doi:10.

1093/alh/aji012
American Literary History 17(1), Oxford University Press 2005; all rights reserved.
The New, Newest Thing:
Have American Studies
Gone Imperial?
Susan Gillman
Reading these books on nineteenth-century US empire in the
context of current world events makes for a strange combination of
obsolescence and prescience. The authors are all answering a disci-
plinary call to arms that weve been hearing at least since the 1998
centennial of the Spanish-American War, when it became the mis-
sion of American studies to rectify the absence of empire in the
study of US culture.
1
Yet now, suddenly it seems, far from absent,
the word empire is, instead, everywhere, on everyones lips. The last
few years have seen a spate of books appear, inside and outside of
the academy, with empire in their titles. Is it the elephant in the
room? We appear to be condemned repeatedly to discover and
announce empires presence, each time with the same shock of the
new. What has produced the charged context this time? Its not so
much any single moment dividing before-and-after, not 9/11 per
se, but rather the war on terror as a war without end, making the
military occupation of Iraq appear increasingly, to defenders and
detractors alike, as a new episode in the history of world empire.
The critical question posed in virtually all of the new books and arti-
cles on the newest US imperial venture is: should it be applauded
and urged onward or denounced? So, on the one hand, our academic
books mark what appears to be the end of an era, the exhaustion of
the imperial turn, currently conceived, in American studies. At the
very same time, though, they signal new directions and possibilities
that emerge from out of the wreckage. The empire is dead; long live
the empire!
As an ensemble, the books under review map the main moves,
terminologies, and innovations in US empire studies, post-1998.
First, and most strikingly, the project has been conceived as an
expos. The story of empire in American studies is one of denials to
be acknowledged and omissions to be redressed. Second, as a cor-
rective to the paradigm of American exceptionalism, which, Amy
War Games: Richard
Harding Davis and the
New Imperialism
By John Seelye
University of
Massachusetts
Press, 2002
American Sensations:
Class, Empire, and
the Production of
Popular Culture
By Shelley Streeby
University of California
Press, 2002
Nineteenth-Century
Geographies: The
Transformations of Space
from the Victorian Age to
the American Century
Edited by Helena Michie
and Ronald Thomas
Rutgers University
Press, 2002
American Literary History 197
Kaplan argues, is structured by the refusal of empire, this new study
of empire would rethink the divides, geographical and temporal, that
have allowed territorial expansion to be separated from imperialism
proper and, concomitantly, located the beginning of our overseas
empire in the year 1898 with the Spanish-American War. Kaplan
points out that even such an influential study as Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negris Empire (2000), which is not identified with the field
of American studies, reproduces the paradigm of exceptionalism,
first by defining imperialism as a European phenomenon and, further,
by separating nineteenth-century European imperialism from the
contemporary, decentered Empire of globalization, epitomized by
the US (Anarchy 1415). Rather than denying, minimizing, or trun-
cating the longstanding US role in that long world history, the study
of empire would contribute to efforts to deprovincialize American
studies, remapping (a term to which Ill return later) it from broader
international and transnational perspectives.
Third, the project of rethinking the location and periodization
of what counts as imperialism in US history has meant the emer-
gence of a new sphere of cultural study. It is almost like watching a
field imaginary materializing, complete with body parts close to full-
grown, including the main events, dates, texts, and founding fathers
that together define the field. So, for example, the Mexican War, what
Shelley Streeby calls a forgotten war (6), is one of those key new
events, just as 1848 is often offered as a counterpoint to 1898, if not as
a new origin for periodizations of US imperialism. Most prominent
among the founding fathers: Walter LaFeber, whose 1963 The New
Empire remains one of the most influential, revisionist studies of the
Spanish-American War and the history of US imperialism. Finally, an
expanded canon for empire studies is emerging that would include
many of the texts and genres in the books under review: the multiple,
popular versions of the story of California bandit Joaqun Murrieta
found in sensational crime literature as well as in the Spanish-language
corridos that Streeby reads; the travel writings of Richard Harding
Davis that John Seelye argues are unjustly neglected (in favor of
Daviss fiction and war correspondence); the photographs of families
in domestic settings by the first wave of American women photogra-
phers that Laura Wexler locates within the age of US imperialism;
the early films of the Spanish-American War by Billy Bitzer, D.W.
Griffith, and others that Kaplan presents; the international confer-
ences, worlds fairs, and geographical societies that produced the
varieties of material culture, from maps to souvenirs to textbooks,
explored in the essay collection Nineteenth-Century Geographies.
2

Its even possible to glimpse in these developments some corol-
laries to other emerging or fairly recently established fields of study,
particularly in the cautionary questions they ask of themselves. Most
198 Have American Studies Gone Imperial?
immediately relevant are debates in African-American studies over
canon expansion and ethnic absolutism.
3
In addition, a revealing
comparison to the problem of denial in the history of US slavery
may be made if we bring in a group of new books on the founding
fathers that rethink the historiography of early America by putting
slavery at the center, challenging the views of previous historians,
who never entirely ignored slavery but minimized its presence in what
Henry Wiencek calls the simple heroic narrative of the Founding.
