American Colonies Research Articles

How to make site-specific art when sites themselves have histories

The term “site-specific” is generally used to describe art self-consciously made to exist in a certain place, effectively making the site a static background for the dynamism of art. If we accept this definition, then how are we to account for the fact that sites themselves have histories? This paper addresses this question by analyzing four performances by the Chicano/a collective Asco: Stations of the Cross, First Supper (After a Major Riot), Walking Mural, and Instant Mural. Whittier Boulevard carries a portion of El Camino Real, which once connected the Catholic missions of Alta California. We know Asco was aware of this fact because a member of Asco once “used the phrase ‘el camino surreal’…to describe Whittier Boulevard as the setting where everyday reality could quickly devolve into absurdist, excessive action.” Contextualizing these performances within the geography of colonial California challenges interpretations of Asco as merely opposing contemporaneous events like the Vietnam War and gentrification, whereas Asco had a more nuanced and expansive understanding of oppression linking the Latin American diaspora. Together, these performances show us how a group contests domesticating and folklorizing stereotypes. Although preexisting scholarship explains these gestures as “protest art,” situating them against Whittier Boulevard allows us to appreciate the radicality of Asco. By engaging with Catholic and muralist imagery, Asco draws parallels between their experience as racial minorities and the history of Latin American colonialism, which highlights both the composite nature of Chicano/a identity and how artists might make site-specific work when sites themselves have histories.

“Recognition of Cuban Independence”: Henry Adams and Empire Building

Drawing on the correspondence of Henry Adams (1838-1918), one of the keenest observers and commentators on US politics throughout the second half of the nineteenth-century, this paper examines a report he prepared on behalf of Senator James Donald Cameron (1833-1918) of Pennsylvania, a member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, entitled “Recognition of Cuban Independence” (1896), to try and justify the right of intervention of the United States in the cause of Cuban independence. Centered on two major arguments, national interest and the existence of a government already in place on the island of Cuba, the document in question, which hitherto has not been subject to any major scholarly examination, embodies many of the principles Adams felt should have guided American foreign policy at the time, bringing to light the extent to which he was a firm believer in the “manifest destiny” of the United States to help Latin American colonies break away from their European rulers within the framework of the Monroe Doctrine.

:Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, PostSaxon Futures

:<i>Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, PostSaxon Futures</i>

Mark Storey, Time and Antiquity in American Empire: Roma Redux

Mark Storey, Time and Antiquity in American Empire: Roma Redux

Political Work on a Cultural Front

Abstract After South Asia won its flag-independence from Britain, Pakistani artists pursued two distinct strategies for the shared goal of producing art in the service of national liberation. A group of communist artists sought to innovate new cultural forms to serve movements of the left, while others endeavoured to recover the pre-colonial Islamicate culture of South Asia to serve state-building efforts. During the Zia coup in 1977, protest poetry and art of the Pak Tea House, Lahore’s art and literary salon, inspired resistance against the military dictatorship. This protest was framed not merely against the military dictatorship, but also against US imperialism more broadly. By examining Walter Rodney’s and Frantz Fanon’s ideal role of the postcolonial artist or intellectual, I show how the role of art in leftist politics was rethought in the aftermath of the Zia coup by the artists and leftists who frequented the Pak Tea House. What the discussions about politically engaged art that took place in the Pak Tea House during the Zia Coup reveal is that novelty and abstraction are important strategies in creating art that can combat imperialist dictatorships.

American Slavery, American Imperialism: US Perceptions of Global Servitude, 1870–1914

American Slavery, American Imperialism: US Perceptions of Global Servitude, 1870–1914

The Empire Cannot Die: Propaganda and Immortality in Top Gun: Maverick

Top Gun: Maverick is a film about the American Empire: its ethos and hopes, its illusions and contradictions. This essay considers the propaganda content of the movie, and reflects on what it reveals and conceals about the wider political and social context of America's imperial project. The film provides insights on the shifting expectations, and troubles facing the American Empire in 2022. In reflecting upon the sequel and comparing it with the original, it is possible to notice changes and new prerogatives in the self-perception of the United States, as well as an overall imperial fatigue and tension. In particular, this essay evaluates the use of missionary language and metaphors in the film, and considers that empires have a chronic incapacity, or maybe impossibility, in abdicating their power. Top Gun: Maverick shows that an empire, any empire, would simply cease to be such if it would not believe in its own myth of perennial youth. Ultimately, this essay considers the burden of the American Empire: its damnation is its immortality, its illusion of eternity.

