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Emily Scheese UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ THE SHORES OF US EMPIRE: ISLANDS AND GEOGRAPHIES OF HISTORICAL STRUGGLE IN THE LITERARY IMAGINATION A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in LITERATURE with an emphasis in FEMINIST STUDIES by Emily A. Scheese December 2012 The Dissertation of Emily A. Scheese is approved: _______________________________ Professor Rob Wilson, Chair _______________________________ Professor Susan Gillman _______________________________ Professor Norma Klahn _____________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Emily A. Scheese 2012 TABLE OF CONTENTS Dissertation Title The Shores of US Empire: Islands and Geographies of Historical Struggle in the Literary Imagination Abstract………………………………………………………………………………iv Dedication & Acknowledgements…………………………………………………..vi Introduction…………………………………………………………………………..1 Part 1—The Shores of US Empire: ―el mar does not stop at borders‖…………..……1 Part 2—Landed versus Oceanic Paradigms of Historiography……………………...11 The Shores of US Empire & Poetic Historiography…………………………..……..23 Part 3— Reading and Writing Transnationally: A Reading Methodology for Texts at the Edges of US Empire……………………..30 Chapter One……………………………………………………………………...…57 Reading the 19th Century US Travelogue Transnationally: Contact Zone Geographies before 1848 and 1898 Periodizations of US Empire Chapter Two……………………………………………………………………….119 Islands and Geographies of Struggle: Caribbean Interventions towards a Genealogy of Poetic Historiography Chapter Three……………………………………………………………………..166 Asia-Pacific / Caribbean Militourism Nexus: Island Spaces on the Edges of the US Imaginary Epilogue……………………………………………………………………………206 Revisiting California Shores: Oceanic Crossings Works Cited……………………...………………………………………………...211 Selected Bibliography……………………………………………………………..217 Dissertation Committee: Rob Wilson, Chair; Susan Gillman; Norma Klahn iii ABSTRACT The Shores of US Empire: Islands and Geographies of Historical Struggle in the Literary Imagination Emily Scheese This dissertation gathers together 19th and 20th century texts produced along the shores of US geo-political expansion across land and sea. Engaging with the fields of transnational American cultural studies and postcolonial studies, this study articulates a transnational reading practice useful for addressing the writers and regions of the American West, the Pacific and the Caribbean in a transnational nexus called the Shores of US Empire. Methodologically inspired by Chinese American author Maxine Hong Kingston and Trinidadian born C.L.R James, the project outlines a practice of reading and writing transnationally that considers US literatures of travel in conversation with contemporary Pacific and Caribbean authors. Chapter one addresses literatures of travel by American authors such as Richard Henry Dana, Jr. and Twain, whose texts, rather than simply being documentary or apologists of US imperial expansion, reflect contact zones of the contested cultural, political and geographical processes of expansion. Chapter two focuses upon the creative literary imagination, looking for other possibilities and alternative epistemologies gleaned from Caribbean and Pacific authors. Drawing from the diverse political, creative and theoretical body of authors of the Spanish and French Caribbean like Martí, Retamar, Cabrera Infante and Carpentier, and Cesaire, Fanon, and Glissant as well as poetic authors from the Anglo-Caribbean like Derek Walcott, John Agard, and novelist Michelle Cliff, Chapter Two of this dissertation proffers a method of poetic historiography attentive iv to challenging western models of materialist history; the works of these authors provide an alternative historiography at sea in the Caribbean. These texts also critique the production of anthropological knowledge in the Caribbean and Pacific contexts. Chapter three shifts back to the Pacific to look at the military legacy left by US imperial expansion and the social and cultural movements that have emerged to contest the US presence on Pacific shores. I address the contexts of Hawai‘i and Bikini Atoll, considering texts by Rodney Morales and Kingston. Overall I argue that Pacific and Caribbean authors bring island geographies to the center of world historical events, challenging the overarching Euro-American myth of island isolation. v DEDICATION AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I‘d like to thank the members of my committee Rob Wilson, Susan Gillman, and Norma Klahn for seeing me through this journey at Santa Cruz. I‘d also like to thank members of the faculty at Santa Cruz and beyond who influenced my critical work and experience along the way although not directly on my committee, namely professors Lourdes Martinez-Echazabal, Louis Chude-Sokei, and Neferti Tadiar. Upon completing my dissertation, I‘d always looked forward to getting my photo taken by the department with the much anticipated document in its proper official box with an ecstatic ear-to-ear grin on my own countenance. I also always harked back to a passage from