English

To call writing transnational is to suggest that it represents perspectives or worldviews that exceed the imaginative and geographical bounds of the nation. This course examines the transnational dimensions of a group of works written in the Americas during a pivotal period of the long nineteenth century. By 1850, the slaveholding societies of Spanish colonial Cuba, the Empire of Brazil, and the US boomed, giving rise to imperial dreams that decisively shaped the future of the nineteenth-century world—not least the expansion of slavery to create a new global empire around the Gulf of Mexico, an idealized hub of exchange linking Atlantic and Pacific, Amazon and Mississippi. We will consider how writers projected backwards and forewords in time to portray the global webs of political and economic interest that set these dreams in motion along with the anxieties about race and revolutions of the enslaved that troubled them. Of primary interest will be how the writers under study contest or unsettle such grand expansionist visions to change our understanding of apparently national conflicts like US westward expansion, the US Civil War, the Cuban War of Independence, or the Mexican Revolution. We will read portions of contemporary histories and primary documents to understand the broader sweep of the century, as well as how the central literary works reimagine it to grapple with processes such as the transatlantic slave trade, revolutions, wars, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and exile. Fulfills Humanities Requirement. Meets ENG Pre-1900 Requirement.

This class will approach the concepts of empire through the figure of the “conscript.” The figure of the conscripted soldier, fighting not-quite-voluntarily, in the service of imperial wars, will provide for us a window to enter into global histories from the perspective of subaltern subjects. While we often speak of postcolonial agency, conscription affords a way of understanding how that agency is constrained by structural conditions. Extending the idea of conscription from armies to indentured laborers, workers, revolutionaries, spies, fundamentalists, and financial analysts (all "conscripts of modernity," in the historian David Scott's phrase), in texts by South Asian, African, Caribbean and their diasporic authors, we will consider how imperial world-making registers at the level of individuals and how these individuals negotiate the demands of modernity. FULFILLS HUMANITIES AND GLOBAL UNDERSTANDING REQUIREMENTS.