Beyond the black legend : Spanish-American political imaginaries in the U.S., 1800-1855 / Evelyn Soto.

Format:

Book

Manuscript

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Soto, Evelyn, author.

Contributor:

Kazanjian, David, 1967- degree supervisor.

Bentley, Nancy, 1961- degree committee member.

Yang, Chi-ming, degree committee member.

Kaplan, Amy, degree committee member.

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

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Penn dissertations--English.

English--Penn dissertations.

Local Subjects:

Penn dissertations--English.

English--Penn dissertations.

Physical Description:

vii, 326 leaves ; 29 cm

Production:

[Philadelphia, Pennsylvania] : University of Pennsylvania, 2019.

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:

Ph. D. University of Pennsylvania 2019.

Department: English.

Supervisor: David Kazanjian.

Includes bibliographical references.

Other Format:

Online version: Soto, Evelyn. Beyond the black legend.

OCLC:

1142814597