Border crossing with Rousseau: Emile and Francisco de Miranda's Tour of the United States, 1783–1784

Abstract

Drawing on Charles W.J. Withers's analysis of the transnational geographies of Enlightenment culture, this essay reconsiders the early Atlantic border crossings of Francisco de Miranda, forerunner of Latin American independence, in relation to Emile, Jean Jacques Rousseau's revolutionary work on education. During his time as an officer in Cádiz, Spain, Miranda participated in the circulation and reading of Rousseau, extending a network of readers who challenged the Inquisition's criminalization of forbidden books in what might be called a shadow public sphere. Miranda's travel diary of his journey through the United States, Diario del Viaje por los Estados Unidos de América del Norte (The Diary of Francisco de Miranda: Tour of the United States, 1783–1784) shows how he transculturated Rousseau's theories on empiricism, travel and education, and political maturation to develop a secular creole epistemology that ushered and affirmed his vision of independence, and his entry into the larger Enlightenment republic of letters as a self-identified American. Miranda thus enacted a model of traveling knowledge-making that paralleled and diverged from the work of Jesuits such as Francisco Clavijero and others who, as Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra shows, developed patriotic epistemologies within religious frameworks.