Imperial Educación: Race and Republican Motherhood in the Nineteenth-Century Americas by Thomas Genova

Abstract

Reviewed by: Imperial Educación: Race and Republican Motherhood in the Nineteenth-Century Americas by Thomas Genova Felipe Martínez-Pinzón Keywords International Education, Nation Formation, Republicanism, Motherhood, Gender, Race, Thomas Genova, Felipe Martínez-Pinzón genova, thomas. Imperial Educación: Race and Republican Motherhood in the Nineteenth-Century Americas. U of Virginia P, 2021, 342 pp. Imperial Educación: Race and Republican Motherhood in the Nineteenth-Century Americas offers a refreshing approach to Latin American literary and cultural studies, specifically 19th-century studies, through rigorous transnational [End Page 323] archival work and a literary review of three national literatures placed in dialogue, friction and mutual influence: the United States, Cuba and Argentina. As part of a recent trend in hemispheric studies of our 19th-century literatures, alongside important names and titles in Hemispheric Studies such as Ronald Brigg's The Moral Electricity of Print: Transatlantic Education in Lima Women's Circuit, 1876–1910 (2017) and Rodrigo Lazo's Writing Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States (2005), Thomas Genova offers a nuanced analysis of a critical trope—or at least one that reveals itself as critical thanks to his book—to the construction of the American republics as "Bourgeois Republics": the racialized figure of the republican mother as teacher, and the teacher as mother. Spanning the mid-19th century all the way to the postwar Spanish–Cuban–American war of 1898, Genova traces this trope in a fascinating array of canonical and noncanonical literary texts, as well as in legal writings, poetry, private correspondence, political essays, travelogues and memoirs. His book offers new readings of classics such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Viajes: Europa, Africa, América (1849), Cirilo Villaverde's Cecilia Valdés (1882), and James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826), in dialogue with other, lesser known texts that reveal the outstanding level of hemispheric cultural porosity among foundational novels, travelogues and memoirs. In conversation with scholarship that reads nationalism and regionalism as a reaction and at the same time a product of imperialism, Genova invites us, among other original interventions, to read Eduarda Mansilla's Lucía Miranda as an old creole Hispanophile's reaction to the Americanization of the national-civilizatory discourse mobilized by Sarmiento's readings of Cooper. The book also offers nuanced readings of Mary Mann's recently recovered Juanita (1887) and Martín Morúa Delgado's (1891) Sofía as different, yet dialoguing, interventions about what model of cultural reproduction (or miscarriage) is better suited for racially diverse republics such as Cuba. Genova's central argument is that education—as a republican duty assigned to women—traversed the debates about how to civilize and incorporate into the fledgling republic a vastly diverse panorama of racialized peoples. The consequences of focusing on the crossings of education, gender and race with a hemispheric scope are manifold and inspiring. First, in line with other scholars, this crossing entails seeing Latin America as a "deeper South" that partakes of northern North American stereotypes of the US South. Secondly, and stemming from this, Genova invites us to see the cultural (and sometimes familial) [End Page 324] connections between, say, the Cuban plantation elite and the US southern gentry. Thirdly, the book places emphasis on novelists writing foundational fictions at the end of the 19th century not only as writers but as readers of this particular genre, and as such, conscious of the narrative opportunities and shortcomings of this pedagogical literary corpus. Thanks to it, Cirilo Villaverde is uncovered as a reader not only of the mid-19th-century Latin American and US canon (Marmol's Amalia, Blest Gana's Martín Rivas or even Delaney's Blake?), and Cuban (Morúa Delgado) and non-Cuban writers (Mary Mann) are seen as readers that rewrite Cecilia Valdés (for Morúa Delgado this has been the typical read), but in doing so, center other ways of conceiving of gender, race and education in the island's turn-of-the-century literature. Imperial Educación is divided into two parts composed of three chapters each. Chapters one, two and three dwell on Argentina–US relations after Rosa's exile, while chapters...