4
The point is that a field called empire studies, drawing on the same
history of additions and revisions to other, allied disciplines, is now
in the process of institutionalization.
So, these empire books summarize the questions weve been
asking broadly in US studies across a variety of disciplines and, in
so doing, point to the need for new questions. In itself, the fact of such
a spate of articles and books on empire in the last few years or so is
a fascinating phenomenon. If imperialism is back in fashion, as Ian
Buruma puts it in The New York Review of Books, then surely we
must have reached the limits of the expos model. With so much
evidence to the contrary, its hard to keep pointing out the imperial
absence in US history. And yet the very idea of American empire
continues to be so troubling that a mainstream publication like The
New York Times carried not one but two pieces by Michael Ignatieff
calling for an end to our national dallying with empire lite. In an
article in The New York Times Magazine, whose front cover reads,
American Empire: Get Used to It, Ignatieff argues, Americas
entire war on terror is an exercise in imperialism. This may come as
a shock to Americans, who dont like to think of their country as an
empire. But what else can you call Americas legions of soldiers,
spooks, and special forces straddling the globe?
5
To pose the ques-
tion in this way, rhetorically assuming an answer thats at once
obvious and contested, suggests that there is a fundamental problem
with the question itself. The expos has exhausted itself, taken up
with, preoccupied with, and ultimately confined by filling preexist-
ing gaps within predetermined analytic frameworks. In so doing, for
all their particular strengths, these books reveal the inherent limita-
tions of the expos: when youre so focused on the holes and omissions,
on filling in whats been left out in the disciplinary answers, its
harder to take a critical look at the questions themselves, much less
ask new ones.
The single question posed most frequently about US empire is
astonishingly crude: for or against? Are you an imperial believer?
Reluctant advocate or equally reluctant skeptic? Outright critic? In
part, this polarization is an effect of the denial theory, which assumes
that the contradiction of empire in the context of US democracy dictated
its repression. Instead, the contradiction itself could be examined,
American Literary History 199
as, for example, it has been in studies of slavery such as David Brion
Daviss paradigmatic The Problem of Slavery in an Age of Revolution,
17701823 (1999). Or, to use an example closer at hand, Wexlers
Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of US Imperialism
(2000) takes as its point of departure just what the paradoxes of the
title suggest, the problem of how the first American female photo-
journalists used a domestic vision to produce images of war as peace
and thus took their place in an age of US imperialism. Wexler openly
acknowledges that she had hoped to tell a different, less equivocal
story of the function of gender and the role of women in the emer-
gence of American photojournalism than the problematic history of
family photography and the discourses of imperial power that she
ultimately told. Yet precisely that dispassionate, self-reflective stance
is what makes her argument on the denial and erasure in these
womens photographs so compelling. The denial by the women pho-
tographers of the structural consequences of slavery, colonization,
industrialization, and forced assimilation, Wexler says, developed
not as a matter of conscious policy but as a matter of genderthat is,
as a matter of course. . . . But their pictures helped to heighten regard
for territorial acquisitions in the Caribbean and the Pacific by eras-
ing the violence of colonial encounters in the very act of portraying
them. It is not only what the women portrayed, therefore, but how
they traded on their gender privilege not to portray that gaveand
still givestheir photography its particular evidentiary value (7).
Moreover, that violent denial produced a historical distortion
operating both forward and backward in time by superimposing new
forms of racial and economic dominance, such as lynching and impe-
rialism, on older visual conventions of the slave system (910).
Because Wexler thus foregrounds the specific mechanics of how
gender works with the structures of denial, she circumvents the whole
question of whether to celebrate or condemn her subjects.
But such critical distance as Wexlers is rare in most of the
recent work on US empire. Instead were more often left stranded
with only two choices, celebration or condemnation of the imperial
object of study. In some respects this is the lingering effect of what
Timothy Brennan, in a piece suggestively titled The Empires New
Clothes, calls an older rhetoric of emancipation and resistance
implied by the term imperialism (338). The whole question of the
temporality of empire, its continuities with the past and its eternal
newness, is one to which Ill return. But, for now, its enough to say
that the tendency to begin and end with such moral judgments about
imperialism, as Brennan notes, sums up lots of empire books, and
how theyre received, in the arenas of academia, public policy, and
the mainstream press. Whether inside or outside of the academy, when
the talk is of US empire, it is with marked moral righteousness. The
The single question posed
most frequently about US
empire is astonishingly
crude: for or against? Are
you an imperial believer?
Reluctant advocate or
equally reluctant skeptic?
Outright critic? In part,
this polarization is an
effect of the denial theory,
which assumes that the
contradiction of empire in
the context of US demo-
cracy dictated its repres-
sion. Instead, the
contradiction itself could
be examined, as, for
example, it has been in
studies of slavery.
200 Have American Studies Gone Imperial?
imperative is our imperial mood: acknowledge empire, celebrate it,
condemn it.
