Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Luis-Brown is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and English at Claremont Graduate University.

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"With "Waves of Decolonization," " "David Luis-Brown practices rather than prescribes a transnational American studies, going beyond the purely thematic level to engage with other languages, cultures, and literary histories. Luis-Brown presents a vast amount of literary material and many cross-cultural connections that will be unknown or little known to scholars in U.S. American studies, while he also contributes new understandings of familiar and canonical writers."--Anna Brickhouse, author of "Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere
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WAVES OF DECOLONIZATION

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS..............................................................................................................................................1INTRODUCTION Waves of Decolonization and Discourses of Hemispheric Citizenship..............................................................................35ONE "White Slaves" and the "Arrogant Mestiza": Reconfiguring Whiteness in The Squatter and the Don and Ramona...............................................67TWO "The Coming Unities" in "Our America": Decolonization and Anticolonial Messianism in Mart, Du Bois, and the Santa de Cabora............................147THREE Transnationalisms against the State: Contesting Neocolonialism in the Harlem Renaissance, Cuban Negrismo, and Mexican Indigenismo.....................202FOUR "Rising Tides of Color": Ethnography and Theories of Race and Migration in Boas, Park, Gamio, and Hurston..............................................241CODA Waves of Decolonization and Discourses of Hemispheric Citizenship......................................................................................245NOTES........................................................................................................................................................301REFERENCES...................................................................................................................................................329

Chapter One

Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona (1884) and Mara Amparo Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don (1885) deploy the discourses of sentimental melodrama and romantic racialism in representing conflicts over land, class position, and racial status in California in the 1870s. These novels portray Anglos, Californios, and Indians as struggling for social position following the U.S. annexation of half of Mexico as a result of the Mexican-American War of 1846-48.

I want to address three related sets of questions. First, what are the ideological limits and possibilities of the traditions of sentimental melo-drama and romantic racialism that Jackson and Ruiz de Burton use in structuring their novels? Second, what happens to one's understanding of the limits and possibilities of the form when sentimentalism travels from England and the U.S. northeast to areas that are politically contested zones of empire? Third, to what extent are the discourses of sentimental melo-drama and romantic racialism adequate to the task of not only representing imperial conflicts, but also promoting decolonization? I pose these three related questions because some would question a focus on sentimental discourse in a book about decolonization because of the form's long-standing association with the formation and consolidation of the middle classes in opposition to the lower classes in England and the U.S. northeast, as Nancy Armstrong and Ann Douglas have shown. Douglas has charged that Harriet Beecher Stowe equated domesticity with middle-class leisure in such a way that the moral high ground claimed by sentimental women served to rationalize their privileged position in a consumer society.

The argument linking sentimental culture to class exploitation is quite persuasive. But sentimentalism's rationalization of class exploitation is a possible outcome of the form, not a necessary one. The argument about the class politics of sentimentalism is persuasive only if one (incorrectly) assumes that the use of the form was restricted to Anglo-Americans in England and the U.S. northeast and that the form cannot be unmoored from its roots in the white middle classes. Sentimental discourse was ideally suited to representations of populations victimized by empire, whether related to the British empire, as Julie Ellison has shown in her analysis of Joseph Addison's Cato (1713), or the U.S. empire, as I show here. Contrary to the assumption that sentimental melodrama was restricted to England and the U.S. northeast, the racially oppressed and colonized used the form to "write back" against the empire, as is the case with W. E. B. Du Bois and Jos Mart (see chapter 2). My analysis of The Squatter and the Don and Ramona supports the claim that sentimentalism has reinforced hierarchies of social class. But it would be a mistake to claim that it necessarily entails a specific ideology on class and race; in fact, the form is remarkably protean.

One measure of the pliant character of sentimentalism can be seen in Mart's assessment of Stowe and Jackson as sentimentalist writers. He offers hints as to how sentimentalism could appeal to writers such as himself, who grew up in poverty in a colonized country and sought to end Spanish colonialism by forging an alliance with tobacco workers and Afro-Cubans (see chapter 2 on the centrality of this alliance in Mart's anticolonial activism). In the prologue to his translation of Ramona (1888), Mart makes a strong case for the continued relevance of Stowe's brand of sentimental melodrama in addressing the differing political context of U.S. expansionism after the Civil War. He favorably compares Ramona to Uncle Tom's Cabin, whose sentimental qualities he had earlier recognized, praising it as "a tear that has something to say." As this metaphor suggests, nineteenth-century sentimentalism appeals to readers' emotions and morals in an effort to shape their politics, often through tropes of family separation. Mart claims that he found in Ramona "our novel," a model full of "fire and knowledge" for what he would call "Our America," a racially egalitarian Latin America opposing both Spanish and U.S. imperialism. Mart celebrates Ramona as "la mestiza arrogante" (the arrogant mestiza), implying that she is the ideal subject of the revolutionary interracial movement that he calls "our mestiza America." Mart represents this collectivity as embodied by the product of interracial love, a mestiza of mixed Indian and white heritage; he thus implicitly recognizes the utility of sentimentalism in representing the intertwined character of the plights of the victims of U.S. racial politics and empire.

Even as Mart is reinventing the figure of Ramona for his own purposes of decolonization and downplaying the moments in the novel that appear to consign Native Americans to menial labor, he is teaching a useful lesson about the potential of sentimental discourses. If on the one hand sentimentalists could represent national, linguistic, and ethnic differences in a favorable if patronizing manner; on the other hand sentimentalism traveled across national boundaries into new cultural and historical contexts and occasionally crossed into the hands of the lower classes and colonized. Sentimentalism, Mart implies, can be a tool of decolonization-did it promote decolonization in the hands of Jackson and Ruiz de Burton?

Cultural production on the aftermath of the Mexican-American War in California presents an ideal opportunity for investigating what happens when sentimental discourse turns its attention away from antislavery reform and toward defining political agendas in...