The Literary Construction of the Monroe Doctrine

Abstract

The Monroe Doctrine in its 1823 version contained a double proposition. It presented an anticolonial message addressed to European powers and it proclaimed solidarity with the emerging republics of Spanish America. How can an anticolonialist proposition become an instrument of U.S. hegemony in Latin America? This is the central question that Hemispheric Imaginings tries to answer. The Monroe Doctrine, the author argues, was constituted at the intersection of literary and journalistic discourses about the nation's role in the world. Narrative texts played a crucial role in transforming the Monroe Doctrine from a foreign-policy principle into a compelling national ideology. By locating the transformations in the doctrine's meaning in relation to public debates and popular anxieties, the book offers a novel and insightful perspective into a traditional topic of diplomatic history. To historians, this book offers an interesting example of the interplay among literature, foreign policy, and the construction of national imaginings. Literary texts, Murphy argues, help to make sense of national imaginings. They negotiate bonds of affiliation for peoples of different race, class, and gender and articulate the tensions posed by foreign-policy initiatives. Murphy's most interesting interpretive move is to situate the Monroe Doctrine in the sphere of public debate and national consciousness. Rather than an invention of John Quincy Adams, the Monroe Doctrine appears as an articulation of U.S. public sentiments and ideas already present in literature and journalism. The author's argument about the embeddedness of the Monroe Doctrine in U.S. political discourse and literary consciousness is quite persuasive. Rather than a foreign-policy principle, the doctrine appears as a master-narrative containing multiple arguments about national identity and imperial ambition, whose function was to suppress the tensions between its anticolonialist and its imperialist positions.