UC Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Entangled Roots: Race, Historical Literature, and Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century Americas Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3rs6w5ch Author Genova, Thomas Francis Publication Date 2012 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ Entangled Roots: Race, Historical Literature, and Citizenship in the Nineteenth- Century Americas A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in LITERATURE by Thomas Genova June 2012 The Dissertation of Thomas Genova is approved: _______________________________ Professor Norma Klahn, Chair _______________________________ Professor Lourdes Martínez-Echazábal _______________________________ Professor Susan Gillman _________________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies i Copyright © By Thomas Genova 2012 ii Table of Contents Abstract iv Acknowledgments vi Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Natural Aristocracy, Race, Slavery and Virtue in Jicoténcal 34 Chapter 2: Cooper in Captivity: Colonial Scenarios and Citizenship in Jacksonian Democracy and Argentine Liberalism 80 Chapter 3: From Disavowal to Dialogue: Manuel de Jesús Galván’s Enriquillo and Haiti 127 Chapter 4: Sombras de Facundo: Translation, Education, and Entanglement 184 Epilogue 230 Bibliography 250 iii Abstract Thomas Genova Entangled Roots: Race, Historical Literature, and Citizenship in the Nineteenth- Century Americas This dissertation examines in the transnational conversation on the place of Afro-descendants in the republican nation-state that ocurred in New-World historical literature during the nineteenth century. Tracing the evolution of republican thought in the Americas from the classical liberalism of the independence period to the more democratic forms of government that took hold in the late 1800s, the pages that follow will chart the circulation of ideas regarding race and republican citizenship in the Atlantic World during the long nineteenth century, the changes that those ideas undergo as they circulate, and the racialized tensions that surface as they move between and among Europe and various locations throughout the Americas. Focusing on a diverse group of writers --including the anonymous Cuban author of Jicoténcal; the North Americans Thomas Jefferson, James Fenimore Cooper, and Mary Mann; the Argentines Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Eduarda Mansilla de García; the Dominican Manuel de Jesús Galván; the Haitian Émile Nau; and the Brazilian Euclides da Cunha--, I argue that --in the extended Caribbean, the Southern Cone, and the North American empire--, letrado members of the lettered elite were entangled in a hemispheric dialogue on the place of Afro-descendants in the body politic as they looked abroad to countries in similar post-independence iv situations for models of how to adopt republican forms to racialized New-World society. In dialogue with one another, letrados from across the Hemisphere turn towards the region’s shared history of conquest, colonization and inter-ethnic conflict in order to elaborate a political philosophy to meet the particular structural needs of the Americas. Looking into the past from the vantage of the present, nineteent- century letrados collectively attempted to imagine a future community in which creole hegemony would be preserved. v Acknowledgements This dissertation would not have been possible without the help of many people. My adviser, Norma Klahn, has been a model of scholarship, mentoring, and patience throughout my time at UC Santa Cruz and I will always be grateful for her guidance. I also would like to thank my readers, Lourdes Martínez-Echazábal --for her encouragement and for always questioning my presuppositions-- and Susan Gillman --for her enthusiasm and her dedication to helping me to elaborate a comparative methodology for this project. Many other professors contributed to this project. Kirsten Silva-Gruesz was available to talk formally and informally throughout my graduate career and constantly enriched my understanding of inter-American and nineteenth-century studies. Juan Poblete’s courses on Latin American and U.S. Latino critical thought provided much of the theoretical background for the chapters that follow and Catherine Ramírez and Megan Thomas’s graduate seminars served as invaluable examples of the possibilities of interdisciplinary comparative work. Eva Guerrero and Julianne Burton first sparked my interest in nineteenth-century Latin America, while Guillermo Delgado was always forthcoming with his knowledge and advice. In addition to my graduate colleagues, I am thankful for the generous support of the Literature Department, Language Program --particularly María Victoria González Pagani and Eve Zyzik-- and the Graduate Division at UCSC. I am grateful to my friends in the U.S. and Spain for their help and to the Genova and Paucar-Espinoza families for their support over the years. Margott Guadalupe Paucar Espinoza deserves special recognition for having put up with me and my dissertation every day. vi Introduction This dissertation examines the deployment of historical discourse in the transnational conversation on Afro-New World citizenship that took place in the historical writing of the Americas between independence in the 1810s and 20s and modernization at the end of the nineteenth century. In an effort to document this hemispheric dialogue on the place of Afro-descendants1 in the New-World republic, the study explores the circulation of political ideas in the Atlantic World during the long nineteenth century, the changes that those ideas undergo as they circulate, and the racialized tensions that surface as they move between and among Europe and various locations throughout the Americas. Ultimately, I look at how the republican model evolves in racialized terms from the classical liberalism of the independence period to more democratic forms of government at the century’s end. Previously, most studies of race in the nineteenth-century New-World historical novel –such as those Concha Meléndez, Aida Cometta Mazoni, Cynthia Steele, and Fernando Operé, among others—have focused on indigeneity in works as diverse as the anonymous Jicoténcal (1826), James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales (1826-1841), Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Guatizmozín: 1 Translating the Spanish words afrodescendiente and afroamericano, I use the terms “Afro- descendant/descendent” and “Afro-New World” in English to refer to people of African descent living in the Western Hemisphere. I offer this choice of terms as a solution to the nonequivalence of the English “black” (which belongs to a binary system of racial ascription) and the Spanish “negro” (which represents one point among many on a broad spectrum of possible racial identities). This question of how to deal with the nonequivalence of culturally specific categories is at the heart of my project. 1 Último emperador de Méjico (1846), Émile Nau’s Histoire des caciques d’Haiti (1854), José de Alencar’s Guarani (1857), and Iracema (1865), Eligio Anacona’s Mártires de Anáuhuac (1870), Juan León Mera’s Cumandá (1877), and Manuel de Jesús Galván’s Enriquillo (1882). Lyric works by José María Heredia, Esteban Echeverría, Coriolan Ardouin, Juan Zorilla de San Martín, José Joaquín Pérez, and Salomé Ureña de Henríquez and the ways in which early republican poets attempt to forge a future out of their countries’ indigenous pasts have also garnered scholarly attention. These texts reflect the tendency of nineteenth-century writers to turn to the foundational moment of the Encounter between European and Amerindian societies as they contemplate the region’s present and future. Yet, despite the historical presence of Afro-descendants throughout the colonial Americas, the place of blackness in the nineteenth-century historical novel has received less attention from scholars.2 This is particularly surprising when one considers how fundamental the question of Afro-New World citizenship was to nineteenth-century republican history in the Americas: from the 1791 slave revolution in Haiti to the exclusion of Afro-descendants from Spanish citizenship in the 1812 Constitución de Cádiz to the Rosas dictatorship in Argentina –which was strongly supported by and eventually associated with the country’s black population-- through the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction, the racially charged struggle for Cuban independence, and Emancipation and the subsequent proclamation of the Republic in 2 A notable exception is Lee Joan Skinner’s section on Vicente Riva Palacio’s 1868 Monja y casada. Virgen y mártir in History Lessons. 2 Brazil. Given this backdrop, it seems inevitable that the nineteenth-century historical novel of the Americas also should explore the place of blackness in the New-World republic. A focus on the Hemisphere’s Afro-descendent population, diasporan in nature, requires a comparative lens. Taking the transnational moment of 1812 –in which a group of metropolitan Spaniards and criollos,3 responding to the French invasion of Spain and subsequent exile of King Fernando VII, met in the Andalusian city of Cádiz to draft a Spanish Imperial Constitution denying citizenship to Afro- descendants—as a point of departure, one discovers a series of hemisphere-wide conversations on the place of Afro-descendants in the New-World republican nation- state. Examples