Beyond the Black Legend: Spanish-American Political Imaginaries in the U.S., 1800-1855 / Evelyn Soto.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Soto, Evelyn, author.

Contributor:

Kazanjian, David, 1967- degree supervisor.

University of Pennsylvania. Department of English, degree granting institution.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature.

Latin American studies.

English--Penn dissertations.

Penn dissertations--English.

Local Subjects:

American literature.

Latin American studies.

English--Penn dissertations.

Penn dissertations--English.

Genre:

Academic theses.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (334 pages)

Contained In:

Dissertations Abstracts International 81-05A.

Place of Publication:

[Philadelphia, Pennsylvania] : University of Pennsylvania ; Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2019.

Language Note:

English

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

Summary:

This dissertation argues that revisions of the "Black Legend"-a set of Anglophone dogmas about Spanish tyranny and racial degeneracy-conditioned the terms for both political conflict and possibility in the nineteenth-century Americas. The project specifically attends to the ideology's displacement from Spanish imperialism to the independence movements in Spanish America (1808 - 1826), which in turn enthralled the diplomatic imagination of the early United States. With the balance of power newly at stake in the hemisphere, Anglo-Americans relied on the Black Legend to encode the emergent polities in Spanish America with longstanding representations of the inhabitants' political illegitimacy, sociopolitical dysfunction, and non-binary "casta" system of racial relations. I trace this language of sociopolitical taint not only in discourses of U.S. expansionism, but more importantly in instances of non-statist, transamerican political innovation. The project juxtaposes canonical, nineteenth-century U.S. literature and non-traditional texts by Spanish Americans, such as diplomatic correspondences, political tracts, subaltern rumors, and propagandist pamphlets. I assemble what I call an early Latinx counter-archive, which re-narrates Spanish America's benighted sovereignty as an opportunity to envision forms of political community capable of disrupting Anglo-American imperial power.

Notes:

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 81-05, Section: A.

Advisors: Kazanjian, David; Committee members: Nancy Bentley; Chi-ming Yang; Amy Kaplan.

Department: English.

Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania 2019.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175

ISBN:

9781392811641

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.

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