My fifth chapter extends my investigation of how epic could facilitate the imagining of a coordination of evangelism and imperialism and also provide, through tensions inherent in the genre, space to critique of the developing ideology of Christian imperialism. I examine Robert Southey’s Madoc as a cautious depiction of Christian conversion: even as Southey regards it as uplifting and beneficial, he expresses wariness about evangelism’s potential to sanction injustice. Conveying the remnants of Southey’s misgivings about the tyrannical potential of established religion, along with his suspicion about the overly enthusiastic zeal of many missionaries, Madoc traces similarities between Christians and non-Christians as a technique to affirm colonial authority, even as it strives to contain the tensions summoned by this strategy. Through his revisions of the epic genre, Southey advocates a need continuously to reform Christianity, empire, and epic, and so continuously to purge them of a tyrannous potential that he believed accompanied them.

Contrary to the long-standing historical view that describes Brazilian independence (1822) as a peaceful pact among elites dominated by Emperor Pedro I, this chapter examines popular participation in this conflictual process. Recent scholarship has shown how elite divisions opened space for popular political actors, as did conflicts and military mobilizations in several provinces. The public sphere expanded by Portuguese constitutionalism encompassed broad sectors of society. Slaves understood the Portuguese constitution as a liberating document and used military mobilizations to pursue their interests. Indians under Luso-Brazilian rule demanded rights used the new language of citizenship to demand relief from labor and militia service while semi-autonomous groups aligned themselves with the contending parties to defend their claims to land. Widespread worries about the “classes of color” indicate the diverse ways in which free people of color’s demands rights and inclusion in the new polity threatened the status quo. While these popular challenges were largely defeated by 1825, they profoundly shaped the independence process and left a long legacy.

This chapter explains the council and king’s ratification of hundreds of thousands of royal decrees, and the unique categories that these edicts contained, such as mestizo and mulato. It outlines the pathways through which vassals of all social backgrounds suggested new laws to the ruling Council of the Indies. Pressed for time, the council’s overwhelmed ministers often transplanted petitions’ vocabulary verbatim into decrees. This meant that subjects often phrased imperial laws minor and major, regional and Indies-wide. Using a multistep archival methodology, this chapter demonstrates how scholars can match vassals’ petitions to decrees, then shows how legal categories such as mestizo and mulato came about through the petitions of not only Spaniards but also Indians, mestizos, and mulatos themselves. Subjects of any social background could therefore introduce and shape Indies legal constructs, and the empire’s agenda from the ground up. It considers the lawmaking royal signature, as well as some vassals’ dangerous decision to attempt its forgery. Lastly, it reflects on the nature of the de partes/de oficio divide in decree production, the number of gobierno royal decrees, and the costs of their production for vassals.

The boundaries between space and place remain unsettled in the founding imagination in three ways: as a space that is unbounded since there is nowhere that cannot potentially be converted into a place; as a space that is already an inhabited place; and as a place that is continually infused with new groups, thus potentially altering the familiarity of that place. This chapter explores the fate of the Samnites in the Roman imagination and the Native Americans in the American imagination as the wild Stranger who threatens place. The Samnite and the Native American are different from the corrosive Stranger, yet both play a part in the construction of its identity. The Greeks, Italians, and Gauls remained a flourishing aspect of Roman culture even as they were cast as Strangers to make room for Rome’s ownership of its past, just as the European and immigrant were cast similarly in the United States. But the Samnites and Native Americans were frozen in time, simultaneously rendered invisible and retained as an image of not just the conquest of wildness but the unifying and securing of a familiar space.

This chapter introduces the volume by offering a reflection on the notion of transition within and across Latin American literary production from 1492 to 1800. This period is defined by a series of transitions as, motivated by personal ambitions or brought by force, Europeans and later Africans and Asians crossed oceans to inhabit the already inhabited lands of the Indies. Native societies and the emergent European colonial societies were transformed by these interactions and the processes that underlay them. This introductory essay explores the broad historical context for this period of transition as it was registered on local and global scales. The book is organized around six thematic areas, which in turn are introduced.

Though it is the size of West Virginia, the Navajo Nation is relatively unknown to non-Indians except the few who live there. Chapter 2 presents a portrait of the reservation, covering everything from the ubiquitous poverty and unemployment to the structure of Navajo extended families. The chapter also launches the reader into a brief history of the tribe, moving from the Navajo creation story to the Navajo long walk and internment to the establishment of the reservation with the signing of the 1868 Treaty with the United States.

