The Colonizing Trick

The Colonizing Trick PDF Author: David Kazanjian
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816642380
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
An illuminating look at the concepts of race, nation, and equality in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century America, The idea that "all men are created equal" is as close to a universal tenet as exists in American history. In this hard-hitting book, David Kazanjian interrogates this tenet, exploring transformative flash points in early America when the belief in equality came into contact with seemingly contrary ideas about race and nation. The Colonizing Trick depicts early America as a white settler colony in the process of becoming an empire--one deeply integrated with Euro-American political economy, imperial ventures in North America and Africa, and pan-American racial formations. Kazanjian traces tensions between universal equality and racial or national particularity through theoretically informed critical readings of a wide range of texts: the political writings of David Walker and Maria Stewart, the narratives of black mariners, economic treatises, the personal letters of Thomas Jefferson and Phillis Wheatley, Charles Brockden Brown's fiction, congressional tariff debats, international treaties, and popular novelettes about the U.S.-Mexico War and the Yucatan's Caste War. Kazanjian shows how emergent racial and national formations do not contradict universalist egalitarianism; rather, they rearticulate it, making equality at once restricted, formal, abstract, and materially embodied.

The Colonizing Trick

The Colonizing Trick PDF Author: David Kazanjian
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816642380
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Get Book

Book Description
An illuminating look at the concepts of race, nation, and equality in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century America, The idea that "all men are created equal" is as close to a universal tenet as exists in American history. In this hard-hitting book, David Kazanjian interrogates this tenet, exploring transformative flash points in early America when the belief in equality came into contact with seemingly contrary ideas about race and nation. The Colonizing Trick depicts early America as a white settler colony in the process of becoming an empire--one deeply integrated with Euro-American political economy, imperial ventures in North America and Africa, and pan-American racial formations. Kazanjian traces tensions between universal equality and racial or national particularity through theoretically informed critical readings of a wide range of texts: the political writings of David Walker and Maria Stewart, the narratives of black mariners, economic treatises, the personal letters of Thomas Jefferson and Phillis Wheatley, Charles Brockden Brown's fiction, congressional tariff debats, international treaties, and popular novelettes about the U.S.-Mexico War and the Yucatan's Caste War. Kazanjian shows how emergent racial and national formations do not contradict universalist egalitarianism; rather, they rearticulate it, making equality at once restricted, formal, abstract, and materially embodied.

The Brink of Freedom

The Brink of Freedom PDF Author: David Kazanjian
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
ISBN: 9780822361510
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In The Brink of Freedom David Kazanjian revises nineteenth-century conceptions of freedom by examining the ways black settler colonists in Liberia and Mayan rebels in Yucatán imagined how to live freely. Focusing on colonial and early national Liberia and the Caste War of Yucatán, Kazanjian interprets letters from black settlers in apposition to letters and literature from Mayan rebels and their Creole antagonists. He reads these overlooked, multilingual archives not for their descriptive content, but for how they unsettle and recast liberal forms of freedom within global systems of racial capitalism. By juxtaposing two unheralded and seemingly unrelated Atlantic histories, Kazanjian finds remarkably fresh, nuanced, and worldly conceptions of freedom thriving amidst the archived everyday. The Brink of Freedom’s speculative, quotidian globalities ultimately ask us to improvise radical ways of living in the world.

A Third University Is Possible

A Third University Is Possible PDF Author: la paperson
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452954100
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 107

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Book Description
A Third University is Possible unravels the intimate relationship between the more than 200 US land grant institutions, American settler colonialism, and contemporary university expansion. Author la paperson cracks open uncanny connections between Indian boarding schools, Black education, and missionary schools in Kenya; and between the Department of Homeland Security and the University of California. Central to la paperson’s discussion is the “scyborg,” a decolonizing agent of technological subversion. Drawing parallels to Third Cinema and Black filmmaking assemblages, A Third University is Possible ultimately presents new ways of using language to develop a framework for hotwiring university “machines” to the practical work of decolonization. Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

The World Colonization Made

The World Colonization Made PDF Author: Brandon Mills
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812297326
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
According to accepted historical wisdom, the goal of the African Colonization Society (ACS), founded in 1816 to return freed slaves to Africa, was borne of desperation and illustrated just how intractable the problems of race and slavery had become in the nineteenth-century United States. But for Brandon Mills, the ACS was part of a much wider pattern of national and international expansion. Similar efforts on the part of the young nation to create, in Thomas Jefferson's words, an "empire of liberty," spanned Native removal, the annexation of Texas and California, filibustering campaigns in Latin America, and American missionary efforts in Hawaii, as well as the founding of Liberia in 1821. Mills contends that these diverse currents of U.S. expansionism were ideologically linked and together comprised a capacious colonization movement that both reflected and shaped a wide range of debates over race, settlement, citizenship, and empire in the early republic. The World Colonization Made chronicles the rise and fall of the colonization movement as a political force within the United States—from its roots in the crises of the Revolutionary era, to its peak with the creation of the ACS, to its ultimate decline with emancipation and the Civil War. The book interrogates broader issues of U.S. expansion, including the progression of federal Indian policy, the foundations and effects of the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny, and the growth of U.S. commercial and military power throughout the Western hemisphere. By contextualizing the colonization movement in this way, Mills shows how it enabled Americans to envision a world of self-governing republics that harmonized with racial politics at home.

Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature PDF Author: Hsuan L. Hsu
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521197066
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
This book examines how literature represents different kinds of spaces, from the single-family home to the globe. It focuses on how nineteenth-century authors drew on literary tools including rhetoric, setting, and point of view to mediate between individuals and different spaces, and re-examines how local spaces were incorporated into global networks.

Queequeg's Coffin

Queequeg's Coffin PDF Author: Birgit Brander Rasmussen
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 082234954X
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Rather than seeing American literature as beginning with the writings of English or Spanish colonists, Brander Rasmussen points to the wide variety of indigenous writing in the Americas prior to colonization. The study looks at writing between 1524 and the mid-19th century work of Herman Melville.

Forgotten Futures, Colonized Pasts

Forgotten Futures, Colonized Pasts PDF Author: Cara Anne Kinnally
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1684481244
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Forgotten Futures, Colonized Pasts traces the existence of a now largely forgotten history of inter-American alliance-making, transnational community formation, and intercultural collaboration between Mexican and Anglo American elites. This communion between elites was often based upon Mexican elites’ own acceptance and reestablishment of problematic socioeconomic, cultural, and ethno-racial hierarchies that placed them above other groups—the poor, working class, indigenous, or Afro-Mexicans, for example—within their own larger community of Greater Mexico. Using close readings of literary texts, such as novels, diaries, letters, newspapers, political essays, and travel narratives produced by nineteenth-century writers from Greater Mexico, Forgotten Futures, Colonized Pasts brings to light the forgotten imaginings of how elite Mexicans and Mexican Americans defined themselves and their relationship with Spain, Mexico, the United States, and Anglo America in the nineteenth century. These “lost” discourses—long ago written out of official national narratives and discarded as unrealized or impossible avenues for identity and nation formation—reveal the rifts, fractures, violence, and internal colonizations that are a foundational, but little recognized, part of the history and culture of Greater Mexico. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Representing the Race

Representing the Race PDF Author: Gene Andrew Jarrett
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814743404
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
The political value of African American literature has long been a topic of great debate among American writers, both black and white, from Thomas Jefferson to Barack Obama. In his compelling new book, Representing the Race, Gene Andrew Jarrett traces the genealogy of this topic in order to develop an innovative political history of African American literature. Jarrett examines texts of every sort—pamphlets, autobiographies, cultural criticism, poems, short stories, and novels—to parse the myths of authenticity, popular culture, nationalism, and militancy that have come to define African American political activism in recent decades. He argues that unless we show the diverse and complex ways that African American literature has transformed society, political myths will continue to limit our understanding of this intellectual tradition. Cultural forums ranging from the printing press, schools, and conventions, to parlors, railroad cars, and courtrooms provide the backdrop to this African American literary history, while the foreground is replete with compelling stories, from the debate over racial genius in early American history and the intellectual culture of racial politics after slavery, to the tension between copyright law and free speech in contemporary African American culture, to the political audacity of Barack Obama’s creative writing. Erudite yet accessible, Representing the Race is a bold explanation of what’s at stake in continuing to politicize African American literature in the new millennium.

David Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles

David Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles PDF Author: David Walker
Publisher: Black Classic Press
ISBN: 9780933121386
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 108

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Book Description
In 1829 David Walker, a free black born in Wilmington, North Carolina, wrote one of America's most provocative political documents of the nineteenth century, Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. Decrying the savage and unchristian treatment blacks suffered in the United States, Walker challenged his 'afflicted and slumbering brethern' to rise up and cast off their chains. Walker worked tirelessly to circulate his book via underground networks in the South, and he was so successful that Southern lawmakers responded with new laws cracking down on 'incendiary' anti-slavery material.

Americanism

Americanism PDF Author: Michael Kazin
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807869716
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
What is Americanism? The contributors to this volume recognize Americanism in all its complexity--as an ideology, an articulation of the nation's rightful place in the world, a set of traditions, a political language, and a cultural style imbued with political meaning. In response to the pervasive vision of Americanism as a battle cry or a smug assumption, this collection of essays stirs up new questions and debates that challenge us to rethink the model currently being exported, too often by force, to the rest of the world. Crafted by a cast of both rising and renowned intellectuals from three continents, the twelve essays in this volume are divided into two sections. The first group of essays addresses the understanding of Americanism within the United States over the past two centuries, from the early republic to the war in Iraq. The second section provides perspectives from around the world in an effort to make sense of how the national creed and its critics have shaped diplomacy, war, and global culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Approaching a controversial ideology as both scholars and citizens, many of the essayists call for a revival of the ideals of Americanism in a new progressive politics that can bring together an increasingly polarized and fragmented citizenry. Contributors: Mia Bay, Rutgers University Jun Furuya, Hokkaido University, Japan Gary Gerstle, University of Maryland Jonathan M. Hansen, Harvard University Michael Kazin, Georgetown University Rob Kroes, University of Amsterdam Melani McAlister, The George Washington University Joseph A. McCartin, Georgetown University Alan McPherson, Howard University Louis Menand, Harvard University Mae M. Ngai, University of Chicago Robert Shalhope, University of Oklahoma Stephen J. Whitfield, Brandeis University Alan Wolfe, Boston College