"The American Invader": George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes and US Expansionism in the Creole Caribbean

George Washington Cable is perhaps best known as a progressive writer of local color stories set in Louisiana. His oeuvre is punctuated with critiques of his Creole characters' regressive attitudes towards people of color, slavery, segregation, and industrial progress. In his overtly political The Grandissimes, Cable positions these morally opprobrious Creoles of French New Orleans against a new, progressive, democratic US on its ascendancy across the North American continent with violent, tragic results. This political expansion correlates well between the text and Cable's present, marking moments of regional and global ascendancy for the United States. Jennifer Rae Greeson points out that his local color fiction, especially "Jean-Ah Poquelin," "mak[es] an episode of recent national history into a widely applicable paradigm for U.S. empire" (Our South 265). The Grandissimes replicates a similar paradigm of national expansion. The novel's concern with the historical legacies of events beginning in 1699, nearly 105 years earlier, roughly corresponds with Cable's 1880 and the birth of the United States in 1776, another period of about 105 years. This temporal similarity superimposes two narratives of national creation, encounter, and expansion. For Cable's present, expansion was at the forefront of political life in the United States, as it seems to be in his novel. President Grant, in 1869 and 1870, set the Western Hemisphere apart when he proclaimed, "hereafter no territory on this continent shall be regarded as subject to transfer to a European power" (LaFeber 36). Grant implies, then, that the entire hemisphere is the especial purview of US paternalism, protection, and subjection. The Grandissimes itself also is concerned with the success of this project. In it, the acquisition of the Louisiana territory represents, as Adam Long notes, "a moment of significant nationbuilding. the characters are explicitly and publicly concerned with creating an acceptable narration of nation" (81). Moreover, in the US's final political and cultural conquest, Cable legitimizes the US American even as it subsumes the Creole. The narrative's concern with the US as a growing regional power in the northern Americas hearkens to Cable's present moment of US expansionism across the globe, allowing him to examine the legitimacy and cultural possibilities afforded by US expansionism during his present over quasi-European, colonial, Creole order.

Cable's narrative is not specifically concerned with a past, completed historical moment, but allegorizes the potential for an ongoing political and social project of post-Reconstruction assimilation and imperial expansion. Indeed, Cable often imagines Louisianan regionalism as antagonistic towards the higher ideal of American nationalism. In "My Politics," Cable reflects on The Grandissimes as "a study of the fierce struggle going on around me, regarded in the light of that past history—those beginnings—which had so differentiated Louisiana civilization from the American scheme of public society" (14). This "fierce struggle" of culture following Reconstruction seems to arise from Louisiana's continued difference from the larger "American scheme" both in past and present. For Cable, the solution to this differentiation lies in a rejection of or at least a subsumption of regional identity for a more advanced US social and political superstructure. Cable articulates as much in an address to students at the University of Mississippi, where he implores, "What we want—what we ought to have in view—is the No South! Does the word sound like annihilation? It is the farthest from it. It is enlargement. It is growth. It is a higher life" (Burnett 21). In this configuration, the southerner, the Louisianan, becomes a secondary identity to the American. If these citizens accept with pride the new "American scheme of public society" and reject or demote those regional idiosyncrasies that contradict the acceptable national character, then what remains of their culture may be legitimized within the "higher life" of US citizenry.

Scholars generally agree that The Grandissimes locates these antagonistic idiosyncrasies in southerners' undue arrogance and the spectrally haunting "shadow of the Ethiopian" and concur that Cable offers generally progressive yet problematic suggestions for exorcising this dark doppelgänger from the recalcitrant...