Beyond The Black Legend: Spanish-American Political Imaginaries In The U.s., 1800-1855

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Degree type
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Graduate group
English
Discipline
Subject
Age of Revolution
Colonialism
History of slavery
Latinx Studies
American Literature
Latin American Languages and Societies
Latin American Studies
Literature in English, North America
Funder
Grant number
License
Copyright date
2020-02-07T20:19:00-08:00
Distributor
Related resources
Contributor
Abstract

This dissertation argues that revisions of the “Black Legend”—a set of Anglophone dogmas about Spanish tyranny and racial degeneracy—conditioned the terms for both political conflict and possibility in the nineteenth-century Americas. The project specifically attends to the ideology’s displacement from Spanish imperialism to the independence movements in Spanish America (1808 - 1826), which in turn enthralled the diplomatic imagination of the early United States. With the balance of power newly at stake in the hemisphere, Anglo-Americans relied on the Black Legend to encode the emergent polities in Spanish America with longstanding representations of the inhabitants’ political illegitimacy, sociopolitical dysfunction, and non-binary “casta” system of racial relations. I trace this language of sociopolitical taint not only in discourses of U.S. expansionism, but more importantly in instances of non-statist, transamerican political innovation. The project juxtaposes canonical, nineteenth-century U.S. literature and non-traditional texts by Spanish Americans, such as diplomatic correspondences, political tracts, subaltern rumors, and propagandist pamphlets. I assemble what I call an early Latinx counter-archive, which re-narrates Spanish America’s benighted sovereignty as an opportunity to envision forms of political community capable of disrupting Anglo-American imperial power.

Advisor
David Kazanjian
Date of degree
2019-01-01
Date Range for Data Collection (Start Date)
Date Range for Data Collection (End Date)
Digital Object Identifier
Series name and number
Volume number
Issue number
Publisher
Publisher DOI
Journal Issue
Comments
Recommended citation