Johnson,