The Race for America: Black Internationalism in the Age of Manifest Destiny

As Manifest Destiny took hold in the national consciousness, what did it mean for African Americans who were excluded from its ambitions for an expanding American empire that would shepherd the Western Hemisphere into a new era of civilization and prosperity? R. J. Boutelle explores how Black intellectuals like Daniel Peterson, James McCune Smith, Mary Ann Shadd, Henry Bibb, and Martin Delany engaged this cultural mythology to theorize and practice Black internationalism. He uncovers how their strategies for challenging Manifest Destiny's white nationalist ideology and expansionist political agenda constituted a form of disidentification--a deconstructing and reassembling of this discourse that marshals Black experiences as racialized subjects to imagine novel geopolitical mythologies and projects to compete with Manifest Destiny.

Employing Black internationalist, hemispheric, and diasporic frameworks to examine the emigrationist and solidarity projects that African Americans proposed as alternatives to Manifest Destiny, Boutelle attends to sites integral to US aspirations of hemispheric dominion: Liberia, Nicaragua, Canada, and Cuba. In doing so, Boutelle offers a searing history of how internalized fantasies of American exceptionalism burdened the Black geopolitical imagination that encouraged settler-colonial and imperialist projects in the Americas and West Africa.

Author: R. J. Boutelle
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 10/03/2023
Pages: 286
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.36lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.81d
ISBN13: 9781469676623
ISBN10: 1469676621
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | American | African American & Black Studies
- Literary Criticism | American | African American & Black
- Political Science | History & Theory | General