More telling is the argument of so many of the recent policy
books on the pros and cons of the new Bush imperialists: again, are
we for or against them? It turns out that whatever position is taken,
the denial theory turns up, often in the form of the question of what
to call such a supposed anomaly as the US empire. If were pro, then
the British Empire could provide a model to emulate, according to
well-known British historian Niall Fergusons Empire: The Rise and
Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global
Power, a book and accompanying TV series (2003). Buruma points
out that praise for the British Empire underlies many of the recent
books telling Americans to stiffen their backbones and shoulder
their imperial burden with more vigor (54). But for Ferguson the
issue of national moral fiber is precisely the problem: Americans
have taken our old role without yet facing the fact that an empire
comes with it (370). Instead, he says, the US has produced an
empire that dare not speak its name. . . an empire in denial (370).
Here, the denial paradigm converges, or perhaps collides, with a sig-
nature refrain of gay rights, the love that dare not speak its name.
6
If
we take the con position, the problem remains of how to name the
ever elusive US empire, as Asia scholar and reconstructed cold war-
rior Chalmers Johnson demonstrates in The Sorrows of Empire
(2004), where he laments the frightening spread of Americas empire
of bases. Or, even if we take the view of a centrist Democrat like
Ignatieff, then what he calls empire lite (a brand name that has, to
judge from the reprintings of his article, caught on more than any
other) must be forsworn in favor of picking up and shouldering the
imperial burden that Ignatieff argues, in a variant of the denial the-
ory, was not actively sought but rather thrust upon the US.
Most revealing of all is a title that seems to be popping up
recently in a number of books and articles, The Empires New
Clothes.
7
The keyword is new, a symptomatic, and salutary, echo
of one of the most common terms in US empire studies. When the
time of the new is paired with a particular space, it has most often
been that of the Americas, the New World. Anbal Quijano and
Immanuel Wallerstein have described this spatiotemporal conjunc-
tion as a badge and a burden of the capitalist world-economy, the
Americas as a geosocial entity born, with the modern world-system,
in the long sixteenth century (549). The concept of newness itself
was a constitutive contribution of Americanity, associated with faith in
science and the progress of modernity but also, Quijano and Wallerstein
point out, with the temporal and spatial hierarchies implied by the
classification systems of natural history underwriting such concepts
as evolution, development, industrialization, and modernization. In
American Literary History 201
this sense, the concept of the New World makes visible the way that
Americanity is its own contradiction: the place and the time both
of the great antiracist, revolutionary mobilization, in North America,
culminating in the eighteenth century, and of the history of multiple
colonizations, uneven subordinations, and regimes of racial power
under the hemispheric hegemony of North America (552). When
will these American utopias come together to offer to the world a
new, specifically all-American utopia (557)?
Another way to ask this spatiotemporal question is to go back to
the story of empire within American studies. LaFebers New Empire
is only the best known of the many works that both promulgate and
interrogate the foundational assumption of newness as a key to the
history of US empire. David Harveys New Imperialism (originally
part of the 2002 Clarendon Lectures delivered in the School of
Geography and Environment at Oxford University) looks through
the lens of what he calls historical-geographical materialism (an
approach linking temporal and spatial analyses, to which I will return)
at the role a new imperialism might be playing in the current
context of global capitalism (1). While one of Harveys aims is to
historicize the present, to demonstrate the material bases of US hege-
mony at a variety of historical-geographical moments since the end
of the nineteenth century, what sets the book in motion is the new-
ness question. Given the fact that, as he says, there have long been
fulsome analyses of American imperialism from the traditional
left, all the recent debates across the political spectrum of the ques-
tions of empire and imperialism raise the further question [W]hat,
if anything, is new about all this? (67). Its really the same ques-
tion posed by New Yorker Critic at Large Joshua Micah Marshall
in an article on the recent policy books by Johnson, Ivo Daalder, and
James Lindsay, et al., entitled Power Rangers and headed with the
provocative question, Did the Bush administration create a new
American empireor weaken the old one? (83). Commenting on
how America has taken on the functions of imperial governance
with an empire that was loose and consensual, Marshall says, in
the last couple of years, however, neo-imperialism, this thing of
stealth, politesse, and obliquity, has come to seem, so to speak, too
neo (86).
Restating the question as an issue of the empires new clothes,
putting it in the context of the classic childrens tale, the new becomes
a potential analytic rather than a polemical term. In the story, the
invisibility of the new clothing dupes the emperor, and yet all of the
kingdom, including him, can see it. The title shows how interdepen-
dent and overlapping are the languages of newness and unmasking
in maintaining the mechanisms of imperial denial. The temporal divi-
sion that Hardt and Negri, among others, see between imperialisms,
202 Have American Studies Gone Imperial?
old and new, is echoed in the project of the unveiling of the American
empire (1213) that motivates Johnsons book, subtitled Militarism,
Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. If Johnson argues passionately
against the secrecy that allows the vast empire of secret US military
bases to thrive and that has, thus far, secured the future of its guise
as an empire dominating the world (Harvey, 47), Harvey demon-
strates, too, how critical are the dynamics of masking to the history
of US empire. Since the late nineteenth century, the US has learned
to conceal the explicitness of territorial gains and imperial ambition
under the mask of a spaceless universalization, an abstract uni-
versalism (Harvey, 50). What does all of this will to exposure have
in common? Look not, as the emperor does, for whats not there,
Brennans Empires New Clothes suggests, but for how its denied,
and, especially in the US case, for the newest mode of disguising the
nakedness of empire. How do the ever-changing guises of the new
make it possiblethrough a set of contortions and gyrations that are
themselves highly revealingfor us not to see the nakedness of our
own imperial body? Moreover, what allows empire at once to be
naked and invisible? Finally, how can US empire studies get beyond
the moral imperative of the pro/con alternatives?
