Rethinking Manifest Destiny and the cultures of early U.S. empire

My dissertation, Rethinking Manifest Destiny, argues that the invention of modern democracy in the US brings into being coexisting discursive practices of empire- and nation-building designed to manage the conflictual nature of democracy's radical potential. The result is a crisis in sovereignty that this project traces episodically through the literature written between the nation's founding and the Civil War. Beginning with an analysis of Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia , I show how the isolationist fantasy of the yeoman farmer tending his own land is inherently troubled by plans for territorial and commercial expansion. I then examine the conflicts resulting from trying to manage the uneasy convergence of foreign and domestic spheres in narratives by Royall Tyler and Susana Rowson about US subjects held captive in Algiers, as well as in stories about Americans caught in the midst of Haiti's revolution. Haiti and Algiers figure in the literature of the early Republic as racialized reflexive models of the US's political project: Haiti as the obverse of popular democracy and Algiers as the return of absolute sovereignty. These "foreign" sites, I argue, give fictive form to what some in the US experienced as the loss of democracy's constituent power through the centralization of sovereign authority. Having identified the process through which domestic conflict is exteriorized, I shift the focus closer to home, to the work of Southern writers Edgar Allan Poe and Lucy Pickens, both of whom saw in Jacksonian democracy the limitations of majority rule. The sectional rift that eventually leads to civil strife by mid-century is mediated in debates about the acquisition of Cuba, as either part of the Union or as the headquarters for a Southern Confederacy. As I show throughout the project, that sense of loss is displaced to "foreign" or "alien" sites of unresolved conflict, not as a sign of capitulation but often as an opportunity for democratic potential.