Vicente Pagasartundua’s Último de los mohicanos: A Racialized Dialogue

This article uses the translation history of North American James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 Last of the Mohicans to explore the place of race in nineteenth-century republican discourse as it circulated in the Atlantic World. Based not on Cooper’s original, but on Auguste Defauconpret’s 1826 French translation, le Dernier des mohicans, Vicente Pagasartundua’s 1832 Último de los mohicanos, like many republican-oriented works in the early nineteenth century, was translated in Spain for a Spanish American audience. Traveling from pre-Jacksonian New York to Orleanist Paris to absolutist Madrid, Cooper’s novel and its translations participate in a transnational conversation on the role of racial hierarchies in republican government-particularly, as I will show, in regards to the question of the place of Afro-descendants in the republic, a contentious issue in the Ú.S., France, Spain, and Latin America as the Atlantic World faced events such as the rise of Jacksonian Democracy, the Haitian Revolution, the Cadiz Constitution, and the independence of the Spanish Main.