Fatal revolutions: United States natural histories of the Greater Caribbean, 1707--1856.
Item
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Title
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Fatal revolutions: United States natural histories of the Greater Caribbean, 1707--1856.
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Identifier
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AAI3127882
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identifier
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3127882
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Creator
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Iannini, Christopher Paul.
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Contributor
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Adviser: William Kelly
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Date
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2004
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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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Literature, American | American Studies | Literature, Caribbean
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Abstract
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"Fatal Revolutions" pursues the complex West Indian routes of American nature discourse. From the signing of the Treaties of Utrecht in 1714, through the Americanization phase in Louisiana, to antebellum debates over the annexation of Cuba, the sugar islands formed a volatile locus of Euro-American ambition and anxiety. During those same decades a series of prominent North American naturalists found themselves almost fatally impelled toward study of the multi-lingual, multi-ethnic and transnational region---extending from Venezuela and Colombia in the south through Florida and Louisiana in the north---that recent scholars have named the greater Caribbean. Figures including St. John de Crevecoeur, William Bartram and John Audubon---along with European collaborators such as Sir Hans Sloane and Alexander von Humboldt---produced a substantial corpus of narratives, images and exhibits of circum-Caribbean environments, societies and commodities. Surveying a broad range of natural historical depictions of the region, the four central chapters of my study attempt to situate key documents of early American and U.S. culture within a specific Black Atlantic geography, one that was itself crucial to the development of Caribbean Studies by figures including Eric Williams and C. L. R. James. Several generations ago, their anti-colonial scholarship helped to locate North America firmly at the periphery of an eighteenth-century global economic vision centered on Caribbean sugar and slavery. "Fatal Revolutions" argues that this powerful counter-geography haunts the ostensibly nationalist designs of texts including Letters from an American Farmer, Bartram's revolutionary-era travel narrative of the Florida borderland, and Audubon's autobiographical account of the mass slaveholder exodus from Haiti to New Orleans. Through varied aesthetic means, their authors depicted the greater Caribbean as source of an ardently desired yet disruptive superabundance, extolling West Indian trade and commodities as source of prosperity and prestige, while warning of the threat to borders and beliefs posed by the mestizaje of the Caribbean plantation, and subaltern movements that included the spread of West Indian-style slave revolution.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
