Hispanicism and Early US Literature: Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and the Origins of US National Identity by John C Havard

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hispanicism and Early US Literature: Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and the Origins of US National Identity by John C Havard Maria A. Windell HAVARD, JOHN C. Hispanicism and Early US Literature: Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and the Origins of US National Identity. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2018. 224 pp. $44.95 cloth; $44.95 e-book. The president of the United States is an avowed nationalist who constructs his position as such most consistently through xenophobic screeds against (im)migrants from Latin America. In such a political moment it is vital that we both produce and attend to scholarship that explores the US’s relationship to the Americas. John C. Havard’s Hispanicism and Early US Literature: Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and the Origins of US National Identity undertakes this task by tracking how the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century US defined itself through and against depictions of Spain’s imperial presence in the Americas. Havard posits the Hispanicism of his title as a counterpart to Edward W. Said’s and Toni Morrison’s more familiar formulations of Orientalism and Africanism. His use of Hispanicism builds on Ed White’s earlier coining of the term as a hemispheric parallel to the exoticism of Orientalism, and his argument more generally builds on developments in transamerican studies that highlight the necessity of nuancing nationalist and transatlantic framings of US literary traditions. In particular, he emphasizes Hispanicism’s “political dimension,” arguing that it “had a special role” in developing “the idea that Anglo-Americans were racially fitted for liberal-democratic self-government,” an idea that he insists goes beyond Africanism’s “constructi[on of] whiteness as a prerequisite for freedom and agency” (15). He thus asserts, “It is no coincidence that US representations of Hispanic difference focus on what is construed as the metaphysical aversion to liberty of the Spanish and their New World descendants in a period in which US expansionists turned their eyes toward Spanish Louisiana, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America” (18). Hispanicism and Early US Literature covers the aftermath of the American Revolution through the late nineteenth century, working to explain how the nation arrived at 1898 and the Spanish-American War, so often seen as a turning point in the development of US imperialism, with a discourse fully prepared to promote US intervention in Spanish America. In tracing Hispanicism across the long nineteenth century, Havard engages an array of canonical and noncanonical authors and texts—at times crossing these categories by, for instance, working with lesser-known novels by authors such as James Fenimore Cooper. The study includes poetry, novels, novellas, and essays, thereby demonstrating Hispanicism’s breadth, depth, and duration. Havard’s argument balances its formal, temporal, and geographic range with a focus on literature’s relation to US political discourses, particularly liberalism. Each chapter of Hispanicism and Early US Literature close reads its central text(s) while questioning how Hispanicism related to developments within liberalism. Havard notes that Hispanicism and liberalism were not, as we might presume today, opposed in the nineteenth century: “For many early national and antebellum whites, it seemed obvious that the capacity to establish liberal institutions was a specifically Anglo-American faculty. Liberalism and racialism were not at odds for these US Americans” (17). By locating Hispanicism within liberal political discourse, Havard illustrates not only the literary but also the cultural, social, commercial, and governmental impact of US tendencies to paint the Spanish (Americas) with a broad brush. The book is organized into an introduction, conclusion, and five chapters divided in two parts. The introduction offers an historical and critical framework [End Page 320] for Hispanicism. Part I of the book examines “The Black Legend, Hispanicism, and the Emergence of National Identity in the Early United States.” The three chapters that compose this section cover ways US authors positioned the nation in relation to ideas, perceptions, and images of Spain, Mexico, and Spanish(-American)ness from the 1780s through the years preceding the US Civil War. The first chapter reads Joel Barlow’s epic poems The Vision of Columbus (1787) and The Columbiad (1807) as establishing an Hispanicist ideology by juxtaposing a rising, cosmopolitan, commercial US against a greed-driven...