Manifesting America: Imperialism and national space, 1776--1861

A rich body of scholarship has emerged in American Studies over the last decade calling for increased attention to the role of U.S. imperialism in the structuring of national politics and culture and assessing the imperial dimensions of specific literary texts. Less attention, however, has been paid to defining imperialism as a system or to situating the oppositional discourses of affected groups within a shared framework. This dissertation demonstrates how the representation of national boundaries in the antebellum period functions as imperial force by illustrating how U.S. administrative discourses produce and manage the difference between domestic and foreign space, examining how such institutionalized mappings of the nation legitimize expansion at "home" and exploitation "abroad." Drawing heavily on the theoretical and methodological insights of Subaltern Studies and Critical Race Theory, the dissertation further shows how the possibilities of self-representation for African Americans, Native Americans (especially the Cherokee and indigenous peoples of California), Mexican Americans, and Native Hawaiians were shaped by the territorial imaginary of U.S. law and diplomacy. Through readings of a range of different kinds of texts (such as memorials, autobiographies, histories, newspaper articles, and constitutions) and a variety of authors (such as Harriet Jacobs, Elias Boudinot, Antonio Maria Osio, Julio Cesar, and Davida Malo), it illustrates how these populations both appropriated and rejected the terms/topologies of U.S. policy in constructing oppositional identities, subjectivities, and mappings.; The project has four foci: the attempted localization of African-Americans and the debate over national citizenship; the representation of native land as "within" the U.S. and countervailing declarations of sovereignty; the assertion of (antagonistic) Mexican and Native American land claims in California after the Mexican-American War; and the growth of U.S. trade interests and political influence in Hawai'i. Complicating available critical narratives of "the borderlands" and reorienting the discussion of antebellum U.S. imperialism from race per se to territorial and jurisdictional claims, this dissertation foregrounds self-determination as an interpretive principle and uses it to construct a comparative analysis that retains the nation as its frame while contesting the geo-political narratives that underwrite the (re)production of American identity.