on The Race for America

Marlas Whitley (MW): Alright, so a rapid-fire, super random question, RJ. Name three of your favorite books post-2010. Go!

RJ Boutelle (RB): Oh gosh! That’s a brutal and very unfair question. Jeeze! The easiest one is Christina Sharpe’s In The Wake: On Blackness and Being. For many of us, that’s on the list. I’ll also shout out Gregg Hecimovich’s The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts: The True Story of the Bondwoman’s Narrative. It is a really astounding work of archival research. And Hala Alian’s The Arsonist City is probably one of the most beautiful novels I’ve ever read. 

Sam Lyons (SL): I have to put these on the list!

MW: Awesome! Thank you so much for indulging us in that question that I may or may not have posed for leisure reading suggestions. This was a good way to open up the conversation by letting us know more about your work, your scholarly life, and how you arrived at the project of The Race for America. How did you write, revise, and complete the work while navigating the job market and teaching at three different institutions? 

RB: There are a couple of starting points. One was in my very first graduate seminar at Vanderbilt on early African American print culture with Teresa Goddu, in which I started to get really excited about archival work and print culture as a methodology and a field of study. Just thinking about the concrete and material connections between texts, how they move, are produced, circulate, and find their way to readers. Also, there was a project in that class that became the center of gravity for the dissertation, and that was some of the work I did on Juan Francisco Manzano. I looked at how he’s conflated with the Cuban poet Plácido and became this martyr figure circulated throughout U.S. Abolitionist discourse. I ended up pulling that out for the book project. It was a really big moment for me, because I really had built the dissertation around that. 

Writing the book was liberating in some ways because I felt bound to that work for so long. It was so crucial to my academic development and my sense of self as a scholar. One of the challenging things about this profession–and I think we all feel this–is a very personal attachment to our ideas, which get wrapped up in our sense of self. That was a real challenge for me when it came time to revise the dissertation. I also realized that my committee had generously indulged me in writing this massive, sprawling, four-hundred-page dissertation! I want to clarify that my committee did not force me to do that or encourage it. They just let me do it. They were like, “This man is going to sit down and write four hundred pages, and we’re just going to let him do it!” I needed to write that much longer version of the project to refine some things. 

When publishing academic articles, there are concrete limits on page length. That is the case for books as well. Academic monographs are getting shorter and shorter, so the dissertation was where I felt like, “Look, I did all this research, and you’re going to read all the research I did!” But it was an ambitious project, not only in terms of its length but in terms of its scope. So, the dissertation explores many of the questions I’m taking up in the book, but I am trying to do it through a truly hemispheric lens. I had chapters in the dissertation on Liberia and Cuba, some of the places I talk about in the book. I also had a chapter on Trinidad and Venezuela and a much longer chapter on Nicaragua. 

Part of what I was trying to do was address this criticism that hemispheric American Studies often gets, which is that it ends up being very U.S.-centric. It was a critique I was really sensitive to. I lived in Argentina for a year. I came to graduate school wanting to do Latin American fiction, and I was trying, in good faith, to do a sprawling hemispheric project in the dissertation. One of the reasons that people don’t do that work is not because of inattention to the ethics of doing that work. I think it’s just very difficult to do that work and tell a good story in a single book. 

As I started thinking about how to revise my dissertation into a book, it became clear that I was interested in the kinds of questions about how Blackness and the racialization of people of African descent contributed to the construction of borders and nationalities—that kind of carving up of the Americas in the nineteenth century. I was interested in what Black people themselves had to say about imagining the hemisphere as a space. I increasingly don’t know how useful the hemisphere paradigm is. I think it certainly has its limitations, and it’s not a paradigm that I’m necessarily attached to as the best way of thinking about transnationalism in the Americas. However, hemispheric thinking is what I was encountering in the Black writers that I was writing about. Because of that framework and the terms they were using, hemispheric thinking became one of the organizing ideas for the project. 

Now, there are things from the dissertation that I have here that I like and am invested in. But I’m gonna have to leave them behind because they don’t fit into this paradigm governed by manifest destiny. And that was hard. Again,  it was also liberating in some ways because once I had this big idea to explore, the question wasn’t,  “how do I reshape what I have to fit into that?” But rather, “what kinds of texts, arguments, and areas of study do I need to explore that would really help accomplish that argument I’m trying to build around manifest destiny in particular?” 

SL: Yeah, I understand that, RJ. I’m writing my dissertation right now, and I feel like it’s less about whittling it down. Rather, I’m more in the process of building it up.

RB:  I think that’s really what a dissertation is. It’s something that you’re doing for the first time, right? None of us have written a dissertation before that point. We don’t know how to do it until we have to actually sit down and do it. Figuring out how to build something at that scale is an incredibly challenging project. It’s honestly a remarkable intellectual feat that any of us do it.

To get back to the part of your question, Marlas, which was also about the timeline and process of turning this into the book, not only in terms of the intellectual process of reconceptualizing it but also the material processes of, like, how do you do this when moving institutions? How do you do this while being on the job market? How do you do this while living your life?

