Safe Distance: U.S. Slavery, Latin America, and American Culture, 1826--1861
Item
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Title
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Safe Distance: U.S. Slavery, Latin America, and American Culture, 1826--1861
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:ab194f4f67c4:10924
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identifier
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11141
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Creator
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Naish, Paul D.,
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Contributor
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James Oakes
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Date
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2011
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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American history | American studies | American Culture | Early Republic | Latin America | Nationalism | Slavery | United States
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Abstract
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This dissertation argues that in the thirty-five years before the Civil War, people in the United States used discourse about Latin America as a way to discuss slavery in the U.S. Through outright comparisons or implicit metaphors, they employed the Latin American context to say what was literally unspeakable when talking about slavery at home. Politicians stifled by Congress's gag rule, Northerners wary of offending their Southern neighbors, even proslavery partisans who countenanced no whisper of criticism of their own peculiar institution, all analyzed slavery south of the border without fear of censure.;At the time of Spanish-American independence, achieved just as the U.S. celebrated its fiftieth jubilee in 1826, many Americans looked forward to a future of shared republicanism and beneficial commercial relations. But during the widely-publicized Panama Congress debates of that year, Southern politicians insisted on the racial difference that characterized their neighbors to the south. By the 1830s, '40s, and 50s, U.S. citizens saw Latin America, however much it shared a history of European colonization and a population that included whites, blacks, and native peoples, as unquestionably the Other.;With chapters considering the work of early U.S. archaeologists, the fiction and drama of the antebellum period, William Hickling Prescott's The Conquest of Mexico and The Conquest of Peru, and proslavery analyses of Cuba and Brazil, this dissertation explores the purpose served by the perception of Latin American otherness during a period when open discussion of U.S. slavery was highly charged and polarized. Though proximate in geography, Latin America was remote in culture, language, and customs---a combination that allowed people in the U.S. to comment on conditions in their own country without appearing to do so.;At the same time, the disparagement of Latin America proved to be something about which everyone---Northerners and Southerners, Whigs and Democrats, scholars secure in their libraries and settlers vulnerable on the Mexican frontier---could agree. By creating a safe space onto which to displace anxieties about racial tensions, servile rebellion, miscegenation, and emancipation, discourse about Latin America helped to unify and reassure a nation whose sectional fissures were growing deeper.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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History
