This dissertation argues for a re-periodization of 1898 as the moment of U.S. empire by utilizing a transhemispheric methodology that discursively connects the Pacific and the Americas. Arguing that the federal campaign of Indian Removal should be considered the actual marker of intra-continental U.S. imperialism, this dissertation takes 1830 as its starting point. Within that historical context, the study examines literary texts by U.S. writers who in the 1830s anticipated the extra-continental colonial visions that would become cultural commonplaces after 1898, when the United States became an extra-continental imperial nation by acquiring possessions in the Pacific and the Spanish Caribbean. The dissertation also examines writers from those regions who proposed their own transcolonial revisions to dominant colonial discourses in the late nineteenth century.
Specifically, this dissertation examines the colonial visions articulated by two sets of New England writers who traveled to Puerto Rico and Cuba. Edward Bliss Emerson and Charles Chauncy Emerson (brothers of Ralph Waldo Emerson) visited Puerto Rico between 1831 and 1834 while Sophia Amelia Peabody (who would later marry Nathaniel Hawthorne), and her sister, Mary Tyler Peabody, lived in Cuba from 1833 to 1835. Their letters and journals reveal that a decade before Manifest Destiny was articulated publicly, the notion that the United States was destined to become an extra-continental empire was expressed more privately in literary and cultural terms.
This dissertation further shows how writers in Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines and Hawai'i deployed transcolonial strategies to challenge colonialism in their regions. This study examines texts by the Puerto Rican Ramón Emeterio Betances, the Cuban José Martí, and the Filipino José Rizal to argue that these writers were transcolonial anti-colonialists. This dissertation also juxtaposes the colonial translations of Hawai'i, written and disseminated by Mark Twain, with the anti-colonial, or indigenized translations, deployed by deposed Hawaiian Queen Lili'uokalani in her autobiography. By deploying distinct transcolonial revisions of dominant representations of their islands and their people, and by representing the United States in their own terms, these writers anticipated later anti-imperialist discourses aimed at U.S. imperialism.