These are all kinds of real material constraints, and I think I figured out the idea for the book relatively quickly. In doing new work for the book, there’s probably about a third of the dissertation in there. There was a lot of rewriting and re-envisioning.  I started with the parts where I had the easiest and clearest vision. I started with Daniel Peterson’s work, which became chapter one. His work is an example of manifest destiny as a paradigm that was appropriated both by colonizationists and by early Pan-Africanists in terms of thinking about the civilizing mission in Africa. It was the easiest place to show the collision of those discourses, so that was my starting point for revision. 

I was grateful to have a few interlocutors who could be readers as I was re-envisioning the work. I want to give a shoutout to Lara Cohen,  who was a very generous early reader of the book. With my readers’ help, things started to fall into place a little bit more.  But it was especially hard moving institutions. At every institution, I would be teaching undergraduate students, and even when you’re teaching the survey, it looks a bit different at every institution. I always try to add different kinds of local elements into the survey, trying to find ways to create overlap and synergy. My students are some of the best interlocutors I’ve had, because they press you about the details of the text. They force you to articulate and distill what is important or exciting about a particular text, moment, or idea. It’s important to find ways to teach the things you’re writing about and those adjacent to what you’re writing about. Because teaching is, for me, at least, one of the most clarifying modes of engaging with some of these ideas. It forces me to distill things in a way that when I’m wrapped up in my own academic prose, it’s a little bit easier to forget that I’m writing for a broader audience rather than for myself.

SL: You mentioned survey classes at the end there. One of the things I found fascinating is thinking about the survey as a place where you can choose which text you want to center in this very broad history of the nineteenth century. 

What  I found so intriguing about your book was that, with each chapter, you’re bringing in a host of different genres and print venues, which is coming back to you talking about the importance of print culture, right? My question centers around your primary sources and how you moved across them in the work. They’re never located in one particular genre or print venue, so what were the challenges of working across your primary sources and bringing these seemingly different forms together in this cohesive story?

RB: That’s a great question. One of the things I always come back to is my research. In many ways, it was dictated to me by the venues in which Black intellectuals were publishing and circulating their work. That involves things like convention proceedings, essays, pamphlets, and newspapers. I want to be careful because I don’t want to get myself in trouble and suggest that genre doesn’t exist, and I’m trying hard not to quote Beyoncé from the most recent record.  However, when you start to see how Black intellectuals operate in print culture, the barriers between these genres and the venues they publish in are often very thin. That’s not to say that publishing in a newspaper is indistinguishable from circulating a pamphlet, but with the culture of reprinting, so many of these things are appearing in different venues. At the end of the day,  it’s a book about ideas and thought experiments—playing around with different ways that the Americas could look and different possibilities for Black futures. But I still try to attend to the specifics of genre in so far as those material choices matter.  

MW: Thank you for that answer, RJ. Since we’re on the topic of genre, I have a question that I’m particularly excited to ask about your experience writing historiography or deploying aspects of it in your work as someone who does literature. As we know, your book was a finalist for the Pauli Murray Prize. Congratulations! The recognition indicates that the work is very strong in historical writing, and it made me curious about your experience writing in that genre. What were some challenges that you came across, if any? Do you regard your book as a historiographical project? Why or why not? 

RB: Due to the subject of my book, it was important for me to immerse myself in the historiography of these places that the U.S. colonized. I’m incredibly grateful to be a finalist for the Pauli Murray Prize. The African American Intellectual History Society is an important organization for me. It’s one that’s been formative for my intellectual development, but to have that recognition from an organization predominantly comprised of historians means a lot. This is work that, when you’re doing intellectual history, transcends genre in the narrow ways we think about them, right? 

I tried to see how historians engage with texts, negotiate archives, and cite other historians, and I tried to model that in my own work. Always provide receipts. I love a discursive footnote! I like to take my time with them and walk through some of the nuances, as well as qualify things and further explain them. Many situations I’m writing about have deep, complicated histories, so all of that context is relevant. 

To get back to you, Sam, on your question about genre, Black print culture, and what we think of as early Black literature is very often not literature in the traditional sense. It’s not always poetry and novels and short stories and plays. A lot of what we think of as early Black literature are things like David Walker’s Appeal, autobiographies, slave narratives, Black newspapers, and convention proceedings. Texts like these are increasingly viewed as essential to thinking about early Black literature, not just early Black intellectual history. I think a literary project, insofar as my methodologies are literary, makes this a book to which close reading is very important. Literary scholars pull out the dictionary a couple of times, and we just really dig into a couple of passages. That’s not how a historian would engage with the text and archives.  One of the book's important contributions, and one I am most proud of, is how it moves between literary methodologies and historiography.

SL: Thank you. That leads perfectly to my next question. One thing I noticed on your faculty page is a new project that you’re working on. It’s described as a “micro-history”  of the 1898 Wilmington Massacre and a specific copy of Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition. How are you shifting between the scope of analysis here? Considering not just historiography and literary analysis, but with The Race for America being a more international project, how are you shifting to a regional focus? 