“Liberty or Death!”

“Liberty or Death!”

Inventing Free Speech: Politics, Liberty and Print in Eighteenth-Century England

Abstract Our modern concept of political free speech as an individual political right was first elaborated in detail three hundred years ago by two London journalists, Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard, in their best-selling, endlessly reprinted, anonymous newspaper column, known as ‘Cato’s Letters’ (1720–23). As is well known, Cato’s novel ideas about speech and press freedom proved hugely influential, especially in the American colonies. Because they underpin the peculiar formulation of the First Amendment of the United States’ constitution, their impact is still with us today. But Trenchard and Gordon’s own lives and motives are remarkably obscure, and how they managed to formulate a completely new way of thinking about politics and public debate has remained an unexplored puzzle. Nor has it previously been appreciated that their arguments, as well as refocusing existing discussions of press liberty, directly engaged long-standing concerns about false news and public deception. Drawing on newly discovered printed and manuscript evidence, this essay reveals the deliberately misleading character of their ideology, and the reasons for its hidden partiality. It shows both how political freedom of speech first came to be systematically conceived of as a mechanism for truth, an antidote to falsehood, and the foundation of all liberty — and that, ironically, this new and powerful theory was itself but a partial, biased fiction about the world. That is a paradox whose consequences we are still living with.

The Case of Scotland in the Constitutional Debate on the American Colonies: Benjamin Franklin’s and Adam Smith’s Visions of Empire (1754-1776)

Avant que les treize colonies d’Amérique du Nord ne deviennent les États-Unis, le désir commun de maintenir un lien pérenne avec la Grande-Bretagne était la norme des deux côtés de l’Atlantique et a conduit à l’élaboration de plusieurs plans d’union. Cet article compare les projets de Benjamin Franklin et d’Adam Smith qui proposaient de réformer l’Empire britannique dans les années 1750 et 1770. Il étudie comment l’Écosse du xviie siècle, État souverain lié à l’Angleterre par la Couronne, et l’Union anglo-écossaise établie en 1707 ont servi de modèle et de contre-modèle dans le débat constitutionnel sur l’avenir des colonies américaines.

Taming the Sculptress: Roman Beauty and Marble Love in Alcott’s Art Tales

In her feminization of Hawthorne’s famous Italian tales, Alcott made of her talented heroines not only objects but subjects of their art. The excellent training of many of her aspiring women sculptors follows the Oedipal patterns which oppressively dominate Nathaniel Hawthorne’s own Roman artworld. Being victimized by a Puritan ideal of beauty that no living body could equal, Alcott’s feminized versions of The Marble Faun allude to the American colony of women sculptors led by the actress Charlotte Cushman, whose extraordinary accomplishments in the arts challenged the patriarchal demands of the male gaze.

Rethinking Thomas Paine and the Origins of the Basic Income Proposal

Abstract In current research, there is a widespread idea that the history of the universal basic income proposal begins with Thomas Paine and his famous pamphlet Agrarian Justice, published in Paris in 1797 in the context of the French Revolution and under its intellectual influence. In this article, the author rescues a largely unknown text by Paine published without a title under the pen name “Amicus” in the Pennsylvania Magazine in 1775. The transcript demonstrates that he was already reflecting on the proposal at least twenty years earlier, shortly after he arrived in the American colonies. The debates and discussions in which Paine wants to intervene cannot be the same in Wilkes's England as in revolutionary France. Locating the proposal of a universal basic income in this context has important implications for the history of its conception. It compels us to highlight the importance of Paine's experience as an exciseman in England, as well as the context of popular radicalism and religious dissent that prevailed in the country at the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Ukraine is here, the maps stay the same. On the ethics of framing an analysis.

With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the world in which New Area Studies (NAS) were born has shifted, and this leaves us with a number of questions on how to move on. In this post-2/24 world, we are back to the past of raw military power, colonial conquest and destabilized international borders. And because the invasion is, itself, explicitly dealing with Ukraine and its borderlands as constructs of history and of politics – as illegitimate constructs, in the Putinian telling – it presents an ethical challenge for constructivist, NAS scholars. I am proposing a two-part ethical and political reflection on how to think about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – and, more to the point, how to think about areas and borders in view of the war.In different circumstances, highlighting the historical constructedness of Ukraine’s (and therefore Russia’s) borders would make sense, while always carrying risks of “recuperation” by Russian revanchists. Now, this risk is heightened sharply and the question of how to be a scholar in a time of war is urgent. Analysis of the situation needs to be anchored first and last in a recognition of the profound wrong that is being perpetrated by Russia against Ukraine, and in an affirmation of the Ukrainian people’s existence and right to exist. The first part of the ethical reflection, then, calls for resisting the use of history as justification for political projects. The second part of the ethical reflection resists a different dimension of the urge to step back and contextualize, especially in left-leaning academia: the critique of American imperialism and of NATO’s very existence as its instrument. But putting one’s critical and political energies, now, in fighting NATO’s expansion and support of Ukraine cannot but bolster Russia. Whatever NATO’s misdeeds were toward Russia in the past thirty years, there can be no equivalence with the death and destruction that Russia is raining on Ukraine since 2/24 – and recognition of this fundamental imbalance must inform our practices, as citizens and as scholars.

