Download Ruins, Revolution, and Manifest Destiny: John Lloyd Stephens Creates the Maya
English | ISBN: 1433123312 | 2013 | 209 pages | PDF | 4 MB
As American literary and cultural scholars reconsider the foundations of
U.S. relations with other nations, Ruins, Revolution, and Manifest
Destiny: John Lloyd Stephens Creates the Maya locates in Stephenss
immensely popular nineteenth-century travel narratives (1841, 1843) the
sources of American perceptions of Central America and contributes
directly to current redefinitions of American nationalism, Manifest
Destiny, and hemispheric imperialism. The study challenges modern
readers to examine critically the cultural stereotypes that the
nineteenth century embraced and that often formed the basis for national
policy. By reading Stephens closely, by locating him within a larger
cultural dialogue about such crucial issues as national identity, race
relations, Manifest Destiny, and historical representation, we can
better understand past and present national attitudes toward peoples and
nations south of the U.S. territorial border. Anticipating many of the
issues that would give rise to the war with Mexico and then to the U.S.
Civil War, Stephens sees the racial landscape of Central America in
stark categories. Writing travel narratives about Central America and
reading narratives written by an American traveling in Central America
are acts of cultural imperialism that result in both writer and reader
implicitly possessing Central America, absorbing its Mayan history and
contemporary diversity into an American national mythology. Central
America becomes, through Stephenss acts of exploring and inscribing, an
imaginative extension of the United States and the Maya, the original
New World Americans. Ruins, Revolution, and Manifest Destiny encourages
twenty-first-century readers to untangle these often conflicting acts of
exploration, inscription, and imagination.
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