Nationalism, Colonialism, and Culture

In this course, we will address the ways in which 19th century writers of the Americas engaged in discussion of liberal democracy by evoking the world of the senses.  The underlying paradigm here is the “civilization versus barbarism” antinomy in which civilization is equated with the realm of reason and barbarism, with the realm of the senses. But in the novels, essays, and poetry of the mid-19th, these categories are often confused, and with it, the ways of imagining a pluralistic social space in which bodies come in contact with each other. If, then, the awakening of feeling through sensation triggers a speculation about the future of the nation, it also stirs contradiction about the limits of writerly desire such that the discourses on race, class, gender and eros are far from resolved. Here, the major texts for study are Melville’s Moby Dick and Sarmiento’s Facundo, but the representation of the sensorium will also be traced through melodramatic mode, essay, and poetry. The corpus will be defined by a selection of writers from the American Renaissance (in the USA) and Latin American romantics.  As a coda, we’ll look at a few texts by Hudson and Martí.