Chapter 1 - American Empire

Summary

“American Empire” explores how the interplay between imperialism and race shaped early American politics, literature, and culture. Through a series of close readings of works by Phillis Wheatley, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, William Apess, and James Fenimore Cooper, the essay shows how early American writers wrestled with the continuities and discontinuities between some of the most important concepts that shaped the young republic, in particular the tensions between democracy, empire, freedom, slavery, and race. These internal contradictions between the ideals espoused in political documents such as the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and The Federalist, and the policies of racial exploitation and dispossession that drove the nation’s expansionist economic agenda, would come to shape the most important literary works of the day. Writers like Wheatley, Crèvecœur, Apess, and Cooper would seek to make sense of those contradictions in their writings, a legacy that would carry on through the nineteenth century and into the current moment.