Anti-Imperialist Traditions in U.S. Literature and Culture

From its Founding through the present, the United States has maintained a complex, often-contradictory relationship to anti-imperialist thought. For all their historical importance to the national discourse, anti-imperialist conceits have been consistently frustrated—by projections of U.S. military power abroad, and perhaps more fundamentally still, through a myriad of cultural, economic, and environmental imperialisms. As Amy Kaplan emphasized in her Introduction to the groundbreaking collection she co-edited with Donald Pease, Cultures of United States Imperialism (1993), this fundamental contradiction between the United States’ self-conceived anti-imperialist identity as viewed through one side of the looking glass, and the realities of U.S. empire appearing through the other, likewise impelled the works of literary critics and historians through the first half of the twentieth century. Enlisting Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness (1956) as a jumping-off point, Kaplan provocatively concluded that “imperialism has been simultaneously formative and disavowed in the foundational discourse of American studies.”¹

Now, twenty years after the publication of Cultures, we find ourselves in a somewhat different kind of scholarly dilemma. To the extent that American Studies in recent decades has done the vital work of exposing previously unrecognized manifestations of U.S. imperialism, it has also led towards a kind of totalizing dismissal of anti-imperialist dissent within the U.S. canon, past and present. For example, in a recent essay appearing in American Literary History, Winfried Fluck draws upon the work of scholars including Kaplan, Pease, and Sacvan Bercovitch, to assert that “literary dissent is really part of a ritual of consensus and as such already co-opted by the idea of ‘America’ [. . .] If sexism, heterosexism, racism, or imperialism lies at the core of the American system, then they must also lie at the core of its literature, even where these texts do not explicitly deal with issues of race, gender, or empire.”² But if the vortex process Bercovitch famously called the “Rites of Assent,” structurally forecloses the possibility of meaningful anti-imperialist dissent, one is left to wonder from where, and out of what tradition, did current-era anti-imperialisms emerge—including those represented in American Studies?

A more cogent understanding of anti-imperialist thought in our own time, for good and ill alike, stands to be activated by futher exploring its connection to the past. In truth, manifestations of United States imperialism during the ‘long nineteenth century,’ as in our own moment, reflect complicated sets of circumstance that cannot be adequately addressed without reference to the oppositional sensibilities, discourses, and visions that they repeatedly evoked. This special issue of South Central Review explores a range of anti-imperialisms that factored prominently in the U.S. discourse from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, and suggests ways in which contemporary academic and popular anti-imperialisms in the U.S. can be historically traced. We hope to contribute to a growing body of scholarship in American Studies—including work by several contributors in this issue—that features important insights into anti-imperialist traditions in U.S. literature and culture.