The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early AmericaAn illuminating look at the concepts of race, nation, and equality in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century America, The idea that "all men are created equal" is as close to a universal tenet as exists in American history. In this hard-hitting book, David Kazanjian interrogates this tenet, exploring transformative flash points in early America when the belief in equality came into contact with seemingly contrary ideas about race and nation. The Colonizing Trick depicts early America as a white settler colony in the process of becoming an empire--one deeply integrated with Euro-American political economy, imperial ventures in North America and Africa, and pan-American racial formations. Kazanjian traces tensions between universal equality and racial or national particularity through theoretically informed critical readings of a wide range of texts: the political writings of David Walker and Maria Stewart, the narratives of black mariners, economic treatises, the personal letters of Thomas Jefferson and Phillis Wheatley, Charles Brockden Brown's fiction, congressional tariff debats, international treaties, and popular novelettes about the U.S.-Mexico War and the Yucatan's Caste War. Kazanjian shows how emergent racial and national formations do not contradict universalist egalitarianism; rather, they rearticulate it, making equality at once restricted, formal, abstract, and materially embodied. |
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Contents
Mercantilist Enclosures | 35 |
The African Colonization | 89 |
Charles Brockden Browns | 139 |
The U S Mexico War and | 173 |
Yankee Universality | 213 |
259 | |
301 | |
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Common terms and phrases
abstract equality aesthetic African ambivalent American Colonization Society articulation assimilation Atlantic biloquism black Americans black mariners British Brown capitalism capitalist Carey Carey's Caste War chapter Charles Brockden Brown civility claims codified colonizationists Colonizing Trick Creoles critique culture debate declares discursive practices early echo economic eighteenth century emergence Enlightenment Equiano figure formal and abstract formal equality freedom gendered governmental History Ibid imperial Indian Iroquois Jefferson labor letter Liberia Ludloe Marx Maya Memoirs of Carwin mercantilism mercantilist merchant Mexican Mexico miscegenated modern Mohock savage narrative national codification nineteenth-century North Olaudah Equiano paradoxically particular passage political Polk population production race racial and national racial formations racism reading represented settler colonialism ship slave slavery Smith social suggests tion trade transformation turn U.S. citizens U.S. citizenship U.S.-Mexico United University Press Venture Smith Walker white Americans white nationalism white settler colonialism Wieland writes Yucatán Yucatecan Creoles