This book recovers a major nineteenth-century literary figure, the American Claimant. The claimant was used to imagine cultural contact and exchange across the anglophone Atlantic, especially between Britain and the United States. Later, claimants were exported to South Africa, in fictions representing black students who acquired American degrees. The book argues that the claimant was a major and pervasive motif, with literary, rhetorical, and political uses. It was invoked to imagine cultural difference, in relation to identity, inheritance, relationship, or time. It could dramatize tensions between tradition and change, or questions of exclusion and power: it was wielded against slavery and segregation, or privileges of gender and class. American Claimants explores the figure’s implications for writers and editors, and also for missionaries, artists, and students, in works created and set in Britain, in the United States, in South Africa, and in Rome. The book touches on theatre history and periodical studies, literary marketing and reprinting, and activism, education, sculpture, fashion, and dress reform. Texts discussed range from Our American Cousin to Bleak House, Little Lord Fauntleroy to Frederick Douglass’ Paper; writers include Frances Trollope, Julia Griffiths, Alexander Crummell, John Dube, James McCune Smith, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mark Twain.
South Africa in the Global Imaginary: An Introduction