RB: I appreciate the opportunity to talk about the new work! One of the things you picked up in your questions is the toggling between internationalism and often very local, provincial, and regional readings and understandings of particular texts and situations. Again, I think that’s important to the work because, in The Race for America, one of the things I’m interested in is that some of these chapters are on speculative projects, things that are being imagined, proposed rather than sort of explicitly undertaken. Locality and the place where some things are taking place matter. My reading of Blake even belies the full scope of the novel’s geographies, and that’s the framework through which it’s most often read, as this Black internationalist text, but also provincialism and locality is super important to the political project in that novel. 

With the next book, I didn’t realize how much some of these methods and questions are carrying over because it does seem like a rather sharp pivot to go from this very geographically expansive study of Black internationalism into a study that is about one city and one moment—the 1898 Wilmington Massacre in Wilmington, North Carolina. The new project is about both the actual people of Wilmington and the actual Wilmington massacre. But it’s also about Charles Chestnutt’s fictionalization of those events in his novel, The Marrow of Tradition. 

It’s a text that is thinking about, again, historiography and the very messy historiography of the Wilmington Massacre, which was very quickly co-opted by white supremacists and downplayed as a both-sided situation. There’s a historiographical battle over who owned that story and history and how to talk about it. Much of what I’m doing is genealogical work and researching the backgrounds of a particular copy of The Marrow of Tradition. It is at the New Hanover County Public Library and was owned by Alfred Moore Waddell, who was a white supremacist and a Trump-like demagogue who delivered all of these speeches ahead of the Wilmington Massacre, getting folks worked up about the so-called “negro domination” in the region. Then, when the coup takes place two days after the elections, Waddell is appointed as mayor when they force the municipal government to resign at gunpoint. 

So, this copy of Charles Chestnutt’s book was given to him as a gift by a Black man named John Taylor, the Deputy Customs Collector at the port of Wilmington. He was one of the few survivors to remain in Wilmington after the massacre. The question driving my project is, why and under what circumstances would a survivor of the Wilmington Massacre offer a copy of Chesnutt’s book to one of its key instigators? On the one hand, the novel is a very local story. It’s about Wilmington’s history and race relations in Wilmington before 1898, which are very complicated and interesting. Wilmington is symbolic of the promise of Reconstruction long after formal Reconstruction ended in 1877.  In that way, it’s also the story of the United States, similar to how I connect manifest destiny to the MAGA movement in The Race for America. You can very easily connect the massacre to January 6th and, again, an attempt to “take back control of the government” from people that you don’t think should be in control of it. 

MW: Thank you! One of my next questions is about your book’s  “Coda.” That is one of my favorite parts of your book. I haven’t seen something like that in many monographs. Can you speak more about the solutions you propose to contest what you argue is a new iteration of manifest destiny? You talk about an expanded curriculum of U.S. literature and history. I’m curious as to what that looks like for you.

RB: I’m still riding high fresh off of C19 and constantly encouraged by my colleagues and peers. When I hear about the teaching they’re doing, the courses they’re designing, the texts they’re bringing into the classroom, and the sorts of assignments they’re doing, I always feel so energized hearing about all the amazing work our colleagues and peers are doing. 

We’re doing the work precisely in how many of us are teaching early American literature, foregrounding the contributions of Black, Indigenous, Latinx writers, women writers, and queer writers. That is the work, and I think it’s something our students appreciate. However, I also think that’s why the humanities have become such a concerted target for reactionaries and conservatives. It’s because part of what we’re trying to do is to get people to think critically about received knowledge, mythologies, and patriotic orthodoxy that a lot of us get in our primary and secondary education. The nineteenth century is a rich period to interrogate those primary scripts and mythologies. We’ve been lying to ourselves for a long time, but folks on the margins of those mythologies have also been pointing that out for a long time. 

One of the cases that I make in the book is that going back to this Black intellectual counter-history of manifest destiny, all of these speculations, all of these ways of imagining the world otherwise, is a very rich archive for thinking about what connections between people and populations can look like, what strategies for organizing and building communities and solidarities can look like. What were the potential pitfalls where these projects went wrong? That’s all instructive as we try to think about responding to our own movement.  Part of what I argue in the Coda about  “Make America Great Again,” as a movement and slogan, is that its historical imprecision makes it powerful. It begs the question: when, exactly, was America great? What are the criteria for greatness? It deliberately doesn’t clarify when and what that is. But I argue that manifest destiny is one of the original scripts of American greatness. It’s this idea that we are a chosen nation where a chosen people, these descendants of the Anglo-Saxons, will usher in a new era of civilization. We’re going to perfect civilization. We’re going to evangelize and spread that version of civilization. It’s no accident that it is a white nationalist project and that we are seeing a resurgence and really a “mainstreamification” of white nationalism.  

I don’t know if that answers your question, Marlas, but I would also be the first to say that whatever solutions I propose or tantalize in the Coda, they are certainly insufficient and only the beginning. I certainly don’t claim to have all of the answers or any of the answers. Using that Coda to scream into the void about the present and some of the connections I saw was cathartic.