The Empire Abroad and the Empire at Home: African American Literature and the Era of Overseas Expansion

168 Pages·2012·1.02 MB·English

by  John Gruesser

Th e Empire Abroad and the Empire at Home
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Th e Empire Abroad
and the Empire
at Home
African American Literature and
the Era of Overseas Expansion
•
JOHN CULLEN GRUESSER
Th e University of Georgia Press Athens and London
© 2012 by the University of Georgia Press
Athens, Georgia 30602
www.ugapress.org
All rights reserved
Set in Minion by Graphic Composition, Inc.
Printed digitally in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gruesser, John Cullen, 1959–
The empire abroad and the empire at home : African American
literature and the era of overseas expansion / John Cullen Gruesser.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8203-3434-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8203-3434-0
(hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8203-4406-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) —
ISBN 0-8203-4406-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. American literature—African American authors—History and criticism—
Theory, etc. 2. Imperialism in literature. 3. Literature and globalization.
4. African Americans—Intellectual life. I. Title.
PS153.N5G785 2012
810.9'896073—dc23 2012017908

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

ISBN for this digital edition: 978-0-8203-4468-3
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Empire at Home and Abroad 1
Part 1. African American Literature and the Spanish- Cuban- American War
Chapter 1. Cuban Generals, Black Sergeants, and White Colonels: Th e African
American Poetic Response to the Spanish- Cuban- American War 19
Chapter 2. Wars Abroad and at Home in Sutton E. Griggs’s Imperium in
Imperio and Th e Hindered Hand 39
Part 2. African American Literature, the Philippine- American War, and
Expansion in the Pacifi c
Chapter 3. Black Burdens, Laguna Tales, and “Citizen Tom” Narratives:
African American Writing and the Philippine- American War 63
Chapter 4. Annexation in the Pacifi c and Asian Conspiracy in Central
America in James Weldon Johnson’s Unproduced Operettas 96
Coda: Pauline Hopkins, the Colored American Magazine, and the Critique
of Empire Abroad and at Home in “Talma Gordon” 113
Notes 127
Works Cited 139
Index 153
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Acknowledgments
My thought process, research, and writing have been signifi cantly shaped and
greatly enriched by my participation in the activities of several professional
associations and scholarly communities. Th ese include not only large organi-
zations such as the American Literature Association (led by the indefatigable
Alfred Bendixen) and the Modern Language Association but also regional
and more specialized groups such as the New Jersey College English Associa-
tion, the Collegium for African American Research, the Association of Gradu-
ate Liberal Studies Programs, the Society for the Study of Southern Literature,
and the Poe Studies Association, as well as small, narrowly focused intellectual
communities and initiatives such as the Pauline Hopkins Society, the Sutton
Griggs Project (organized by Ken Warren and Tess Chakkalakal), the 1990 neh
summer seminar on the problem of race in American and Afro- American lit-
erature from 1860 to 1930 held at uc Berkeley and directed by Eric Sundquist,
the 1994 neh summer seminar on literary history in theory and practice held
at Princeton University and directed by Earl Miner, and the 2007 neh sum-
mer seminar on hemispheric American literature held at Columbia Univer-
sity and directed by Rachel Adams and Caroline Levander. Over the past fi ve
years, parts of this book have been presented in sessions and symposia orga-
nized under the aegis of the ala, mla, njcea, caar, aglsp, sssl, and the
Griggs Project, and I have greatly profi ted from audience responses to these
panels. What follows is very much a partial list of the people I have been for-
tunate enough to get to know through and in some cases work closely with
in these scholarly associations and communities during the past two decades:
Elizabeth Ammons, Claudia Tate, Jennie Kassanoff , Lois Brown, Jill Bergman,
Richard Yarborough, Maryemma Graham, Daylanne English, Stephen Knadler,
