Conclusion

Transamerican Sentimentalism concludes by returning to the 1880s and exploring how the mode translates not only across the US–Mexico border but also through language. The coda juxtaposes an 1878 suffragist document that maligns “the Mexicans, Half-Breeds and ignorant, vicious men [who] voted solid against women’s suffrage in Colorado” with Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 novel Ramona and José Martí’s 1888 translation thereof. Given their associations with nineteenth-century reform movements, it is perhaps unsurprising that these distinct yet varied documents use sentimentalism to generate connective possibilities. Yet the coda notes how they each also use the mode as a tool of dispossession. Within this contradiction lie the contingent, disjunctive, and anachronistic accumulations that define transamerican sentimentalism—and that open powerful alternative possibilities for hemispheric connection.

Sentimental Diplomacy

Chapter 3 explores instances of “sentimental diplomacy” in the literary aftermath of the US–Mexican War and Indian Removal. It opens by arguing that the heroines of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1885)—who seek to counter the violence and dispossession of late-nineteenth-century Californios—stand as unrecognized heirs to the women in John Rollin Ridge’s 1854 novel of Mexican banditry, Joaquín Murieta. Amidst the sensational violence of Joaquín Murieta, the first Native American novel, Mexican and Anglo-American women engage in a sentimental diplomacy that resists rampant racialized violence. In both The Squatter and the Don and Joaquín Murieta, sentimental diplomacy offers local possibilities for peace, but in neither novel can it overcome the war’s brutal legacy or the racism and systemic corruption that followed.

Introduction

It is nearly impossible to talk about US sentimentalism without talking about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s influential 1852 best-selling novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The Introduction thus discusses US reactions to an 1887 Mexican theatrical performance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to illustrate how Transamerican Sentimentalism dislocates familiar scholarly narratives about US literary sentimentalism as a New England or abolitionist mode. The Introduction links transamerican and sentimental scholarship through questions of incommensurability before elaborating on how US sentimentalism connects to a broader Americas tradition. It then delineates the parameters of a transamerican sentimentalism by articulating the implications of reorienting such an important national and transatlantic mode. Finally, the Introduction offers an overview of how persistent recurrences of transamerican sentimentalism enabled African American, Native American, and Latinx writers to navigate the violent, multivalent realm of the nineteenth-century Americas.

Moor, Mulata, Mulatta

The second chapter centers a figure familiar within US sentimental literature, the tragic mulatta, placing her among hemispheric counterparts: the enslaved Moor and the Cuban mulata. Mary Peabody Mann’s only novel, Juanita (1887), offers an Uncle Tom’s Cabin-style antislavery narrative set in Cuba, importing a US racial hierarchy to the island. Mann’s novel overwrites figures such as the Cuban mulata and the mulato antislavery leader, replacing them with Eva-like children and a tragic US mulatta. Yet Cuban author Cirilo Villaverde’s novel Cecilia Valdés (1882) demonstrates how Juanita’s racial hierarchy diverges from that developing in late-nineteenth-century Cuba, which offered a different model of racial relationships. Erasing the multiracial nature of Cuba’s antislavery and anticolonial movements, Juanita prefigures US influence in Cuba following the Spanish–American War.

Coquetry and the Transamerican Foundations of US Literary Sentimentalism

Chapter 1 recontextualizes early US sentimental literature through the coquette, a figure who connects Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797), Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798), and Leonora Sansay’s novel of the Haitian Revolution, Secret History (1808). The chapter argues that the historical connections between Sansay’s and Foster’s heroines demonstrate how novels such as The Coquette obscure the transamerican connections underlying their “found[ing] on fact.” Secret History instead uses its Saint-Dominguan setting to rewrite paradigmatic US understandings of the coquette, rescuing the figure from both gothic horrors and the condemnations suffered by Brown’s and Foster’s heroines. Pairing Foster’s, Brown’s, and Sansay’s novels illustrates how early US sentimentalism was shaped by the Americas’—not just early America’s—literary, economic, political, and military flows.

The Jacobs Siblings’ Black Hemispheric Geographies

The fourth chapter highlights the hemispheric imaginaries and sentimental skepticism of Harriet A. Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1862) and John S. Jacobs’s speeches and writings. The siblings challenge the North–South mapping of US slavery, instead embedding it in an East–West, antiracist, anti-imperial mapping that makes explicit the transamerican pressures shaping the dispossession of African Americans, Native Americans, and Mexicans. Their writings move not only along familiar abolitionist routes from South to North and the United States to Britain but also from North Carolina and New York to Florida, Haiti, Jamaica, California, and Mexico. As the foreclosure of Harriet’s journey to California at the end of Incidents suggests, however, transamerican sentimentalism here struggles to sustain even localized moments of connection. The Jacobs siblings’ writings highlight the challenges that complicate potential multiethnic, transnational alliances.

Revolutionizing Sentiment

In Chapter 5, sentimentalism becomes event-oriented as possibilities for revolt resonate throughout the Caribbean and the United States. Questions of violence, hemispheric politics, and community collide in narratives of slave resistance, including Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave (1853), Victor Séjour’s “The Mulatto” (1837), Cuban author Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab (1841), and Martin R. Delany’s Blake (1859–62). Each text engages the racial, gendered, and economic exploitations of slavery while contemplating sentiment’s role in organized acts of slave violence; together these fictions highlight transamerican structures of enslavement and racialization that complicate US racial discourses. The chapter culminates in a discussion of Blake’s construction of a militarized affective abolitionism, which builds on prior nineteenth-century fictions’ challenges to slavery and racism. As the novel insists upon a sentimentalism that works at the level of “the people,” it makes sentiment revolution-ready.