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UNSETTLING THE NATION:
ANTI-COLONIAL NATIONALISM AND NARRATIVES OF THE
NON-WESTERN WORLD IN U.S. LITERATURE AND CULTURE, 1783-1860
by
Jeffrey H. Solomon
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
August 2011
Copyright 2011 Jeffrey H. Solomon
Object Description
| Title | Unsettling the nation: anti-colonial nationalism and narratives of the non-western world in U.S. literature and culture, 1783-1860 |
| Author | Solomon, Jeffrey H. |
| Author email | solomonj@usc.edu;JeffreyHSolomon@gmail.com |
| Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
| Document type | Dissertation |
| Degree program | English |
| School | College of Letters, Arts And Sciences |
| Date defended/completed | 2011-03-08 |
| Date submitted | 2011-07-29 |
| Date approved | 2011-07-29 |
| Restricted until | 2011-07-29 |
| Date published | 2011-07-29 |
| Advisor (committee chair) | Lloyd, David |
| Advisor (committee member) |
Rowe, John Carlos Handley, William Ross, Steven |
| Abstract | In Unsettling the Nation, I explore the uneven construction of a non-Western imaginary in U.S. literature and culture, focusing my attention upon early narrative representations of U.S. citizens who represent their presence and actions within the non-Western world as a response to Anglo-European imperialism. In these realist narratives of cultural contact, national characteristics are drawn out of the imaginative comparison of national protagonists and their Western and non-Western cultural Others. I argue that the literary portrayal of U.S. citizens in the non-Western world contributed important factual and imagined articulations of U.S. identity and nationality for a highly literate public that was already primed by the political writing of the period to reject their inherited colonial identities, and the works I discuss here present readers with representative Americans who are imaginatively portrayed in contrast to both Anglo-European foils engaged in colonial ventures in the non-Western world, and the non-Western people who inhabit that desirable geography. The representative U.S. citizens in these works act out national conflicts upon foreign landscapes imaginatively constructed as “neutral ground” – to use Hawthorne’s popular literary term for the space imaginatively conceived of as the setting for the American Romance genre – to produce, promote and disseminate U.S.-centric geopolitical narratives about a world of undeveloped nations threatened by Anglo-European colonial occupation, and in need of U.S. political intervention. ❧ John Ledyard asked for and received the first legal copyright for a literary work in the newly formed U.S. nation in 1783. The inaugural U.S. critique of British Imperial hubris that emerges in his Journal of the Final Voyage of Captain Cook (1783) is soon after echoed by U.S. Navy Captain David Porter in support of his own contrasting act of colonial occupation of Nuku Hiva during the War of 1812; like Ledyard’s journal of service with Cook, Porter’s A Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific (1822) contrasts U.S. actions in the non-Western world to those of Britain and the European empires. I revisit this very same geopolitical terrain in my chapter on Herman Melville’s quasi-fictional novel, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), set on the same island of Nuku Hiva that was identified and claimed for the U.S. by Porter in his Journal. Collectively, these works present nuanced descriptions of the characteristic “American” approach to the valuable territory and indigenous cultures of the Pacific, while condemning the contrasting Anglo-European colonial approach to those same people and places, documenting new and varied possibilities for a U.S. presence in the non-Western world. ❧ The non-Western world of the Pacific may hold symbolic significance in U.S. literary history and U.S. political history for the actions documented and described in these two popular memoirs, but the more significant contributions to the “geopolitical” character of U.S. identity emerged from the imaginative interactions staged between U.S. citizens and the North Africans of the “Barbary States” that were presented to readers during the Barbary Crisis of the late-18th century. I outline the slippage between domestic and global politics that is reflected in both Susanna Haswell Rowson’s play “Slaves in Algiers” (1794), and Royall Tyler’s novel, The Algerine Captive (1797). I conclude by tracing elements of the non-Western imaginary in U.S. literature and culture that are outlined in these U.S. works set in Africa and the Pacific to that which is presented by the mid-19th century U.S. filibuster, William Walker, in his celebrated memoir of invasion and conquest in Latin America, The War in Nicaragua (1860). |
| Keyword | John Ledyard; Royall Tyler; David Porter; Susanna Haswell Rowson; Herman Melville; William Walker; geopolitics; American studies; 19th century U.S. literature; postcolonial literature; non-Western imaginary; orientalism; imperialism; Journal of the Final Voyage of Captain Cook; Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean; Slaves in Algiers; The Algerine Captive; Typee; The War in Nicaragua |
| Language | English |
| Part of collection | University of Southern California dissertations and theses |
| Publisher (of the original version) | University of Southern California |
| Place of publication (of the original version) | Los Angeles, California |
| Publisher (of the digital version) | University of Southern California. Libraries |
| Provenance | Electronically uploaded by the author |
| Type | texts |
| Legacy record ID | usctheses-m |
| Rights | Solomon, Jeffrey H. |
| Access conditions | The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the author, as the original true and official version of the work, but does not grant the reader permission to use the work if the desired use is covered by copyright. It is the author, as rights holder, who must provide use permission if such use is covered by copyright. The original signature page accompanying the original submission of the work to the USC Libraries is retained by the USC Libraries and a copy of it may be obtained by authorized requesters contacting the repository e-mail address given. |
| Repository name | University of Southern California Digital Library |
| Repository address | USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 7002, 106 University Village, Los Angeles, California 90089-7002, USA |
| Repository email | cisadmin@usc.edu |
| Archival file | uscthesesreloadpub_Volume6/etd-SolomonJef-205.pdf |
Description
| Title | Page 1 |
| Full text | UNSETTLING THE NATION: ANTI-COLONIAL NATIONALISM AND NARRATIVES OF THE NON-WESTERN WORLD IN U.S. LITERATURE AND CULTURE, 1783-1860 by Jeffrey H. Solomon A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) August 2011 Copyright 2011 Jeffrey H. Solomon |
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