Agent of Empire: William Walker and the Imperial Self in American Literature (review)

William Walker became one of the key cultural figures of the antebellum period when he and a small band of Americans seized control of Nicaragua in 1856. Although his reign as president of Nicaragua was brief, Walker was the most successful mercenary, or filibuster, of the filibuster-plagued years between the U.S.-Mexico and Civil Wars. Although Walker is largely unknofin today, literary scholar Brady Harrison makes broad claims for his lasting significance. Even Theodore Roosevelt's career stands second to Walker's as "one of the primary literary vehicles for the exploration of U.S. imperialism" among writers (14). Agents of Empire explores the more than a dozen retellings of Walker's career since 1860, the year the filibuster met his death in front of a Honduran firing squad. While some of these texts are justly obscure, others, like the mercenary romances of Richard Harding Davis, the 1987 Alex Cox film, Walker, and Joan Didion's A Book of Common Prayer, were either popular or critical successes. Walker resurfaces, according to Harrison, whenever U.S. foreign policy and interventionism heat up.

Harrison has several goals here. He hopes to illuminate the continuing literary and cultural significance of Walker as an ambivalent figure of imperialism, to explore the understudied genre of the mercenary romance, and to posit a definition of the imperial self that explains why certain individuals have seen the imposition of their individual will on the continent as natural and preordained. Harrison employs the theories of poststructuralist scholars, including Frederick Jameson and Judith Butler, in a manner accessible to nonspecialists, and in general this book is clearly and engagingly written, if not always convincingly argued. (Were Walker and Roosevelt really "remarkably alike" [81]?) Harrison is at his most persuasive when exploring the swashbuckling thrillers of Richard Harding Davis, wildly popular adventure stories that encouraged imperialist fantasies on the eve of the Spanish-American War and posited the mercenary as a model of manhood.

This study also considers why it is that despite his regular appearances in American literature, there is almost no popular historical memory of Walker. Harrison suggests that American's amnesia regarding Walker is in large part a result of their expansionist history. Walker's story, "a tale of conquest, colonization, grand visions, rapacity, and defeat—lays bare many of the fantasies and desires for power that run beneath the rhetoric of the good neighbor and American exceptionalism"(197). Because these truths are too painful to acknowledge, Walker is forgotten almost as soon as he is remembered, only, in a return of the repressed, to reappear again and again.

Agent of Empire would have been strengthened had the author made better use of the wealth of recent scholarship on Walker and other midcentury filibusters. Unfortunately, his analysis of Walker, the historical figure, is largely based on two semi-romanticized biographies written in 1963 and 1976. Engagement with more recent publications might have led to a more nuanced sense of the aims and goals of filibusters and prevented a number of errors of fact and interpretation that mar the value of this work to students of the historical, as opposed to fictional, William Walker. For example, Harrison wrongly claims that Walker never set foot in Sonora in his attempt to foment revolution there in 1853–54; in fact he crossed from Baja into Sonora in early 1854. And John L. O'Sullivan most likely did not coin the term, "manifest destiny." Linda S. Hudson, in Mistress of Manifest Destiny: A Biography of Jane McManus Storm Cazneau, 1807-1878(2001) has argued persuasively that it was Cazneau, a central figure in the Young America movement and a writer at the Democratic Review, who authored many of the essays Harrison attributes here to O'Sullivan. Although Harrison discusses Young America at some length, he seems unaware of McManus's role in antebellum expansionism.

On several other occasions Harrison seems to read backwards...