Review: Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities, edited by Erina Duganne and Abigail Satinsky

Review: <i>Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities</i>, edited by Erina Duganne and Abigail Satinsky

Problems of Distance, Communications, and Authority: How Charles V and Philip II Ruled the Global Spanish Empire

This essay explains how the Spanish (or Castilian) crown during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries managed its worldwide empire. It emphasizes the contribution of, and the tension between, the crown’s two main strategies: political decentralization – or delegation – and imperial centralization. To begin, it contextualizes the issue by exploring the situation at the time and explains how the problems of distance and communication were closely linked. Secondly, drawing on the comments of both contemporary observers and modern historians, this paper examines the approaches used by the Spanish kings in ensuring the optimum reliability of their intelligence networks within Europe and with America. Thirdly, the issue of decentralization is approached. The essay (1) outlines the context for Spanish imperial delegation and how Charles V and Philip II differed in this regard and (2) gives several representative examples of the use of delegation in Europe and abroad. Using the American colonies as a case study, it (3) explores the centralized, peninsula-based forms of administrative delegation (i.e. councils and juntas) and (4) addresses the decentralized, colonial types of delegated government; specifically, viceroys and audiencias. Lastly, the paper explores the imperial strategy of centralization by which the kings of Spain unified their global empire. It argues that, ultimately, these monarchs used a combination of various means to ensure that they received a steady flow of reliable information. They also utilized centralized authority and decentralized administration to ensure that their provinces worldwide were governed efficiently.

Oral Histories in the Black Pacific

Abstract This article examines women’s erasure from the Spanish colonial imagination in South America. While Black women are completely absent in the official colonial narratives about the various frontier expeditions to Esmeraldas featured in documents housed at the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, Spain, they are certainly present in testimonial records in court archives in the American colonies, and often appear demanding their freedom. Meanwhile, in the Black Pacific, a territory always conceived as free despite the lack of written records, the African diaspora prospered with a river economy that still depends today on the health of rivers, mangroves, and the ocean. In the Chocó, women carried ancestral knowledge in chants, by planting, through cooking, praying, or fishing, sustaining the memory of a territory that conceived itself as outside master-slave relations. Yet Black women’s role in shaping national history is hard to trace. Oral history projects in Bojayá and Esmeraldas are trying to change that by bridging the digital archive, by using memory and orality as shields of truth, and by using traditional methods such as song and prayer to access the knowledge for resistance and re-existence that is needed today in the defense of the Chocó against deadly extractivist development. The encoding of women’s legacies in the Black Pacific serves as an example of how Blackness and freedom continue to be political concepts in this important diaspora that is developing decolonial methodologies that do not neatly fit in the confines of the Afropolitan, especially when it comes to class and migration.