1. Where are we going? Where have we been?
These are the kinds of questions that the books under review
dont directly pose but rather point to. Scattered throughout all of
the books is a variety of critiques of the traditional spatial and tem-
poral paradigms of US empire studies, both of which have relied on
the historical divide between continental expansion of the era of
Manifest Destiny and what LaFeber (and so many others) calls the
new empire, initiated by the annexation of overseas territory with
the Spanish-American War. In effect, the geographical divide is
restated in temporal terms of old and new. But rather than develop-
ing the spatiotemporal relationship as a single unit of analysis for the
study of empire, the critiques in these books tend to focus, as well
see, either on the problem of timerethinking key dates and peri-
odsor of spacerevising the key locations, spatial units, or geo-
graphical orientations in the study of US empiremaking it difficult
to see the connection between the two. Even more pressing is the
need for a thoroughgoing theory of history that would take into account
the roles of both coordinates. Finally, there is the question of how to
produce a substantive comparative study of empires within which the
US could be placed.
First, the focus on time: the most influential move thus far, galva-
nized by the 1998 centennial, is to reperiodize, as Streeby proposes
American Literary History 203
in her focus on alternative originary moments for US imperialism.
Although there is a tendency simply to replace 1898 with 1848 as an
alternative origin of US empire, Streeby questions the notion of a
true origin point for US imperialism and thus foregrounds the
question of periodization (10). In so doing, she points toward the
possibility of a historicizing that would account both for the continu-
ities and ruptures in both the history and the historiography of
American empire. This is an issue embedded in postcolonial studies
broadly speaking, oriented around what Anne McClintock calls the
temporal axis colonial-postcolonial, which makes it easier to not
see and therefore harder to theorize the continuities in international
imbalances in imperial power (McClintock, 13). To not see: the
forms of US imperialism (some concealed, some half-concealed)
rely, then, on the theory of historical rupture to maintain their appar-
ent absence. The temporality of the new, with its allied question of
historical continuity-rupture, is further explored in John Seelyes War
Games, subtitled Richard Harding Davis and the New Imperialism
in an allusion to the revised notion of empire defined by LaFebers
New Empire. The whole question of the new US imperialism, well
see, trades both on American exceptionalism and the denial theory
that, together, have made it so difficult to historicize, in comparative
context, the development of US empire.
Second, the focus on space: a geographical relocation or reori-
entation, shifting from an exclusively east-west, continental axis to a
north-south, hemispheric view, has also defined US empire studies
since 1998. This inter-American frame (Streeby, 7, 246) tends to
elevate space over time, with borderlands, borders, and contact zones
as its keywords. But even the gesture toward spatiality sometimes
remains just that, most strikingly when the inter-American project is
articulated as an institutional call for a remapping of American cultural
studies. In this disciplinary use of the term, remapping can become
less a material than a figurative term, evacuating actual geographical
coordinates in favor of figuring a revised literary and cultural land-
scape.
8
It is, then, probably not coincidental that, of the books under
review, the interdisciplinary and comparative collection of essays on
Anglo-America, titled Nineteenth-Century Geographies and subtitled
The Transformation of Space from the Victorian Age to the American
Century, goes the farthest toward explicitly demonstrating how the
field of geography and its theories of space may narrate a history of
imperial transformation. The title combines temporal terms (nineteenth-
century, Victorian Age, American Century) with spatial categories,
suggesting the analytic promise of understanding the geographical
implications of such far-reaching global transformations. Whether it
might culminate in Harveys full-fledged historical-geographical
materialism is a question I will take up at the end of the review.
204 Have American Studies Gone Imperial?
The accent on the new is the tipoff, we know, to the most dis-
tinctive feature of the historical study of US imperialism, at least
since LaFebers influential study The New Empire was first published
in 1963 and reissued in 1998 (in recognition, John Seelye says, of
the extent to which LaFeber had revised the accepted historical
interpretation of the Spanish-American War [1]). LaFebers revi-
sionist theory turned on what was not new about the emergence in
1898 of the US as a world power with an overseas empire: First,
the United States did not set out on an expansionist path in the late
1890s in a sudden, spur-of-the-moment fashion. The overseas empire
that Americans controlled in 1900 was not a break in their history,
but a natural culmination. Second, Americans neither acquired this
empire during a temporary absence of mind nor had the empire been
forced upon them (LaFeber vii). Seelye reminds us of the compli-
cated nuances in what appears to be LaFebers elegantly simple the-
sis. Although its easy to summarize the negative conclusions, as
LaFeber does in all those nots, its more difficult to pin down pre-
cisely the nature of the historical continuity, the theory of the natural
culmination, that undergirds them. Seelye notes twice that the new
empire was, for LaFeber, a logical if not inevitable (a word, he
says, that LaFeber self-consciously avoids) conclusion to nearly
fifty years of a policy of commercial expansion that moved inexo-
rably (if not inevitably) toward a policy of international expansion
(1). Streeby, too, underscores the equivocal moves LaFeber makes
in dating what he calls the period of preparation, the years that
provided the roots of empire, not the fruit (LaFeber 61). Although
the subtitle of The New Empire indicates 18601898, Streeby notes
that LaFeber repeatedly returned to even earlier moments as he
searched for the origins of this empire (Streeby, 9), going back as
far as the history of the Monroe Doctrine and US interest in expan-
sion into the Pacific and the Caribbean in the 1840s and 50s. More-
over, although LaFeber calls the 1890s a major watershed (60) and
a new departure (61) in American history, he also insists that, as
Streeby notes, it represented a continuation rather than an absolute
break. Both Seelye and Streeby thus point implicitly to the need for
a theory of history that can address the issues underlying LaFebers
apparently contradictory views of the new empire, questions about
the metaphor of roots and fruits, the developmental narrative of cul-
mination and climax, and the nature of periodization itself.
