'The image of democracy': The politics of American race, vision and mobility from the Early Republic to the Daguerrean Era

This dissertation will analyze the intersection of literary and visual culture during the years between the Revolutionary War (1776) and the end of the "Daguerrean Era" (1839-1860). Beginning in rural Pennsylvania with Hector St. John de Crevecoeur in 1782 and ending in the bustling boomtown of Los Angeles with daguerreotypist and painter Solomon Nunes Carvalho in 1854, I will focus on a set of literary and visual texts contributing to and struggling against a composite image of America. The dynamics of mobility and vision fundamentally shaped American self-expression during this period, developing a form of American writing that I call narrative mobility in this study. From lithography to photography, a flood of innovative visual technologies also deeply influenced literary production---from detailed frontispieces, maps and illustrations to tentative verbal descriptions of an entirely new and mechanized visual reality. Furthermore, in the period between the Treaty of Paris that signaled the end of the Revolutionary War to the Gadsden Purchase of 1853, the territory of the United States of America more than tripled. These transformations in literary and visual culture thus took place within an American civil society in constant flux due to the dizzying expansion of national borders, the forced migration of American Indians and widespread westward settlement.; This study will ask a series of questions about the concept of Manifest Destiny, the phase most frequently associated with this formative period in the development of American art, literature and democracy. For whom is this destiny manifest and through what lens does one see this future so clearly? How is the act of seeing itself constitutive of agency and identity and how is that agency expressed in language? How is this articulated American destiny itself a manifest that follows a dizzying and often violent westward itinerary? If this westering current decisively contributed to antebellum expressions of American democracy, it also inevitably brought about a profound crisis of the visual that destabilized perceived relationships between objects and subjects. The narrative mobility expressed in such diverse sources as Crevecoeur, William Apess, Harriet Martineau, Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville reflects the ongoing struggle for control of the nation's identity. From autobiographical travel writing to slave narratives, marginalized figures such as immigrants, sailors, escaped slaves and displaced American Indians began to write themselves into the image of America.; These texts speak to the contingent and flexible relationship between race, vision and mobility that constitute the particular conditions nineteenth-century antebellum America. This is certainly due to such texts' recognition of the heterogeneous racial and ethnic composition of American identity and their subsequent rearticulation of the mono-racial "authorized" image of America to reflect a social and political reality that was far from settled. These texts actively challenge the orthodoxy of American racial models in their own historical contexts. While such works do not engage in what might be called a common "racial project," all of them rearticulate the dominant discursive ideologies of race and alterity by blending visual and verbal elements to create an alternative, anti-racist politics of representation.