Jonathan Eburne, Houston Baker, Paul Lauter, Mary Balkan, Kelly Shea, Burt
Kimmelman, Susannah Chewning, Ed Shannon, John Wargacki, Claude Julien,
Isabel Soto, Tish Crawford, Kim Phillips, Ira Dworkin, Cindy Hamilton, Jean
Yellin, Martyn Bone, Keith Cartwright, Holly Stave, Beth Sweeney, Kelly Ross,
David Schmid, Kate Nickerson, Susan Amper, Barbara Cantalupo, Jerry Ken-
nedy, Scott Peeples, Richard Kopley, Alisha Knight, Eric Gardner, Dorri Beam,
Mary Frances Jiménez, Carla Peterson, Tanya Clark, April Logan, John Ernest,
Giulia Fabi, Carole Doreski, Joe Alvarez, and Aldon Nielsen. I am grateful to
Jennifer James and Keith Wailoo for their helpful advice and to Rudolph Byrd,
the researchers at the U.S. Army Military History Institute, and the librarians
at Yale University’s Beinecke Library and the U.S. Army War College Library
at Carlisle Barracks for answering my questions. Th e people at the Nancy
Th ompson Library and many fellow faculty members at my home institution,
especially Richard Katz, Mia Zamora, Bert Wailoo, Alan Robbins, Holly Logue,
Carole Shaff er- Koros, and Terry Golway, have been very supportive. I owe a
profound debt to Colleen O’Brien, Nirmal Trivedi, Ira Dworkin, Hanna Wall-
inger, and Paula Seniors for reading parts of the manuscript and to John Er-
nest, Ken Warren, and MJ Devaney for reading all of it and off ering sage advice
for improving it. Some of the material in this book appeared in diff erent form
in American Literary History and Revue Afram: Publication Semestrielle du
Cercle d’Etudes Afro- Américaines et Diasporiques, and in the section on Frank
R. Steward in chapter 3, I draw on the ideas and in some places the eloquence
of Gretchen Murphy with whom I collaborated in editing and writing an intro-
duction to Steward’s Laguna stories, published in the May 2011 issue of PMLA.
Beth Snead, Jon Davies, and the amazing Nancy Grayson at the University of
Georgia Press and my most patient and generous e-mail correspondents Malin
Pereira and Hanna Wallinger off ered me much appreciated encouragement
during the whole course of this project. By no means can I fail to mention the
support of my old friends Mike, Phil, Joe, and Tim, my in-laws the Spilmans,
various Cullen and Fandel cousins and uncles, my parents John and Eileen, my
sister Jenny, my son Jack, my daughter Sarah, and, most of all, my wife Susan.
viii Acknowledgments
•
Introduction
Empire at Home and Abroad
When the United States learns that justice should be blind as to race and
color, then may it undertake to, with some show of propriety, expand.
Now its expansion means extension of race hate and cruelty, barbarous
lynchings and gross injustice to dark people.
—Lewis H. Douglass, “Black Opposition to McKinley”
Th e older idea was that the whites would eventually displace the native
races and inherit their lands, but this idea has been rudely shaken in the
increase of American Negroes, the experience of the English in Africa,
India and the West Indies, and the development of South America. Th e
policy of expansion, then, simply means world problems of the Color
Line. Th e color question enters into European politics and fl oods our
continent from Alaska to Patagonia.
—W. E. B. Du Bois, “Th e Color Line Belts the World”
Best known for the role it plays in the “Forethought” to Th e Souls of Black Folk
(1903), W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous declaration “Th e problem of the twentieth
century is the problem of the color line” (100) originally appeared three years
earlier in “Th e Present Outlook for the Dark Races of Mankind.” In this speech
he delivered at the third annual meeting of the American Negro Academy in
Washington, D.C., in March 1900, Du Bois makes the statement in the con-
text of the “new imperial policy” (53) the United States was implementing in
the wake of its victory over Spain and amid the ongoing Philippine- American
War: “Indeed a survey of the civilized world at the end of the 19th century but
confi rms the proposition with which I started—the world problem of the 20th
century is the Problem of the Color line—the question of the relation of the
advanced races of men who happen to be white to the great majority of under-
developed or half developed nations of mankind who happen to be yellow,
brown, or black” (54). Du Bois goes on to link the empire abroad and the em-
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