Race, Nation, and Empire in American History / Edition 1

by James T. Campbell, Matthew Pratt Guterl, Robert G. Lee

Overview

While public debates over America's current foreign policy often treat American empire as a new phenomenon, this lively collection of essays offers a pointed reminder that visions of national and imperial greatness were a cornerstone of the new country when it was founded. In fact, notions of empire have long framed debates over western expansion, Indian removal, African slavery, Asian immigration, and global economic dominance, and they persist today despite the proliferation of anti-imperialist rhetoric.

In fifteen essays, distinguished historians examine the central role of empire in American race relations, nationalism, and foreign policy from the founding of the United States to the twenty-first century. The essays trace the global expansion of American merchant capital, the rise of an evangelical Christian mission movement, the dispossession and historical erasure of indigenous peoples, the birth of new identities, and the continuous struggles over the place of darker-skinned peoples in a settler society that still fundamentally imagines itself as white. Full of transnational connections and cross-pollinations, of people appearing in unexpected places, the essays are also stories of people being put, quite literally, in their place by the bitter struggles over the boundaries of race and nation. Collectively, these essays demonstrate that the seemingly contradictory processes of boundary crossing and boundary making are and always have been intertwined.

Contributors:
James T. Campbell, Brown University
Ruth Feldstein, Rutgers University-Newark
Kevin K. Gaines, University of Michigan
Matt Garcia, Brown University
Matthew Pratt Guterl, Indiana University
George Hutchinson, Indiana University
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Yale University
Prema Kurien, Syracuse University
Robert G. Lee, Brown University
Eric Love, University of Colorado, Boulder
Melani McAlister, George Washington University
Joanne Pope Melish, University of Kentucky
Louise M. Newman, University of Florida
Vernon J. Williams Jr., Indiana University
Natasha Zaretsky, Southern Illinois University Carbondale

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807858288
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	09/24/2007
Edition description:	1
Pages:	392
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.87(d)

About the Author

James T. Campbell is professor of American civilization, Africana studies, and history at Brown University. Robert G. Lee is associate professor of American civilization at Brown University.

Matthew Pratt Guterl is director of the American studies program and associate professor of African American and African diaspora studies at Indiana University.

Robert G. Lee is associate professor of American civilization at Brown University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments     vii
Introduction   James T. Campbell   Matthew Pratt Guterl   Robert G. Lee     1
Who's who: American Encounters with Race
The Racial Vernacular: Contesting the Black/White Binary in Nineteenth-Century Rhode Island   Joanne Pope Melish     17
What Is Race?: Franz Boas Reconsidered   Vernon J. Williams Jr.     40
An End to the Family Romance: Nella Larsen, Black Transnationalism, and American Racial Ideology   George Hutchinson     55
Ironies of Empire
White Is the Color of Empire: The Annexation of Hawaii in 1898   Eric Love     75
Annexing the Other: The World's Peoples as Auxiliary Consumers and Imported Workers, 1876-1917   Matthew Frye Jacobson     103
The Americanization of South Africa   James T. Campbell     130
Engendering Race, Nation, and Empire
Women's Rights, Race, and Imperialism in U.S. History, 1870-1920   Louise M. Newman     157
Cain contra Abel: Courtship, Masculinities, and Citizenship in Southern California Farming Communities, 1942-1964   Matt Garcia     180
Private Suffering and Public Strife: Delia Alvarez's War with the Nixon Administration's Pow Publicity Campaign, 1968-1973   Natasha Zaretsky     201
Crossings
Desengano: A Confederate Exile inCuba   Matthew Pratt Guterl     231
Pauli Murray in Ghana: The Congo Crisis and an African American Woman's Dilemma   Kevin K. Gaines     250
Nina Simone's Border Crossings: Black Cultural Nationalism and Gender on a Global Stage   Ruth Feldstein     277
End Times
Redefining Americanness by Reformulating Hinduism: Indian Americans Challenge American Academia   Prema Kurien     307
Brown Is the New Yellow: The Yellow Peril in an Age of Terror   Robert G. Lee     335
Rethinking the "Clash of Civilizations": American Evangelicals, the Bush Administration, and the Winding Road to the Iraq War   Melani McAlister     352
Contributors     375
Index     379

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Focusing on race and deploying a capacious notion of empire that ranges from formal empire to individual and collective transnational experiences, these quite imaginative and diverse essays open up many new and important avenues for understanding the workings of race, the meanings of American nationalism, and the dimensions of empire.—Thomas Bender, New York University



The contributors to this volume analyze the entanglements of race, nation, and empire through scrupulously close readings of texts and artifacts as well as through intensive historiographical analyses of cultural contexts. They convincingly demonstrate how economic, political, and military expansionism went hand in hand with the rise of the nation-state, making empire a constitutive feature of global modernity.—Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth College, coeditor of Cultures of U.S. Imperialism

Editorial Reviews

Offer[s] something new, important, and exciting. Should be read cover to cover. Fascinating introduction. . . . Presents new models for collaboration and the final product is a wild and wonderful ride.—Journal of American History



[A] diverse collection of essays.—CLIO



A strong addition to the libraries of historians on race, empire, nation formation, gender, and diaspora studies.—Journal of American Ethnic History



The essays are without exception lucidly written, engaging, and critical yet empathetic. . . . [An] impressive collection.—Journal of Southern History

From the Publisher