American Mediterraneans

A Study in Geography, History, and Race

Häftad, Engelska, 2022

Av Susan Gillman, Professor Susan Gillman

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The story of the “American Mediterranean,” both an idea and a shorthand popularized by geographers, historians, novelists, and travel writers from the early nineteenth century to the 1970s. The naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, visiting the Gulf-Caribbean in the early nineteenth century, called it America’s Mediterranean. Almost a century later, Southern California was hailed as “Our Mediterranean, Our Italy!” Although “American Mediterranean” is not a household phrase in the United States today, it once circulated widely in French, Spanish, and English as a term of art and folk idiom. In this book, Susan Gillman asks what cultural work is done by this kind of unsystematic, open-ended comparative thinking.American Mediterraneans tracks two centuries of this geohistorical concept, from Humboldt in the early 1800s, to writers of the 1890s reflecting on the Pacific world of the California coast, to writers of the 1930s and 40s speculating on the political past and future of the Caribbean. Following the term through its travels across disciplines and borders, American Mediterraneans reveals a little-known racialized history, one that paradoxically appealed to a range of race-neutral ideas and ideals.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2022-05-20
Mått152 x 229 x 18 mm
Vikt286 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor208
FörlagThe University of Chicago Press
ISBN9780226819662

Tillhör följande kategorier

Pedagogik inom Psykologi och pedagogik

List of FiguresPreface: The Strange Career of the American MediterraneansIntroduction: Beginning with Humboldt1 American Mediterraneans: A Space-Timeline2 Nineteenth-Century Geographers and Their Mediterraneans3 1890s California-Pacific Mediterraneans4 1940s Gulf-Caribbean MediterraneansEpilogue: Ending with BraudelAcknowledgmentsList of AbbreviationsNotesIndexA gallery of figures follows page 000

"In this stunningly original book, Susan Gillman takes the reader on a journey through multiply imagined American Mediterraneans and their contrasting encodings of race, climate and geographical destiny. Opening and ending with vigorous interrogations of the legacies of Humboldt and Braudel, she focuses on the two New World regions where the Mediterranean allusion has had the most fraught political history. In Southern California, Anglo-American entrepreneurs, otherwise ignorant of the authentic Mediterranean character of the environment, invented a romantic Spanish culture to sell real-estate while expunging indigenous and Mexican histories. In the circum-Caribbean, meanwhile, Mediterraneity with a more Roman and imperial inflection helped justify the expansionist project of slaveowners. In each case, Gillman warns us that geohistorical metaphors have often served as quasi-scientific projections of a Western right to conquest."