The Race for America - by R J Boutelle Paperback

About the Book

"The cacophonous intellectual tradition outlined in The Race for America spans practical emigration schemes, informal foreign policy, and theories of diaspora. Through this internationalist print culture, Black writer-activists proffered substitutes for and contestations of the "American Legend" that took root during the feverish age of Manifest Destiny. Their engagements sought to unravel its premises and reweave them into novel arrangements of political borders and racial ontologies that could underwrite new forms of community, modes of governance, and grounds for solidarity"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"The Race for America is a thoroughly compelling project, illuminated by detailed readings of canonical and underread texts as well as a fluid and inventive engagement with theory. With attention to both literary history and a conceptual verve, Boutelle has given us a timely intervention in the debates about the transnational genealogies of Black intellectual and political life of the nineteenth century."--Ivy G. Wilson, author of Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Nationalism

"The Race for America makes an original contribution at the intersection of two flourishing academic fields: hemispheric American studies and studies of the Black Atlantic. . . . Thanks to its nuanced interpretations, its extensive research, and its examination of non-traditional literary forms such as pamphlets, newspapers, and convention proceedings, [the book] provides a significant addition to our understanding of Black internationalist thought, as well as of the sway of Manifest Destiny during times of heated domestic debate, both then and now."--American Literary History

"A highly researched and compellingly written study, The Race for America uses a novel approach in examining Black transnationalism across the continent through the prism of Manifest Destiny. Through his analysis of Black literature, newspapers, brochures, correspondence, and the Colored Convention movement, R. J. Boutelle expertly details the intricate history of how Black writers in the United States actively shaped debates on the geopolitical development of the singular idea of America."--Marlene L. Daut, author of Awakening the Ashes

"Bold, ambitious, [and] compelling. . . . [T]his book succeeds in its aim of providing a 'counterhistory of hemispheric development apart from the US-American neocolonial dominion' (27). Historians of Black nationalism, diasporic thought, and Manifest Destiny and its discontents will all be grateful for the book's contributions and provocations."--Journal of the Civil War Era

"By establishing lines of continuity between US nationalist claims and Black internationalist politics, Boutelle makes an important contribution that substantially complicates a sometimes too-easy celebration of Black diasporic community making. . . . [A]n exciting intervention that looks beyond the familiar geographies and lineages of Black internationalist politics to recover a once vital--and still moving--effort to envision freedom against prevailing trends at the national level."--H-Diplo