Romance and Colonial Conflicts in Literature by Women I: US Imperialism
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Going Rogue: E.D.E.N. Southworth’s Beautiful Empire. April Davidauskis, University of Southern California
This paper argues that the characteristics of a rogue woman--a sentimental heroine whose beauty is enhanced by her passionate, mischievous, or adventurous behavior--were crucial to the articulation of nineteenth-century feminine identity in terms of the nation and its empire.
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"The Sins of Our Legislators": Colonial Subjects and the Romance of Corporate Capitalism in María Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don. Ryan Heryford, University of California, San Diego
This paper considers María Ruiz de Burton’s novel The Squatter and the Don as it extracts the contradictions in an American studies project aimed toward interpreting U.S. imperialism on the Californio coast. I focus on Ruiz de Burton’s use of romantic tropes as they moralize collective concerns about national culture.
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Imperial Rhetoric and Performing Whiteness in the Memoir of Queen Lili‘uokalani. Leslie Hammer, University of California, Santa Barbara
Considering Hawai‘i’s annexation in light of US economic objectives and empire building, this paper argues that Queen Lili‘uokalani performs whiteness in her autobiography as a strategy to persuade US American readers, for whom the book is written, that she is the legitimate “owner” of Hawai‘i.
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Colonial Geographies, Imperial Romances: Travels in Japan with Ellen Semple and Fannie Macaulay. Ellen Adams, College of William and Mary
This paper examines a set of texts on Japan produced by Ellen Semple and Fannie Macaulay. Semple’s was scientific and academic, while Macaulay’s was popular fiction, but both drew upon and contributed to Orientalism and reinforced their power as white women and representatives of U.S. culture.
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