Queering Mennonite Literature: Archives, Activism, and the Search for Community

Queering Mennonite Literature: Archives, Activism, and the Search for Community

Life of Mà-ka-tai-me-she-kià-kiàk, or Black Hawk, An Autobiography

From its initial publication in 1833, Black Hawk's autobiography has challenged readers to confront dominant narratives of race and progress, justice and inequality, and US territorial acquisition and Native sovereignty. A Sauk war chief, Black Hawk related the annual cycles of his peoples’ lives from the 1780s in the modern border area of Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Missouri, including their several relocations, aspects of their spirituality, society, and economy, their sometimes-violent relations with other Indian peoples as well as with British and Americans. Black Hawk credits the British with being more honest and trustworthy, particularly as the US perpetrated a fraudulent treaty in 1804 in which the Sauks and Foxes were supposed to have ceded much of their lands. While Black Hawk and his people had regular interaction with American traders over the years, the treaty fraud and intermittent violence led some Sauks to follow Black Hawk into siding with the British in the War of 1812 and later to fight the US again in the so-called Black Hawk War in the summer of 1832.Black Hawk's autobiography recounts the causes and course of the 1832 conflict as well as the subsequent tour of Eastern cities that he and his main Sauk advisors were compelled to take as prisoners at the insistence of President Andrew Jackson. As well explored by Michael Loraro, Black Hawk's message to white America was much more than an account of the eponymous war; it offered a broader criticism of the cultural and political context of the conflict and a vision for future peace and friendship. Black Hawk's autobiography both reflected and influenced Romantic literature and emerged as one of the most important and compelling works by a Native American in the nineteenth century, retaining a canonical place to the present day.Loraro's new engagement with Black Hawk's autobiography is a welcome update to Donald Jackson's 1955 edition from the University of Illinois Press. For those who may wonder whether they should upgrade their bookshelf with a new edition of Black Hawk's Life, I assure you that you should. Whereas Jackson's introduction and notes provided solid historical context from relevant primary sources, his book is obviously decades out of date regarding scholarship and includes some cringe-inducing verbiage. Loraro's update includes three main forms of editorial commentary. First, a brief introduction offers a sketch of Life's content, its implications for contemporary readers, and an overview of scholarly analyses. Second, Loraro includes a more developed version of this introduction as a distinct essay, “Resistance, Rebellion, Resignation, and Re-creation: Black Hawk's Life as Negotiation, Transition, and Testimony.” As suggested by the complicated title, the essay delves more thoroughly into literary analysis and modern scholarship, advancing several interesting observations and arguments, culminating in the idea that whereas Black Hawk failed militarily in 1832, he succeeded the following year in publishing a widely read and well-regarded Nativist criticism of American settler colonialism. Black Hawk influenced subsequent critics in the nineteenth century, and Native writers continue to reflect his ideas. Third, Loraro includes explanatory notes throughout Black Hawk's narrative, with clarifications, some primary sources, and references to recent historical and literary scholarship. Finally, Loraro adds to the Native voice element of Black Hawk's Life with inclusion of lines from Meskwaki (Sac and Fox) poet Ray A. Young Bear, “For You, a Handful of the Greatest Gift.”Loraro rightly points out that Black Hawk's Life continues to be considered and analyzed by new generations who bring their own interests and ideas to their reading of this foundational work. Loraro's edition reflects his own background as a literary scholar of frontier writings mostly east of the Mississippi River. He largely takes Black Hawk's authorship at face value with some limited consideration of his nineteenth century editor and mediator, J. B. Patterson. The third player in the production of Black Hawk's Life receives almost no attention, the interpreter Antoine LeClair, a culture broker of French and Indian descent, and the man who rendered Black Hawk's oral testimony and performance into written English. Perhaps a scholar will develop this crucial third element of the narrative's triangular production in a future edition Black Hawk's Life.

The Weathersfield Affair

The Weathersfield Affair

" The origins of the neo-conservative political thought between Straussie and Trotskyism and its implications for the Arab region"

The origins of the political thought of the neo-conservative movement stem from non-American European references, and non-Christian Jewish theological beliefs, especially the ideas of Leo Strauss, the German Jewish thinker, and Leo Trotsky, the Russian Jewish thinker who formulated the idea of ​​the neo-conservative movement with this conclusion that drew its horizons to the world, especially the Middle East from In order to achieve the greatness of the American Empire, its hegemony and its sovereignty over the whole world, and because the theological references of the movement are of Jewish fundamentalism (Strauss and Trotsky), this opened the door of ideological affiliation to the movement in front of the Jews of America and Europe. And then, in a geopolitical way, it affected the Middle East, where securing the existence of (the Zionist entity) / “the State of Israel” required that intervention in the affairs of the countries of the Arab region as neighbors of the Zionist entity, and demanded a just solution to the Palestinian issue, and this influence is one of the most prominent pillars and foundations of the political thought of the neo-conservative movement In the USA and the world.&#x0D; It seems that the influence of the revolutionary Trotskyite philosophy is more evident in neo-conservative thought than the influence of Straussian philosophy, although this reference was not explicitly declared in the literature of American political thought or political thought critical of neo-conservative thought, which is what we perceive in this study as new, especially if We looked at the origins of the Zionist movement in its infancy with "Leo Pinsker", "Theodor Herzl", "Vladimir-Raif Jabotinsky" who write down the most socialist whose heirs from the Zionists benefited from the exploitation and employment of Trotsky's socialist ideas to a greater extent than Strauss, and they presented the socialist system over the liberal in formulating the idea Zionism