The U.S. Filibusters in Transnational Newspaper Discourses, 1855-1857

Abstract

The essay focuses on the transnational entanglements between the USA and Nicaragua in the mid-nineteenth century, when U.S. adventurers (so-called 'filibusters') started private invasions to the American isthmus. One embodiment of these entanglements was El Nicaraguense, a bilingual newspaper published by the invaders and distributed in the USA and Central America. The article analyzes how the paper contributed to the incorporation of Nicaragua into the U.S. colonial realm. Ever since Shelley Fisher Fishkin's 2004 presidential address to the American Studies Association about the 'transnational turn' of the discipline, this approach has been part and parcel of American Studies. 1 New (online) publications have mushroomed (among many other examples, FIAR: The Forum for Inter-American Research on the German level and the Journal of Transnational American Studies in the USA), and new scholarly networks and associations have been formed. The following article aims at contributing to this strand by investigating an instance in which U.S. history became intimately connected with Nicaraguan history—and vice versa: the so-called 'filibuster invasion' to Nicaragua in 1855-1857, in which newspapers played a pivotal part. The article argues that newspapers re-formulated existing discursive patterns (often derived from travel accounts) to allow an expansionist U.S. nation to perceive Nicaragua and its people as akin to the already known U.S. West, thus discursively incorporating the American Isthmus into its national realm. The wide circulation of some of these newspapers—and their attempt to cater to Central American audiences, too—locates the news coverage of the filibuster invasion in a transnational realm spanning the USA and several countries on the American Isthmus. The papers not only represented but also created several discursive patterns that contributed to the ideology of 1 Contributions which attempt to widen the research and analytical scope of American Studies beyond the territorial boundaries of the USA are manifold. Some of the basic theoretical outlines of these 'New American Studies' (as they are also called) can be found in Rowe, while Stoler updates the concept of transnational analyses by strongly focusing on gender-power relations. Hebel and Adams, amongst various others, both point to the importance of a hemispheric approach within the field of American Studies. An already classic critique of exceptionalist approaches, which often turn a blind eye to imperial moments of U.S. history, is Kaplan and Pease's Cultures of United States Imperialism.