have american studies gone imperial?

7/27/2019 Have American Studies Gone Imperial?

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doi:10.1093/alh/aji012

American Literary History 17(1), Oxford University Press 2005; all rights reserved.

The New, Newest Thing:

Have American StudiesGone Imperial?Susan Gillman

Reading these books on nineteenth-century US empire in the

context of current world events makes for a strange combination ofobsolescence 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 thenew. 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 ofthe 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 theNew 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


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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 overseasempire in the year 1898 with the Spanish-American War. Kaplan

points out that even such an influential study as Michael Hardt and

Antonio NegrisEmpire (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 studyof 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 newevents, 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-languagecorridos 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 collectionNineteenth-Century Geographies.2Its 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


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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 foundingfathers 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, inso 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 anarticle 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 upwith, 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? Inpart, 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,


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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 stanceis 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 notto portray that gaveandstill 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 therecent 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, andhow 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? Areyou 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.


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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, arewe 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 FergusonsEmpire: 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 shouldertheir 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 NewClothes.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 Wallersteinpoint 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


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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 multiplecolonizations, 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. LaFebersNew 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 (originallypart 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 beenfulsome 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 byNew YorkerCritic at Large Joshua Micah Marshall

in an article on the recent policy books by Johnson, Ivo Daalder, and

James Lindsay, etal., entitled Power Rangers and headed with the

provocative question, Did the Bush administration create a new

American empireor weaken the old one? (83). Commenting onhow 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,


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old and new, is echoed in the project of the unveiling of the American

empire (1213) that motivates Johnsons book, subtitledMilitarism,

Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. If Johnson argues passionately

against the secrecy that allows the vast empire of secret US militarybases 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 isrestated 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 theUS 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


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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 thequestion 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 geographicalcoordinates 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, titledNineteenth-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 geographicalimplications 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.


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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, ofthe extent to which LaFeber had revised the accepted historical

interpretation of the Spanish-American War [1]). LaFebers revi-

sionist theory turned on what was notnew 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 beenforced 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 ofThe 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) anda 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


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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 sucha 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 looksconfirms, 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


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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 intoour 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 USempire. The hallmark of the US difference, the imperial negation, is

the new.

At the end ofAmerican 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 thestimulus 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 Mexicanbandit-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 wholeparadigm 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


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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, continueto 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 collectionNineteenth-

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 modernimperial 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 ofworldwide 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


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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 ofthe 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 tocomparative 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 overseasexpansion 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 remindus 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 inLife magazine entitled The AmericanCentury, 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


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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, Towarda 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 administrativeclass). 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 urgethat 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 thanan 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.


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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: HarveysNew Imperialismand 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 demonstratehow 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 thatflies 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 ithides 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,


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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 formulationof 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 relationsamong 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 ofImagined 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 everydaylife (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 uneventemporalities, 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


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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, ToniMorrison, 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. KaplansAnarchy 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).


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10. The quotations are from a manuscript version of the article used with the

authors permission.

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