| "The Diplomacy of Affect" defines a crucial but unacknowledged sentimental undercurrent in US literary forays into Haiti, Cuba, and Mexico during the hemisphere's rebellious nineteenth century. Given the popularity of the nineteenth-century sentimental novel, the appearance of its central motifs---tearful embraces, fractured families, fainting heroines, angelic children---in other literary texts is unsurprising. What is remarkable, however, is how unexpected texts deploy seemingly insignificant affective episodes to navigate gendered and racialized experiences of conflict throughout the Americas. Sentimental discourse acts as a double agent, traversing national, racial, and cultural boundaries even as is shores up national solidarity against perceived foreign encroachments.Chapter One argues that Leonora Sansay's Secret History (1808) creates a network of affective narratives from French, creole, mulatta, and slave women caught in the Haitian Revolution the novel ends poised to creolize a nationalist US sentimentalism. Chapter Two examines the aftermath of the US-Mexican War as the first Native American novel, John Rollin Ridge's Joaquin Murieta (1854), tracks Mexican bandits across the newly-minted state of California the novel's female characters conduct a stealth campaign against the men's violence, but they are unable to reverse the war's brutal legacy. Chapter Three maps the hemispheric geography of enslavement constructed by Harriet A. Jacobs's 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as, in response to sentimental insults, Jacobs gestures toward California, colonial Florida, and the Caribbean. The final chapter situates Mary Peabody Mann---sister-in-law to Nathaniel Hawthorne and friend to Argentinean Domingo Faustino Sarmiento---at the intersection of US literature and transamerican politics. The gap between her novel's 1830s conception and 1887 publication transforms Juanita's obsession with abolition into an argument for US annexation of Cuba."The Diplomacy of Affect" delineates both the productive civic potential of sentimental discourse and its ideological participation in nineteenth-century US imperialism. Even as these narratives adhere to a rapidly crystallizing logic of US hemispheric domination, their competing discourses present an alternative vision through localized moments of affective connection---moments that articulate other, more egalitarian models of transamerican relation. |
