Intertexts

In Hispanicism and Early US Literature, literary critic John C. Havard interrogates contradictory US national discourses about Hispanophone peoples and locales. These often-negative discourses resound today in contested discussions about the border wall, Central American immigration, and contemporary political upheaval in Latin America. Defying conventional flashpoints for the emergence of Hispanophobic representations, such as the 1848 Mexican-American War or the 1898 Spanish-American War, Havard examines even earlier beginnings of US literary nationalism to the multiform literary discourse he terms "Hispanicism." Havard's use of the term builds and departs from the original coinage by Ed White who uses it "to refer to an antebellum literary interest in exotic Latin American locales that is analogous to Orientalism" (3). In Havard's theorization of the term, "Hispanicism" refers to a variable set of racial, political, and moral ideologies about Spain and Spanish America foundational to the US national imagination, particularly as Anglo-American writers defined the political, imperial, and social identity of the US in relation to the rest of the world. Havard's examination of Hispanicism's plasticity across time and space—with an emphasis on pre-1898 geopolitical connections to Spain, Mexico, and Cuba—establishes the book's contribution to the transnational turn in early American literary studies and its critical purchase for thinking through the discursive afterlives of Hispanicism in our political present.

The book's introduction carefully delineates Havard's main assertion "that US nationality is unthinkable without reference to literary Hispanicism" (14). It does so first by tracing various features of the key term, Hispanicism. Central to the argument, literary Hispanicism names a contingent and capacious discourse about the Hispanophone world that circulates in early American literature. Depending on the particular time period, author, and text, literary Hispanicism entailed a taste for the exotic; a fear of Spanish degeneration deriving from the long legacy of "the Black Legend of Spanish depravity"; and gothic narratives [End Page 146] of inquisitorial authoritarianism and bloodthirst. (To be clear, Havard distinguishes the literary and ideological concept of Hispanicism from Hispanism, which refers to a conservative field formation for the study of Hispanic culture.) Among these various registers of literary Hispanicism, Havard's book focuses most on the concept's development through an ideological antecedent—known as the "Black Legend"—in the Anglophone colonial world. Amid inter-imperial competition for dominance in the so-called New World, Anglophone peoples asserted the moral legitimacy of their own colonial ambitions through the Black Legend, which represented "colonial cruelty and avarice as special characteristics of Spanish colonialism" (4). The Black Legend of Spanish conquest effectively whitewashed Anglo-imperial intrusion in the Americas. Later US writers drew on this centuries-old discourse to construct the racial inferiority of deficient "Spanish" character. Through this emphasis on racialized difference, Havard argues, US national narratives barred Hispanophone peoples and polities from liberal narratives for political modernity, progress, and legitimate self-rule. The book asserts that Hispanicism's ideological work fundamentally delineates Anglo-American conceptions of liberal self-government.

Havard places the racializing function of Hispanicism in productive conversation with Edward Said's theory of "Orientalism" and Toni Morrison's analysis of a haunting "Africanist presence" against which canonical writers forged US national identity (10). Between the two, Hispanicism most closely approximates Said's Orientalism, wherein several discursive processes homogenize groups of people into an abstract "Other." Across both European Orientalism and US Hispanicism, the abstracted Other becomes necessary for the construction of favorable self-conceptions tied to national identity.

Although Hispanicism ultimately produces a racialized "Hispanic Other" foundational to the fashioning of US national identity, the process is not wholly reductive nor without risk for nationalist writers. Through close readings of novels by James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and Mary Peabody Mann, Havard provides an account of how Hispanicism's ideological effects can be recalcitrant precisely because such constructions...