So what was new about the New Empire? Rather than a
colonial empire on the European model, with formal annexation and
political control, LaFeber says that commercial expansionism of dif-
ferent types characterizes all periods of US history, as the US pur-
sued trade and investment opportunities through strategic control of
commercial passageways, foreign markets, and military bases. Just
American Literary History 205
as important, though, were the new imperialists themselves, what
Seelye calls LaFebers geopoliticians, intellectuals who influenced
the American policymakers responsible for creating the new empire.
The subject of Seelyes book, Richard Harding Davis, novelist, jour-
nalist, and war correspondent, is presented as operating both within
and without the circle of the new imperialists, on an alternative yet
parallel track to that of Theodore Roosevelt and company. Although
Davis is known now primarily for his best-selling adventure novel,
Soldiers of Fortune (1897), usually read as what may now be called
an imperial romance, Seelye wants to complicate Daviss place among
the new imperialists by focusing not on the fiction but rather on the
reportorial and travel writing that his contemporaries preferred.
Daviss first published book, The West from a Car Window (1892),
for example, was a humorously dismissive account that discounted,
rather than debunked, the myth of a new West promulgated by
Roosevelt, Owen Wister, and others, a means of licensing their impe-
rial vision. Yet, Seelye points out that, while verging strategically
from Roosevelts western myth, Daviss writings merged at a criti-
cal moment with the geopolitical imperialism that was Roosevelts
main agenda (10). Seelyes conclusion: both the interplay and the
discontinuity between Daviss romances and his travel writing must
be accounted for, since it is Daviss conflicted impulses toward
the expansive geopolitics of the new imperialists that make him such
a reliable cultural bellwether (11, 13). In thus expanding the Davis
canon to embrace the wide-ranging genres of the quintessential late-
nineteenth-century man of letters (so many of whom were, like
Davis, journalists and novelists working the vein of what Hayden
White calls the fictions of factual representation [12134]), Seelye
makes his own contribution to the emerging field of new US empire
studies.
But as Seelyes invocation of the tastes of Daviss contempo-
raries suggests, and as LaFebers series of receding, backward looks
confirms, the key role of the new to thinking US empire may reach
back at least as far as the responses contemporary to 1898. The new
imperialists themselves explained the emerging empire in terms of
what it is not: not like old-world empires, either of the past or the
present, exporting not colonial exploitation but freedom and democ-
racy. Louis A. Prez, Jr., documents how contemporary explana-
tions for the war of 1898, ranging from uncontrollable forces, to
Destiny, to chance, all subscribed to the proposition of war as
accident, with unanticipated and uncontrolled outcomes, in implicit
contrast to the acquisition of colonial possessions under the old model.
The war with Spain was undertaken, President William McKinley
argued, not that the United States should increase its territory, but that
oppression at our very doors should be stopped. . . . Duty determines
206 Have American Studies Gone Imperial?
destiny. Destiny. . . results from duty performed (qtd. in Prez 111).
More of the nots followed in 1899: We did not go there to conquer
the Philippines, McKinley reaffirmed, but in the providence of God,
who works in mysterious ways, this great archipelago was put into
our lap (qtd. in Prez 113). [I]t beautifully corroborates the chance
theory of history, William James concluded of the war in 1898, to
find the critical turning points in these great movements are purely
accidental. A victory often depends on the weather (qtd. in Prez
112). Clearly, we today are not the only ones to see the US empire
as wearing new clothes. The impulse to differentiate us from them,
sometimes also us now from us then (the divide between nineteenth-
century continental expansion and modern, overseas imperialism)
has long been part and parcel of the history and historiography of US
empire. The hallmark of the US difference, the imperial negation, is
the new.
