I suppose the best place to start, in terms of this class, with discussing Manifest Destiny is how Stephanson deals with the topic of race. In particular, he seems to perceive the dominant Anglo-Saxon idiom of the United States as an exclusionary force and one of the predominant forces that persisted in the expansion across the continent and eventually across the Pacific.
"Because 'the degraded Mexican-Spanish' were in no state to receive the 'virtues of the Anglo-Saxon race,' there could be no talk of any 'political union.'...The only feasible result of the war, therefore, was 'the annihilation' of Mexico 'as a nation.'" (p. 46)
Mind you, this was in 1847, so the blatantly racist overtones of this concept don't have the eerie post-Nazi feel these sentiments would have today. "This race is so far beneath us that they cannot be blessed with the wonders of our civilization--we must destroy them," is a terrifying thought, but it brought me back to thinking about Carl Schmitt. He said that war was never justified, that if it were just it would not be a war, and in thinking of that I noticed how this book shows just how politicized race could become in terms of expansion. In particular, this idea that America must annihilate Mexico as a nation, when Stephanson actually says that around this time the American South was highly resistant to the idea of considering any part of the United States itself as a nation. To the South, the freedom of the individual states took priority over any national concern, and so to see the American consciousness using this specific rhetoric is oddly disconcerting.
Stephanson also notes, that in this Anglo-Saxon American idiom, African Americans were often treated as aliens, in large part because they did not fit into this image of--let's face it, the WASP. Or, even more specifically, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (Puritan or Anglican) Male. He continuously reiterates the concept of a very black-or-white culture, that could not accommodate blending, and how as a result these subcultures, as well as the Creole French of Louisiana, were essentially subjugated because they could not fit into this conceit of white, American superiority.
I'm excited to think how we can apply this perspective to human-alien relations.
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I think this look at race is really interesting, especially in the context of the books we have read so far, such as Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, and The Martian Chronicles. Each of these stories presents at least one other species that seems so different from humans that they think that there's no way that they can relate to and understand each other. This is a parallel to race relations, particularly those during the expansion period described in Stephanson's book.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Sartre's Prodigy that this idea of Anglo-Saxon superiority will be very interesting to compare with the images of human superiority we see in many of the books we've read this semester. Certainly, the presentation of African Americans as alien to the Anglo-Saxon population is controversial and an interesting topic to examine on Thursday.