NEO-ROOSEVELT, OR, WHY POST-COLONIALISM IS PREMATURE

Abstract

Taking up Amy Kaplan's warning about reducing the relations of colonizer and colonized to a single universal model, this article acknowledges the diversity of the colonized, but also emphasizes the diversity of colonizers in a re-examination of the particular way that the culture of American imperialism is constructed. The literary retorts of Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, John Dos Passos and Zora Neale Hurston offer interesting counterpoints to a prevailing American neo-colonial ethos inherited from Theodore Roosevelt, yet the most salient points are that, while American exceptionalism is a myth and the United States does indeed perform a neo-colonial global role, it does so following a path embellished by Roosevelt: his problem, he said, was one of orchestrating plurality within the United States while imposing American dominance abroad, as he put it in an address to the English. Roosevelt's notion of the role of the United States follows, but also deviates from, the English imperial model, for the flag of plurality becomes for him a singular rationale and justification. While not an exception to those historic patterns of international relations we name as colonial, American hegemony has emerged from different conditions and been molded by distinctive ideas of Manifest Destiny. While this path to empire progressed from controlling the hemisphere through invocation of the Monroe Doctrine, under Roosevelt it developed from the model of the winning of the West to the domination of other territories through the assimilation and inclusion of the colonized. Imperial multiculturalism thus improves upon Puritanical ethnocentrism without losing a strong sense of a providential mission. This article draws from a number of historians and cultural critics synthetically in gaining an understanding of how the culture of imperialism functions as a successful and appealing ideology that offers a vision of progress that can appear more democratic and more equalitarian than previous colonializing visions.