Abstract
In the Humanities, transnational approaches have gained widespread currency, especially in such fields as American Studies.1 This chapter aims to apply these approaches to the study of masculinities and their interrelationship with nationalism by focusing on one particular historical case study. It provides a transnational perspective on the gender dimensions of American nation-building in the nineteenth century, attempting to challenge nation-state-centered scholarship on the history of masculinities in the modern world. It argues that the transnational forays of the so-called filibusters enhance our understanding of how different masculinities interacted with each other in what Mary Louise Pratt has famously called the “contact zone” between different cultures.2
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Notes
The following studies provide a good introduction to the transnational approach: Jeffrey Grant Belnap and Raul A. Fernandez, eds., Jose Marti’s “Our America”: From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998);
Anna Brickhouse, Transamerican Literary Relations and Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004);
Gretchen Murphy, Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005);
Winfried Fluck, Donald E. Pease, and John Carlos Rowe, eds., Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2011);
Mathew C. Gutmann et al., eds., Perspectiveson Las Americas: A Reader in Culture, History, &; Representation (Hoboken: John Wiley &; Sons, 2008);
Klaus Hock and Gesa Mackenthun, eds., Entangled Knowledge: Scientific Discourses and Cultural Difference (Berlin: Waxmann, 2012);
Sünne Juterczenka and Gesa Mackenthun, eds., The Fuzzy Logic of Encounter: New Perspectives on Cultural Contact (Münster: Waxmann, 2009);
Caroline Field Levander and Robert Steven Levine, eds., Hemispheric American Studies (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008);
Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman, eds., The Futures of American Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 4.
The following English language studies provide important insights into filibustering: Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005);
Charles Henry Brown, Agents of Manifest Destiny: The Lives and Times of the Filibusters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980);
Rodrigo Lazo, Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005);
Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854–1861, 2nd ed. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002);
Robert E. May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002);
William O. Scroggs, Filibusters and Financiers: The Story of William Walker and His Associates (New York: Russell and Russell, 1969).
Some of the best studies in Spanish include Víctor Hugo Acuña Ortega, ed., Filibusterismo y Destino Manifesto en Las Américas (San José: Museo Histórico Cultural Juan Santamaría, 2010);
Rafael Obregón Loría, Costa Rica y la Guerra Contra los Filibusteros (Alajuela, San José: Museo Histórico Cultural Juan Santamaría y Ministerio de Cultura, Juventud y Deportes, 1991);
Iván Molina Jiménez, La Campaña Nacional (1856–1857): Una Visión desde el Siglo XXI (Alajuela: Museo Histórico Cultural Juan Santamaría, 2000).
May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld, 20. During the heydays of Manifest Destiny in the 1840s and 1850s, scholars diagnosed a “fever of expansionism.” Victor Hugo Acuña Ortega, La Campaña Nacional: Memorias Comparadas, ed. Museo Histórico Cultural Juan Santamaría (Alajuela: Museo Histórico Cultural Juan Santamaría, 2009), 56. On Central America, see Greenberg, Manifest Manhood, 55.
On filibustering activities in Mexico, which was the most prominent target due to its geographical proximity, see Joseph Allen Stout Jr., Schemers and Dreamers: Filibustering in Mexico 1848–1921 (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2002);
Delia Gonzalez Reufels, Siedler und Filibuster in Sonora: Eine mexikanische Region im Interesse ausländischer Abenteurer und Machte (Köln: Böhlau, 2003).
Manifest Destiny was the belief that Providence had allocated the whole continent exclusively for the expansion of the Anglo Saxons, while Young America was the name of a group of politicians (mainly affiliated to the Democratic Party) and editors who strongly advocated expansion driven by Manifest Destiny. See Sam W. Haynes and Christopher Morris, eds., Manifest Destiny and Empire: American Antebellum Expansionism (Arlington: University of Texas Press, 1997);
Tomas R. Hietala, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985);
Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
Gail Bederman, Manliness &; Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 4, 27;
Greenberg, Manifest Manhood, 14; R. W. Connell, Masculinities, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 23.
Anne McClintock, “Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family,” Feminist Review 44 (1993): 1–4, 61–80.
Todd W. Reeser, Masculinities in Theory: An Introduction (Maiden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 174.
See Robert W. Johannsen, “The Meaning of Manifest Destiny,” in Manifest Destiny and Empire, ed. Sam W. Haynes and Christopher Morris (Arlington: University of Texas Press, 1997), 7–20;
Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2000); Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny.
Greenberg, Manifest Manhood, 156–157; Amy S. Greenberg, “Soldado o Don Nadie,” Filibusterismo y Destino Manifiesto, ed. Acuña Ortega (Museo Histórico Cultural Juan Santamaría, 2010), 258–259.
All masculinities are “socially defined in contradistinction from some model (whether real or imagined) of femininity.” R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender and Society 19, no. 6 (June 2005): 848.
Greenberg, Manifest Manhood, 125; Brady Harrison, Agent of Empire: William Walker and the Imperial Self in American Literature (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 190.