a dedication in Steinbeck‘s East of Eden which came to mind as I urged myself to ‗tie a bow‘ on the project and be done: ―Well here‟s your box. Nearly everything I have is in it, and it is not full. Pain and excitement are in it, and feeling good or bad and evil thoughts and good thoughts—the pleasure of design and some despair and indescribable joy of creation. And on top of these are all the gratitude and love I have for you. And still the box is not full,‖ marking Steinbeck‘s remarks to Pascal Covici. Since my journey to complete this document has taken so long, and been quite the extended journey, not surprisingly, the technology has changed, and we‘ve entered the digital age, and there will be no representative picture of me with dissertation and said official box, unless I stage one myself. The online library awaits me. However, the words of Steinbeck‘s dedication are still true: what remains within here is a document filled with the pleasure of design and some despair and the indescribable joy of creation. And yet, our work as intellectuals, academics, vi and/or activists is never fully finished. Despite being ―done,‖ the box is never full— unfinalizable in a sense. Many thanks also go out to my friends in the humanities and social sciences without which this ongoing journey would not be possible, namely the camaraderie and ongoing creative projects and friendships of Christy Lupo, Jake Thomas, Sarah Romano and Dina El Dessouky. To you all I am forever grateful. Thanks to my family, especially my mom and Uncle Don for being supportive of my literary interests, and to Dylan who showed up just in time to see me over this bridge. And finally, credit is due to the many scholar-activist-poets whose work inspired me to write this inquiry—many of whom have passed on during the composition of my dissertation, which is either a testament to them leaving us too soon or a symptom of how long I‘ve strung out this journey—across lifetimes it seems. In some fashion, it is my hopes that this dissertation whether in the physical world in future book form or in the virtual world in digital form, pays homage to my debt to them and their creative inspiration. With the closing words of Gloria Anzaldúa, ―This almost finished product seems an assemblage, a montage, a beaded work with several leitmotifs and with a central core, now appearing, now disappearing in a crazy dance.‖ vii The Shores of US Empire: Islands and Geographies of Historical Struggle in the Literary Imagination Introduction I. The Shores of US Empire: “el mar does not stop at borders” Wind tugging at my sleeve feet sinking into the sand I stand at the edge where the earth touches ocean where the two overlap a gentle coming together at other times and places a violent clash. –Gloria Anzaldúa, ―Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza‖ I want to begin my dissertation with a tribute to the late Gloria Anzaldúa (1942-2004), meztiza poet-activist, whose body of work and aura I‘ve had the pleasure and privilege of learning from while at Santa Cruz. In the passage above taken from Borderlands / La Frontera, she locates her ―feet sinking into the sand‖— the sand in her context, being the shores of the Rio Grande. By the time of Anzaldúa‘s writing in 1987, the border waters of the Rio Grande had long been turned into what she calls the ―Tortilla Curtain‖ borrowing from Cold War imagery to refer to and localize the embattled river as a ―1,950 mile-long open wound‖ / ―una herida abierta‖ across which families and histories had been torn by the earlier border-policies imposed after 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the US- Mexican War.1 Anzaldúa, immersed in the seemingly peaceful moment of standing 1 See Gloria Anzaldúa‘s, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987, 1999). (Aunt Lute Books: San Francisco): 24. All subsequent references will be made in the text. Anzaldúa is apt to give us in her poem a ―birth-date‖ for the border, suggesting the way it has literally become a living entity over and above a referent on a timeline in the lives divided by its imposition: ―The border fence that divides 1 on the river‘s shore ―at the edge where the earth touches ocean / where the two overlap / a gentle coming together‖ is stirred from her reverie when the shore becomes ―at other times and places a violent clash‖ (Anzaldúa 23). In her poetic treatise Anzaldúa reminds us that the borderland / la frontera space has historically been a site of violent encounter and upheaval. At a time when borders and national boundaries and the politics surrounding the bodies and policing of borders continue to be hotly contested in national politics, oftentimes occasions for violent reassertions of nationalism, Anzaldúa‘s creative work reminds us that national borders are arbitrarily constructed entities based on political purpose. Her poem becomes a means to record the genealogy and history of the natural and cultural landscape itself rather than to uphold the human-imposed national boundary line drawn on the map in 1848: But the skin of the earth is seamless.
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