At the end of American Sensations, a book framed by the prob-
lem of periodizing the new empire, Streeby gestures toward an alter-
native approach to imperial temporality that could conceivably
sidestep the whole question of continuity and rupture, the old and the
new, that has so plagued US empire studies. And it is Streebys new
and improved imperial canon, expanded with the addition of such
popular-culture genres as the international race romance, sensational
crime literature, and the Spanish-language corrido, that provides the
stimulus for thinking this alternative temporality. Calling several
times for a much longer history of US imperialism in the Americas
than that beginning with 1898 leads Streeby to her suggestive, clos-
ing discussion of the haunting of mid-twentieth-century popular
culture by traces of ideas about race, class, and nation forged during
the US-MexicanWar era. This is the era of what she calls, adapting
Michael Paul Rogins periodizing phrase, the American 1848 (103),
when the slavery debate intersected with expansionist ambitions in
the Americas and, not coincidentally, when the story of the Mexican
bandit-patriot Murrieta first began to circulate (6). To track the cir-
culation of the many popular cultural forms of the Murrieta story,
Streeby explains, requires a nonlinear reconstruction, moving back-
ward from the Beadle dime novels of the 1880s to the 1850s (when
the sensational Murrieta story appeared in crime narratives serialized
in police gazettes as well as in John Rollin Ridges now canonical
1854 novel) and then shifting forward to the various accounts pro-
duced in both English and Spanish during the Depression years of
the 1930s. Such a disjunctive temporal movement leads implicitly to
a conception of the history of empire that leaves behind the whole
paradigm of old/new, continuity/rupture. To follow the ghosts in
these Murrieta narratives, as Streeby suggestively puts it, allows her
to show how Murrieta and the American 1848 returned to haunt
American Literary History 207
the 1930s, an era of economic downturn, nativism, and anti-immigrant
(especially anti-Mexican) policy (27576). The uncanny return of
the Murrieta story during the Depression reveals a historical link
between the ghosts of Californias so-called past (276) and ongo-
ing debates about law, labor, race, crime, and nationalism in the US.
Finally, the Murrieta corridos, or ballads, part of an oral folk tradi-
tion which strives to make Murrieta the bearer of a mexicano cul-
tural nationalism (282) countering US imperialism, complete an
alternative approach to conceptualizing the history of empire. It is a
history of uncanny resemblances, of temporal repetition, and of a past
that continues to take on new guises in the present. The corridos
transregional and often transnational circuit of performance preserves
memories of the American 1848 that, Streeby concludes, continue
to haunt the US home in an age of law and racial terror that has
not ended (287). As a haunted history, the outcome of US empire is
still provisional, open-ended: a past, in Walter Benjamins terms, with
claims, as yet unredeemed, on the present (254).
If Seelye brings into critical focus the long US history of the new
imperialism and Streeby gestures toward an alternative, hemispheric
conception of imperial temporality, the essay collection Nineteenth-
Century Geographies seeks, perhaps even more sweepingly, to com-
bine the interrelated categories of time and space to produce a social,
cultural, and political history of the trans-Atlantic world in the modern
imperial age. The introduction, by Helena Michie and Ronald R.
Thomas, is a virtual mission statement for an intellectual project,
larger than the collection itself, that takes as its central heuristic
geography, understood as a history (of mapping, surveying, and
exploration); as a discipline, institutionalized during what is so often
designated as the long nineteenth century (expanding the era back-
wards, the editors explain, to 1789 and forward to 1914 to establish
a period defined. . . by the beginning of the epoch of great nationalist
revolutions, on the one hand, and the dawn of a new imperial age of
worldwide conflict and the balance of powers, on the other), and,
finally, as a means of exploring changes in more general attitudes
toward space (30). Although the essays all make use of developments
in nineteenth-century geographical thought, they are not themselves
primarily about nineteenth-century geography. Rather, this interdis-
ciplinary collection of studies of nineteenth-century Britain and the
US, drawn from scholars in the fields of geography, history, art his-
tory, anthropology, theater and performance, history of science, and
literary studies, suggests how both the spatial and the temporal might
be brought together systematically to produce a study of compara-
tive imperialisms. The editors see their project in light of the current
movement of geography and the humanities toward one another,
reflecting the efforts of geographers and social theorists such as
208 Have American Studies Gone Imperial?
Harvey, Edward Soja, and Derek Gregory to take up the project of
writing a history of space and power.
In the context of such a history of place, the choice to focus on
nineteenth-century Anglo-American culture itself becomes part of
the argument. Situated at a turning point, a crossroads (to use the
editors terms, referring both to time and space) in the imagination
and deployment of space, nineteenth-century culture witnessed trans-
formations that required a radical reimagining of space, signaled by
the shift from the dominance of European imperialism to the emer-
gence of global economic domination by the USor what is summed
up in the volumes subtitle as The Transformation of Space from
the Victorian Age to the American Century (14). The plural geog-
raphies in the title also establishes the commitment of the editors to
comparative analysis. Although the essays collected in this volume
speak from Anglo-American perspectives, I take even that relatively
traditional, narrow unit as a harbinger of the more thoroughgoing,
substantive comparativism that could shape the future of US empire
studies. In establishing links between geography and temporality,
some of the essays, especially those in the opening section entitled
Time Zones, explore how place can get expressed as time and,
thus, how geography becomes history. Although none of the essays
addresses the ways in which, as we have seen, the geographical
divide within US empire studies between continental and overseas
expansion is restated in temporal terms of old and new empires, they
surely could have.