These conquests, “international race romances,” as Shelley Streeby has called them, were imagined to obliterate the racial anxieties that were awakened by territorial expansionism. Shelly Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 86.
Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, Reissued (New York: Norton, 2006), 58;
Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 110.
This included a land redistribution scheme that was aimed at Anglo American settlers, the introduction of English as the second official language, and the reintroduction of slavery. See David E. Whisnant, Rascally Signs in Sacred Places: The Politics of Culture in Nicaragua (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 75–76.
“Captain J Egbert Farnham’s Quarters,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 3, 1856, cited in Alejandro Bolaños Geyer, The War in Nicaragua: La Guerra En Nicaragua as Reported by Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 1855–1857, trans. Orlando Cuadra Downing, vol. 1 (Managua: Fondo de Promoción Cultural BANIC, 1976), 59; “Interior of the Convent, Repose after Battle,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 3, 1856, cited in Geyer, The War in Nicaragua, 61.
Anne Baker, Heartless Immensity: Literature, Culture and Geography in Antebellum America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 106.
Evoking the oldmyth about Hernán Cortés’ embodiment of Quetzalcoatl, Walker stylized himself as the “Gray-Eyed Man of Destiny,” a supposedly legendary figure long awaited by the Central American indigenous people. See Amy S. Greenberg, “A Gray-Eyed Man: Character, Appearance and Filibustering,” Journal of the Early Republic 20 (Winter 2000): 673–699;
Alejandro Bolaños Geyer, William Walker: El Predestinado de los Ojos Grises. Tomo III: Nicaragua, vol. 3 (Saint Charles, MO: Impresión Privada, 1993); May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld, 77.
See Bruce A. Harvey, American Geographics: U.S.-National Narratives and the Representation of the Non-European World, 1830–1865 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 153–154;
María DeGuzmán, Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 47–67.
See Jorge Eduardo Arellano, ed., Nicaragua en el Siglo XIX: Testimonios de Funcionarios, Diplomáticos y Viajeros, vol. 6 (Managua: Fundación UNO, 2005);
Bradford E. Burns, Patriarch and Folk: The Emergence of Nicaragua 1798–1858 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991);
Antonio Esgueva Gómez, ed., Taller de Historia. Nicaragua en los Documentos 1523–1857, vol. 10 (Managua: Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica, 2006);
Miguel Angel Herrera Cuarezma, Bongos, Bogas, Vapores y Marinos. Historia de los “Marineros” en el Río San Juan; 1849–1855 (Managua: Centro Nicaragüense de Escritores, 1999);
Frances Kinloch Tijerino, Nicaragua, Identidad y Cultura Política, 1821–1858 (Managua: Banco Central de Nicaragua, 1999).
Frances Kinloch Tijerino, “El Primer Encuentro con los Filibusteros: Antecedentes y Contexto,” in Revista de Historia, ed. IHNCA, vol. 20/21 (Managua: Editorial de la UCA, 2006), 24.
Tijerino, Nicaragua, 31, 211; Isabel Rodas, “Ladino: Una Identificación Política del Siglo XIX,” in Política, Cultura y Sociedad en Centroamérica, Siglos XVIII–XX, ed. Margarita Vannini and Frances Kinloch Tijerino (Managua: IHNCA, 1998), 53–63, 56.
El Nicaraguense of August 16, 1856, mentions a total of 32 Cubans in Walker’s forces; the most important ones were José Agüero Estrada, who became the editor of the Spanish part of El Nicaraguense, and Domingo de Goicouría Cabrera, famous for having participated in several filibuster attempts on Cuba in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Carlos Granados, “Geopolítica, Destino Manifiesto y Filibusterismo en Centroamérica,” in Filibusterismo y Destino Manifiesto en las Américas, ed. Victor Hugo Acuña Ortega (San José: Museo Histórico Cultural Juan Santamaría, 2010), 11–21, 12.
See Burns, Patriarch and Volk; Granados, “Geopolítica”; Michel Gobat, Confronting the Ameriean Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
Alejandro Bolaños Geyer, La Guerra Nacional de Centroamérica contra Los Eilibusteros en 1856–1857: Conversaciones eon el Doctor Alejandro Bolaños Geyer (Alajuela: Museo Histórico Cultural Juan Santamaría, 2000), 96 (my translation).
Miguel Angel Alvarez, “Los Filibusteros en Nicaragua 1855–1856-1857,” Revista Conservadora del Pensamiento Centroamericano 73 (1966): 1–44, 16 (my translation).
Tom Pendergast, Creating the Modern Man: American Magazines and Consumer Culture 1900–1950 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 1; Greenberg, Manifest Manhood, 171;
Kristin L. Hoganson, Lighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
Laurence Greene, The Filibuster: The Career of William Walker (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merril, 1937), 21.
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© 2015 Pablo Dominguez Andersen and Simon Wendt
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Beer, A. (2015). Martial Men in Virgin Lands? Nineteenth-Century Filibustering, Nation-Building, and Competing Notions of Masculinity in the United States and Nicaragua. In: Andersen, P.D., Wendt, S. (eds) Masculinities and the Nation in the Modern World. Global Masculinities. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137536105_7
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