Alternate imperialisms in the age of Manifest Destiny.

摘要

Alternate Imperialisms draws upon a growing body of scholarship stressing the movement of peoples, print culture, and ideas in the Americas. Specifically, I study the relationship of antebellum culture to the rise of U.S. imperialism and empire by demonstrating that the growing U.S. presence in and influence over non-contiguous trans-American spaces were shaped, enabled, and contested in narratives of individual and collective movement. Ideologies of mobility---and their cultural and literary representations---became both the site and the stakes for debates about and the policies of U.S. expansionism. Moreover, by insisting on the multiple ideologies of mobility I recognize the varying ways that personal and social movement are constrained, enabled, or coerced through racial, gendered, class-based, and nationalist determinants.; My research is grounded in archival sources and the study of a variety of antebellum texts, including canonical sea narratives, literary and scientific journal articles, women's travel journals and letters, and African-American fiction, speeches, and tracts. The accounts I study indicate the ways that intensified attention to movement and mobility, informed by discourses of race and gender, served as a means through which projects of emerging empire were articulated. Specifically, I analyze writings from Richard Henry Dana, Herman Melville, Matthew Maury, Mrs. D.B. Bates, Mary Jane Megquier, Martin Delany, and others. Taken together, these works show how cultural texts can establish, contribute to, and interrogate the logics of imperialism. They also make evident how U.S. expansionism depended upon multidirectional activity; westward movement was inextricable from physical and discursive claims to non-contiguous sites throughout the hemisphere and was established through the presence and influence of mobile U.S. Americans including emigrants, businesspeople, laborers, and government agents.