Alternatively, the introduction explicitly addresses the problem
of periodization that we have also seen is such a troubling element of
US empire studies, arguing that the category of the nineteenth
century is no less problematic a temporal term than geography is a
spatial category (3). It is, indeed, to the inadequacy of the century
as a significant temporal marker that the editors attribute the cur-
rency of the term the long nineteenth century (3). In this, they remind
us of the masking, disguise, or denial effect of certain structures of
time. In geographer Neil Smiths American Empire: Roosevelts
Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (2003), an account of
the career of Isaiah Bowman, the twentieth centurys most famous
American geographer, Smith explains how the category of the tem-
poral, implicit in the phrase the American century, contributed to the
mechanics of US disavowal of empire. What we find out from Smith
is the history of how the US learned to mask the explicitness of terri-
torial annexation and occupation. When Henry Luce coined the phrase
in his 1941 cover editorial in Life magazine entitled The American
Century, Smith argues, he was denying the power of geography in
order to deny the presence of empire. Whereas the geographical
language of empires suggests a malleable politicsempires rise and
American Literary History 209
fall and are open to challengethe American Century suggests an
inevitable destiny. . . . How does one challenge a century? US histor-
ical dominance was presented as the natural result of historical
progress. . . . It followed as surely as one century after another. Inso-
far as it was beyond geography, the American Century was beyond
empire and beyond reproof (20). Once space is evacuated in favor
of time, as we know from the ubiquitous new, everywhere present
in US empire studies, the disguise of empire is virtually guaranteed,
condemning us to see nothing but whats not-there, the empires
new clothes.
2. The Lost Calling of Comparability; or, Toward
a History of US Empire that Compares
So, now whats needed, what are the next steps outlined by all of
these books? I would argue that we are perfectly poised to make good
on what we might call the aborted comparativism, a comparativism
interruptus of all the new empire studies. The study of European
empire has always worked within a circumscribed comparativism,
limited, by and large, to making local comparisons, selectively
applied, between imperial structures (settler versus mercantile colo-
nies, French native bureaucracy versus British national administrative
class). But this tendency goes deeper, and becomes stranger, in US
empire studies, where the comparativist moves are even more quali-
fied, circumscribed, less reflective, and more opportunistic. Its not so
much a systematic comparativism of different empires in different
places at different times as a reflex of differentiation: us versus them.
As weve seen, the accent is always on the new. And that in itself is
nothing new. We know that the new imperialists of the US have long
defined themselves against what they were not. The old/new dichot-
omy in empire studies has thus always had a quasi-comparativist urge
that got interrupted, truncated. We need a robust, systematic compar-
ativism that doesnt just replicate the methods or the objects of com-
parative history, such as the longstanding pairing of Anglo-America,
but rather is attuned theoretically both to questions of time and space
in its construction of analytical units.
9
How to compare, within and
across times, through what temporal units as well as what spatial
units? Perhaps we need more varied translocal, transtemporal sites of
comparison, such as those defined by oceans as well as by land. Most
of all, we need to develop for US empire studies what historian
Frederick Cooper calls a history that compares (1135) rather than
an inert Comparative History (1135). This would go a long way
toward laying to rest, or perhaps making irrelevant, some of the burn-
ing questions that have shaped the field to date.
210 Have American Studies Gone Imperial?
By way of a conclusion, let me suggest two examples, one,
already familiar, near the center of the field, and one from far outside,
both of which speak reflexively of their own disciplinary identifica-
tions and convey the possibilities at hand: Harveys New Imperialism
and Harry Harootunians essay Some Thoughts on Comparability
and the Space-Time Problem.
10
Harvey, we know, is a geographer
writing through the lens of historical-geographical materialism, and
Harootunian is a historian of Japan reflecting on how the increasing
spatial turn, and a concomitant withdrawal of time, in the social and
historical sciences affect the viability of comparative study. Both
seek to restore what Harootunian calls the crucial spatiotemporal
relationship that must inform any explanatory program, but espe-
cially our capacity for comparative study. And both demonstrate
how a structure of comparability would allow for a study of the
denial paradigm itselfthe maskings, ghosts, and spectres that haunt,
and thus are constitutive of, the history and historiography of US
empire.
Harvey proposes a brief model of the stages of empire that
incorporates the question of how Americas power grew with the
political and economic histories of Europe, Asia, and Africa (26).
He links the structures of imperialism to those of capitalism and
modernity, arguing that the territorial and capitalist logics of power
intertwine in contradictory ways, producing an uneven history that
flies in the face of the conventional assumption of the ready accord
between the politics of state and empire and the molecular pro-
cesses of capital accumulation in space and time (26). The net result
is to follow the historical-geographical trajectory of American hege-
mony from the rise of bourgeois imperialisms, 18701945 (42), to
the post-war history of American hegemony, 19451970 (49). For
those familiar with the usual dividing lines in the history of US
empire, the sheer fact of this alternative chronology, together with
the ongoing location in world history, presents a radically defamil-
iarized picture of what we know so well. We recognize the faces, as
it were, but not the times or the places. The trope of American
exceptionalism is present even here, looking most strange in a
discussion of how in the midst of fifty years of interimperialist rivalries
in Africa, the US was evolving its own distinctive form of imperi-
alism (46). The most powerful consequence of such an historical-
geographical analysis is the way Harvey uses it to unmask the structure
of disavowal, the maskings, that we know are constitutive of both the
history and the historiography of US empire. All the open talk of
empire has done nothing more than to convince most today that it
hides the explicit power of territorial gain under the mask of a demo-
cratic rhetoric, or what Harvey calls a spaceless and abstract
universalism (47, 50). The US did not acquire its imperial stature,
American Literary History 211
Harvey concludes, as virtually all the commentators discussed here
insist or assume, through denial: it simply used denial of geography,
and the rhetoric of universality to hide its territorial engagements,
more so from itself than from others (60). What better formulation
of the empires new clothes could be imagined?
