Race for America: Black Internationalism in the Age of Manifest Destiny

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Boutelle, R. J.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African Americans.

African diaspora.

Black nationalism.

Black people.

Manifest Destiny.

National characteristics, American.

United States.

America.

Genre:

Critiques litteraires.

Literary criticism.

History

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (286 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

The University of North Carolina Press 2023

Summary:

As Manifest Destiny took hold in the national consciousness, what did it mean for African Americans who were excluded from its ambitions for an expanding American empire that would shepherd the Western Hemisphere into a new era of civilization and prosperity? R. J. Boutelle explores how Black intellectuals like Daniel Peterson, James McCune Smith, Mary Ann Shadd, Henry Bibb, and Martin Delany engaged this cultural mythology to theorize and practice Black internationalism. He uncovers how their strategies for challenging Manifest Destiny's white nationalist ideology and expansionist political agenda constituted a form of disidentification-a deconstructing and reassembling of this discourse that marshals Black experiences as racialized subjects to imagine novel geopolitical mythologies and projects to compete with Manifest Destiny. Employing Black internationalist, hemispheric, and diasporic frameworks to examine the emigrationist and solidarity projects that African Americans proposed as alternatives to Manifest Destiny, Boutelle attends to sites integral to US aspirations of hemispheric dominion: Liberia, Nicaragua, Canada, and Cuba. In doing so, Boutelle offers a searing history of how internalized fantasies of American exceptionalism burdened the Black geopolitical imagination that encouraged settler-colonial and imperialist projects in the Americas and West Africa.

Contents:

Self-fashioning citizenship in the colonizationist renaissance

Ethnology, empire and a Central American Communipaw

Restaging gender in the Black borderlands of Canada West

Diaspora literacy and the "Africanization" of Cuba

From Manifest Destiny to MAGA.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

1-4696-7665-6

979-88-908614-1-2

1-4696-7956-6

1-4696-7664-8

OCLC:

1401907285

Access Restriction:

Open Access Unrestricted online access