“On Imperialism, see. . .”: Ghosts of the Present in Cultures of United States Imperialism

I begin with a quotation: “On imperialism, see Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, Cultures of United States Imperialism.” This language represents a now familiar endnote found in literary criticism and American studies scholarship that references the emergence of academic interest in empire, borders, transnationalism, neocolonialism, and war. This or similar phrasing surfaces in an endnote in Siobhan Somerville’s Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (2000) to cement the connections between white supremacy at home and US interventionism abroad (1, 199); in David Leverenz’s Paternalism Incorporated: Fables of American Fatherhood, 1865–1940 (2004) to explain the sway of imperialist romance (11, 207); in Rodrigo Lazo’s Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States (2005) to describe “the relationship of culture to U.S. imperialism” (15, 199); and in Antoinette Burton’s introduction to Gender, Sexuality, and Colonial Modernities (1999) to identify “the cultures of American imperialism” (3, 14). This unscientific gathering of citations starts us on the path of discerning the legacy and impact of Kaplan and Pease’s intervention. How does Anglo-American professional culture engage the culture of US imperialism? What are the politics of citation, in particular, citations to an entire volume that collectively spans 26 separate essays and several hundred years of American cultural history? What are we remembering—and, of course, any question about remembering is also a provocation to think about forgetting—about literature and history when we reference Cultures of United States Imperialism (1993)?

The answers to these questions, I will ultimately argue, are bound up with readings that treat Kaplan and Pease’s project as a history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that stops there, breaking off well before that past might be seen to continue into the present. Segmentation, not continuity, as Wai Chee Dimock observes in broad terms, has been the rule of literary history, and its specific effect upon Kaplan and Pease’s intervention is to prevent their book from intervening beyond its own history.¹ It is not that Cultures of United States Imperialism does not go “back” far enough (Myra Jehlen’s essay uses Columbus and Montaigne to chart the long durée of colonization), but rather that readings of this book do not go “forward” far enough. Clearly, crises discussed in a 1993 book will no longer be contemporary 15 years later in 2008. Nonetheless, the present is there as a shadow or ghost that appears in the uncanny ability of Cultures of United States Imperialism to speak to Iraq, Afghanistan, and New Orleans.

For now, though, it is enough to start by taking the appearance of the present in an “old” book as acknowledgment of the influence that Cultures of United States Imperialism has had on our field since its publication. This influence cannot be measured by the number of works that cite this book. Still, it is instructive to examine moments when Kaplan and Pease’s effort breaks out of the secondary status of endnote to find discussion in the text proper, often as a general marker of a salutary turn in American studies to confront the imperialist past that had so long been sidelined as extraneous to prevailing patterns of national culture. In this respect, Malini Johar Schueller states that “the essays in Cultures of United States Imperialism attest to the growing acceptance of imperialism as an important ideology in the study of U.S. literature” (20), and Colleen Lye summarizes that “in recent years interest in the ‘cultures of United States imperialism’ has importantly directed our gaze to the military events involving the U.S. annexation and occupation of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines” (18).² Although I will want to wonder whether citations to the entirety of Cultures of United States Imperialism, like the total gesture of “On imperialism, see Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease,” constitutes critical engagement and not merely the use of endnote as incantation, for now it is...