Harootunian focuses on the prospects for a proper comparative
approach that would rectify what he lambasts as the relentless spa-
tialization of time (16), rooted in the dominance of the nation-state,
a unit fixed in space, deriving its difference from irreducible and
essential elements, and therefore incomparable (16). How might
we seek to restore the lost unity of the space-time relationship in
our own efforts to create comparative strategies (17)? Like Harvey,
Harootunian stresses the constitutive, often contradictory relations
among nation and empire, capitalism, and modernity, considered as
sites of comparison, both temporal and spatial. Even more telling,
for our purposes, Harootunian invokes the work of Benedict Anderson
on modern nationalism, not the Anderson of Imagined Communities
(1983) but of the more recent Spectre of Comparisons (1998), where
Anderson argues that the ghosts of Europes modernitythe worlds
outside of Europe but part of its imperial expansion, whose modern
forms originated through the export of capital and colonial power
simultaneously identify a site of comparison (14). Anderson iden-
tifies Southeast Asia as what Harootunian calls the haunted house,
so to speak, the place inhabited by the spectres of European moder-
nity, a place therefore condemned to be seen through a kind of second-
order doubling, as a site of comparison. In contrast to Andersons
predominantly spatial identification of the ghostly as the object of
comparative study, Harootunian argues for the larger and more
important spectrality of societies involved in fashioning a capitalist
modernity co-eval and co-extensive with Euro-America, yet whose
difference is dramatized by a different kind of haunting: the
ghosts of what have been past that co-exist with the new in everyday
life (24).
To see these ghosts of a surviving past, as Streeby seeks to do
in her history of the American 1848 that haunts the 1930s, or as
Wexler aims for in the forth and back movement in time of her photo-
graphs that superimpose images of lynching and imperialism on older
visual conventions of the slave system, requires what Harootunian
calls a structure of comparability (25). This means a theory of both
space and time that would recognize the role played by temporally
rooted forms in the present, where past and present are not neces-
sarily successive but simultaneously produced, or co-exist as uneven
temporalities, just as the here and there of modernity are co-eval
(25). What is revealed through such a structure of comparability
is nothing less than a theory of the new in everyday life. The
212 Have American Studies Gone Imperial?
everyday, Harootunian concludes, is genuinely the spectral, where
the shadows of another life constantly act upon and are acted upon
by the new, the modern (26). Modernity, the time of the new, is
differentially haunted by the ghosts of the past, as Benjamin, Toni
Morrison, Paul Gilroy, and others have said. What better means are
there to see, and to see through, the guises of the new, and thus to over-
throw the tyranny of the eternally new empire, than Harootunians
ghosts?
Notes
1. See Kaplan, Left Alone with America.
2. See Kaplan, Anarchy of Empire 1617; Streeby; Seelye; Wexler; Michie and
Thomas.
3. On debates over the canon, see, e.g., the essays in Michigan Quarterly
Review 28 (1989), especially Toni Morrison, Unspeakable Things Unspoken:
The Afro-American Presence in American Literature (134); Hazel V. Carby,
The Canon: Civil War and Reconstruction (3543); Eric Foner, The Canon
and American History (4449). On the dangers of ethnic absolutism, or what
Carby calls the search for cultural purity rather than cultural complexity
(423), see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Conscious-
ness (1993).
4. See Wiencek; Gore Vidal, Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson
(2004); Gary Wills, Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power (2004);
Michael Knox Beran, Jeffersons Demons: Portrait of a Restless Mind (2004);
R. B. Bernstein, Thomas Jefferson (2004).
5. Michael Ignatieffs The Burden reiterates the argument he made earlier in
How to Keep Afghanistan from Falling Apart: The Case for a Committed American
Imperialism in The New York Times Magazine on 28 July 2002.
6. On the appropriation of the language of gay pride, and other progressive move-
ments, in the service of empire, see Kaplan, Violent Belongings and the Question
of Empire Today: The Presidential Address to the American Studies Association,
October 17, 2003, American Quarterly 56 (2004): 34.
7. The Empires New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri, edited by Paul Passavant
and Jodi Dean (2004); Brennan, Empires New Clothes.
8. See Jos David Saldvars Border Matters, in which he works with both the
material and figurative uses, arguing for a remapping of US cultural studies that
would acknowledge the materially hybrid and often recalcitrant quality of literary
and (mass) cultural forms in the extended US-Mexican borderlands (5).
9. Kaplans Anarchy of Empire gestures toward this through an underlying pattern
of space-time analysis (only one example of how this book revises the straight
expos approach of her Absence of Empire).
American Literary History 213
10. The quotations are from a manuscript version of the article used with the
authors permission.
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