Domesticating Foreign Struggles: The Italian Risorgimento and Antebellum American Identity

Notes

notes introduction 1. Among the numerous descriptions of a global approach to the study of American culture, see the introduction to Bender, Rethinking American History, 1–21; Desmond and Dominguez, “Resituating American Studies”; Giles, “Reconstructing American Studies” and Virtual Americas, especially 1–21; Kadir, “Introduction”; Ickstadt, “American Studies”; Lenz, “Towards a Dialogics”; Romero, “Nationalism and Internationalism ”; Rowe, “Post-Nationalism, Globalism, and the New American Studies” and “Nineteenth-Century United States Literary Culture”;Thelen, “Of Audiences, Borderlands , and Comparisons”; and the collaborative introduction to Rowe, Post-Nationalist American Studies, 1–21. 2. Kaplan, “ ‘Left Alone with America’: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture,” in Kaplan and Pease, Cultures of United States Imperialism, 16. See also Kaplan’s essay “Domesticating Foreign Policy” and her monograph Anarchy of Empire. 3. Among other essays warning that the focus on internal ethnoracial difference could become another unifying nationalist narrative and reinforce American isolationist and exceptionalist mythologies, see Radway, “What’s in a Name,” and Messmer, “Towards a Declaration of Interdependence.” 4. See Balibar’s essay “Racism and Nationalism” in Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, 37–67. 5. I maintain in this study that the confrontation with revolutionary Italy was central to the articulation of American national identity in the antebellum era. Historians of U.S. international relations, however, have traditionally devoted little attention to American commentary on the Risorgimento and focused instead on the response elicited in the United States by the French socialist revolution of 1848. The major studies of U.S. assessments of the European revolutions of the mid-nineteenth century Williams’s America Confronts a Revolutionary World, Larry Reynolds’s European Revolutions , and Davis’s Revolutions emphasize that the American condemnation of the socialist bent taken by the French revolution reflected the fear of proletarian insurrections that haunted a bourgeois democracy. Although the censure of French socialism is no doubt indicative of class division in the United States, racial and ethnic tensions are most evident when Americans commented on revolutions in Italy. 6. Eagleton’s Ideology is a useful guide to the range of different definitions of the term “ideology.” For the purposes of this study, I use “ideology” to indicate the system of beliefs through which a society coheres and maintains power differentials. For Bercovitch’s theory of American ideology’s capability to contain dissent, see his classic American Jeremiad and the more recent Rites of Assent. 7. For an overview of the events of the Risorgimento, see Brendon, Making of Modern Italy; Holt, Making of Italy; Riall, Italian Risorgimento; and Woolf, History of Italy. { 163 } For a more detailed account, see Candeloro’s eight-volume Storia dell’Italia moderna and the multi-authored, six-volume Storia d’Italia dal settecento all’unità edited by Valeri. 8. For an excellent overview of the work of American artists in Italy, see Stebbins, Lure of Italy. 9. Hawthorne, Marble Faun, 3. 10. Buzard, Beaten Track, 155–216. 11. Norton, qtd. in Salomone, “Nineteenth-Century Discovery of Italy,” 1383. 12. James, Italian Hours, 104. 13. For an excellent analysis of American artists’ ahistorical approach to Italy, see Bailey’s “Protected Witness.” 14. This discussion of the cultural productivity of American accounts of the Risorgimento draws on the vast body of scholarship that has defined texts as a mode of action. Tompkins’s notion of the “cultural work” performed by literature in Sensational Designs, Montrose’s definition of texts as “discursive practices” in “Professing the Renaissance ,” and Mailloux’s concept of the political effectiveness or “rhetorical power” of discourse in Rhetorical Power have been especially influential. Given that the texts I examine are in large part nonliterary, I have found LaCapra’s contention in History and Criticism that historical documents also have a “work-like aspect” i.e., they possess a performative as well as a constative dimension extremely useful in my own analysis of diplomatic dispatches, commercial treatises, and religious pamphlets. 15. It is precisely because I focus on the cultural function of American commentary on the Risorgimento that this study differs from prior examinations of the American response to nineteenth-century Italian revolutions. The scholars who have preceded me Marraro with American Opinion; Rossi with Image of America; Giorgio Spini with “Le relazioni politiche fra l’Italia e gli Stati Uniti durante il Risorgimento e la Guerra Civile,” in Lombardo, Italia e Stati Uniti, 121–86; and, more recently, Matteo Sanfilippo with “La questione romana” and Giuseppe Monsagrati with “Gli intellettuali americani e la...