Laying Claim

Scholars of American Studies have gone from overlooking the foundational importance of empire to U.S. culture to documenting the long shadow that empire casts in the literatures, histories, and cultures of the Americas. Studies such as Cultures of US Imperialism, Spain’s Long Shadow, Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture, and Close Encounters of Empire have been important to developing a more complex understanding of the shape and texture of United States power. However they have tended to focus on the impact of the US as an emerging empire rather than on the complex web of competing empire projects that were being explored and tested within what is now the United States during the Age of Empire. In so doing, they have told only part of the story of empire in the United States, leaving uncharted the full shape and scope of empire in the American hemisphere. Missing is attention to empire—like manifest destiny—as a political project to which many groups were laying claim, with varying degrees of success, in the second half of the 19th century. Laying Claim seeks to correct for this oversight in ways that point out the rich and layered nature of border as political project, challenging our tendency to think of the history of empire as a series of clear dichotomies between foreign and indigenous cultures, oppressors and oppressed.

Laying Claim suggests that the history of empire in North America is a story not only of nations dominating outlying geographic areas, but also of a diverse, wide-ranging and thus far overlooked series of imperial experiments that complicate and enrich our understanding of nation, expansion, and borderland cultures. As the title suggests, Laying Claim attends to the inward rather than outward flows of empire—the countercurrents that work against or temporarily interrupt the tide of national expansion and that muddy the waters of swelling national borders.  It asks us to listen to the echoes rather than major chords of empire, to look to the back stories rather than headlines in order to find the dissonances that successful empires work so hard to suppress. What emerges is a dynamic and unfinished story of territoriality, civic engagement and national representation.  Nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than along the US/Mexican border, where the idea of empire had rich and multi-directional play.  Laying Claim focuses on the geographical point of contact between two dominant nations (US and Mexico) because the myriad alternative imaginings of empire that erupt throughout this region suggest empire’s complex, palimpsestic nature.