The Premise: It's Hard to Study American Literature

There have been many spatial turns in the field of American Studies. These spatial turns tug at the edges of what we consider the body of American literature. Each one has provided, at least to some extent, a necessary anecdote to the nationalist rhetoric of the field’s origin. For those who might be less-familiar, the study of American literature as a field of knowledge separate and distinct from, say, British literature, was often mired in deeply propagandist movements. As scholars have tried to re-define the field, they have often used geographic categories to refocus scholarly attention. Each new definition comes with a new set of vocabulary, a new geographic region to center, and a new collection of questions to guide scholarly attention. This has provided a wealth of language articulating the problems with nation as a category in a world where national belonging comprises only a small part of the tangled web of lived experience. In contrast to other scholars who have interpreted the limits of nationally organized fields as a need to orient around new spaces, I have found it useful to consider transnational literature while abandoning static geographic frameworks including nation and hemisphere.

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The Project: Quiet the Noise on Geographic Attachment

My dissertation Traveling Figures and Uneven Geographies in Nineteenth Century American Literature offers a solution to these problems. I argue that loosening our attachment to geographic groupings of literature produces the means to better understand how these frameworks arrange meaning through various structures of power. This project uncovers these quiet and at times competing structures at the borders of genre. The articulation of American geography in the limits of genre across a broad body of literature tracks the deep entanglements between race and empire in American literary traditions. I argue this by examining traveling figures who move both in space and across genres. These traveling figures are: 1) the pícaro–a young orphan who moves frequently for survival 2) the flâneur– a bourgeois city wanderer, 3) the filibustero– a leader of one of the private armies that invaded Latin American territories, and 4) the rough rider– both a general cowboy figure and members of the military division under the same name in the Spanish-American war. The multilingual terms for these figures attests to the multilingual and multinational origins of American literature.

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The Findings: Lived Experience is Fluid

This project demonstrates how nineteenth century American authors thought of geography as fluid, uneven, and unstable. My research tracks the many types of texts in which these four literary figures appear such as manuscripts, novels, and newspapers, including archival sources that have not yet been digitized. I read African American authors (broadly defined) like Frederick Douglass (1845), Juan Francisco Manzano (1835), Harriet Wilson (1859), William J. Wilson (1859), and Latinx authors like José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi (1816), Loretta Velazquez (1876), and José Hernández (1872). These are sometimes read alongside Anglo authors like Mark Twain (1884), William Walker (1860), and Theodore Roosevelt (1899) as well as newspaper articles. These texts come from South America, Central America, Mexico, the Caribbean, and the United States. The inclusion of under- studied texts and archival material in this project contributes to the still ongoing recovery projects of Hispanic and African American archives which began in the 1980s and 1990s. More broadly, this project provides pathways for the development of intellectual frameworks that escape the confines of nation without reifying another geographic center for analysis.

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Supplemental: Connections with Our Current Moment

Additionally, each chapter contains a thread of our current moment, drawing the line between nineteenth century rhetoric and politics and our current environment. The filibuster chapter discusses Strom Thurmond and Cory Booker’s modern and contemporary speeches. The rough rider chapter frames the nineteenth century texts through a discussion of the Compton Cowboys and Jordan Peele’s Nope. These contemporary threads articulate the importance of understanding our history. American literature and culture continues to grapple with questions of frontiers, expansionism, and racial violence. At the same time, authors and artists now, as they did in the nineteenth century, continue to imagine other futures and articulate the frameworks that might support them.

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Gratitude: Many Supporters Along the Way

My work has been supported by the Center for Latin American Studies Benson Summer Research Fellowship at the University of Texas Austin where I sourced archival material related to this project. My writing forthcoming in J19. It has also appeared in Literary Geographies. My first publication, “Workers in the Field: Geographies of Difference in Helena Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus” interrogates the competing systems of power that spatially fix workers in agricultural economies. My more recent work draws on the newspaper articles from African American author James McCune Smith that argue against the mid-nineteenth century rhetoric promoting the development of a canal through Nicaragua as both an imperialist and racially motivated project. I continue to maintain a robust presentation agenda at conferences like C19 and the American Studies Association. Research previously presented at C19 on the creative historiographic literature of Pauline Hopkins (1902) is under revision at MELUS.

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Looking Forward: The Work Continues

I expect future research will continue to find inroads into how the field of American studies and hemispheric American literature can better incorporate multilingual and multicultural frameworks across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.