‘Our America’ and ‘the America that is not ours’: Buried strategies of internationalism and inclusion/exclusion in cultural and political struggles for democracy

In the antebellum period after Britain had abolished slavery, but while slavery was actively dividing the United States, a number of fugitive African American slaves traveled to Britain to secure their freedom and encourage sympathizers outside the borders of the United States to work toward helping free four million enslaved African Americans on US soil. This paper will focus on a particular strategic moment where the tensions between inclusion and exclusion were intentionally performed: the visit of William Wells Brown and William and Ellen Craft, along with white British abolitionist friends to the ‘American department’ of the Great Exhibition. Drawing upon primary and unpublished material, I will explore Brown and the Crafts’ choice to place themselves within the ‘American department’, which included US sculptor Hiram Powers’ romantic depiction of ‘the Greek Slave.’ I will use this occasion to examine the performance, representation, and reception of images of American slavery as visitors encountered them ‘under the world’s huge glass case.’

Theodore Dreiser's rhetorical question of 1895, "What need of perished Martís?" was part of a strategy to call for aid to the Cuban insurgency against Spanish rule, while eschewing imperialist designs. It initiates an ironic critique of “American idealism” that Dreiser would pursue for fifty years, notably with respect to Cuba, World War I, and World War II. This paper therefore considers Dreiser’s contribution to the historical negotiation between, in José Martí’s terms, “our America” and “the America that is not ours.” While for Dreiser and Martí these terms had quite different referents, I argue that Dreiser’s wide-ranging output of novels, travel writing, and social criticism pursues a similarly dual project of interrogating the mystifying rhetorics of USAmerican democracy, while rejuvenating democracy by reference to the potentially positive dynamics between different Americas, and between America, the non-American, and the un-American. Aspects of Dreiser’s critique of “American idealism” have been recognised in his novels Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy. By shifting the focus to Dreiser’s hitherto neglected political writings, including suppressed material that will be published for the first time in 2011, I uncover a more productive, internationalist perspective.

This presentation explores how the best-selling novel of 1958 by Leon Uris and Otto Preminger's award-winning 1960 film packaged and sold the 10-year-old state of Israel to American audiences. Exodus created a myth of Israeli origins that appealed to popular American conceptions of its own revolution against the British empire. This foundational myth presented a spectacle of Israel's "specialness" which mirrored American exceptionalism in the Cold War era and which remains influential today. Written in the immediate context of the 1956 Suez Crisis, Exodus was engaged in an implicit debate with competing histories of 1948. The Palestinian narrative of the Nakba haunts what would become the dominant story of Israel's birth.