Most readers agree that Faulkner’s Indian characters are romanticized, if not grotesquely stereotypical; the author himself readily admitted that he “made them up.” Indeed, neither Faulkner nor his critics seem able to conceive of his Indian as anything more than a static, romantic, obsolete trope, despite the fact that Natives appeared frequently and suggestively at the margins of his world, and that they reappeared in his fiction as self-buttressing concepts sited uncannily between reality and fantasy - an imaginary supplement or alter ego that presents a compensatory and destabilizing fiction for the white southern subject. This chapter argues that we need to acknowledge how very intimate and “real” this Indian is in order to fully appreciate the significance of their symbolic transubstantiations. There are Indians hidden in plain sight throughout Faulkner’s career in ways we have hardly begun to notice, and their “disappearance” is the product of an unspoken collusion between Faulkner’s stated method and our symptomatic critical misprision. His Indians are finally there and not-there at the same time, mirroring an uncanny vacancy in the white southern ego that both desires and rejects their supplemental knowledge.

Mark Twain’s attitudes toward Native Americans is complex and more troubled than his attitudes toward other racial and ethnic groups. His exposure to native tribes in Nevada and California during his days in the West shattered his romantic illusions about Indian life gained from his childhood reading of James Fenimore Cooper and other writers, and his writing in the time is virulently racist against Native Americans. His views may have softened somewhat later in his life, and there is evidence that he supported pro-Indian charities and efforts. But overall, his attitudes mirror those of white Americans at the time, which included wars against the Indians and removal to reservations.

This chapter focuses on how diverse societies came to attach themselves to Bagamoyo and, thus, became “owners of the town” in their own unique ways. It argues that, even though various peoples settled at different times, each was just as significant to the town’s growth as the others; to think in dichotomous terms of insiders and outsiders, core and peripheral, civilized and heathen, frustrates a more informed understanding of how Bagamoyo evolved from a fishing village to a trading entrepôt. Although the Shomvi did think in these dichotomous terms to maintain their elite status and protect their privileges, their actual interactions and ties with Bagamoyo’s other communities belied a greater level of tolerance than their posturing might otherwise have indicated. The acceptance of groups of people from different cultural backgrounds could prove economically – and even politically – beneficial for the Shomvi, so long as the newcomers did not threaten their influence.

This chapter continues to assess the impact of colonial rule on the townspeople, and the ways in which it revealed their attachments to the town and their ties to one another, but it emphasizes an economic theme. I begin with an investigation of the German imperial government’s plot to undermine the Wabagamoyo. Uncertain of how to wrest trade in the port away from local hands, the Germans’ plan was to develop the less economically significant town of Dar es Salaam, located about 70 km south of Bagamoyo, and divert the central caravan routes there, where the Germans had greater control over the economy. Yet building a new city did not mean that it was guaranteed to usurp Bagamoyo as the preeminent trading entrepôt of the colony. During the British period, many of the townspeople plotted ways to get around rationing restrictions imposed upon them by the British during WWII. This chapter concludes with a detailed examination of smuggling networks, revealing yet again the ties among the various social groups which bound them together as Wabagamoyo

The chapter gives a short description of Yucatán’s key social characteristics in the nineteenth century, allowing the reader to place subsequent chapters in their historical context. While the characterization of the Caste War by the elite as a racial struggle against progress is grossly misleading, it reflected the post-colonial nature of the Yucatecan society. The structure of the population in the region, its economy and hegemonic worldview were the product of three centuries of Spanish colonial rule in a relatively poor and isolated part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Colonial society was always more complex than the rigid dichotomy between conqueror and conquered or Spaniard and Indian (or Maya) permits. However, the persistence of colonial structures and the enduring importance of racist arguments in the elite discourse following Yucatán’s independence from Spain in 1821 are fundamental to understanding the conflicts that led to the outbreak of the Caste War and its interpretation by numerous contemporary observers as a racial fray.

While Yucatecan elites consistently characterized the Caste War as a racial conflict and labelled the rebels as Indians, the insurgents were in fact a fairly mixed population. Ample evidence from contemporary observers shows that many non-Indians were found in the rebel ranks. The rebels employed terms of self-identification that reflect their mixed social and ethnic composition and religious affiliation, generally referring to themselves as cristiano’b (Christians), otsilo’b (poor), masewalo’b (commoner) or kruso’b (the crosses) and not as Indians or Maya. It comes as no surprise that legally most rank and file rebels were Indians, as revealed by their Maya surnames. Legal Indians were overrepresented among the rural lower classes, the insurgents’ main social base. In addition, the preponderance of Indians simply mirrors Yucatán’s demographic structure, since the bulk of the rebels came from areas where this group outnumbered vecinos by three or four to one.