Imperial Educación

Thomas Genova

Description

In the long nineteenth century, Argentine and Cuban reformers invited white women from the United States to train teachers as replacements for their countries’ supposedly unfit mothers. Imperial Educación examines representations of mixed-race Afro-descended mothers in literary and educational texts from the Americas during an era in which governing elites were invested in reproducing European cultural values in their countries’ citizens.

Thomas Genova analyzes the racialized figure of the republican mother in nineteenth-century literary texts in North and South America and the Caribbean, highlighting the ways in which these works question the capacity of Afro-descended women to raise good republican citizens for the newly formed New World nation-states. Considering the work of canonical and noncanonical authors alike, Genova asks how the allegory of the national family—omnipresent in the nationalist discourses of the Americas—reconciles itself to the race hierarchies upon which New World slave and postslavery societies are built. This innovative study is the first book to consider the hemispheric relations between race, republican motherhood, and public education by triangulating the nation-building processes of Cuba and Argentina through U.S. empire.

New World Studies

Preface
Introduction
1. Republican Motherhood and Citizen Educación
2. Mothers, Moors, Mohicans, and Mulattas in Mansilla’s Miranda
3. Una Maestra Norteamericana in the "South"
4. Foundational Frustrations in Cirilo Villaverde, Mary Mann, and Martín Morúa Delgado
5. "La Dignidad de la Mujer Cubana": Racialized Gender Allegory and the Intervención Americana
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Latin American
• Caribbean

Informations

• Publié par: University of Virginia Press
• Date de parution: 08 juillet 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780813946252
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Imperial Educación
New World Studies
Marlene L. Daut, Editor
Imperial Educación
Race and Republican Motherhood in the Nineteenth-Century Americas
Thomas Genova
University of Virginia Press
Charlottesville and London
University of Virginia Press
© 2021 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia
All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper -->
First published 2021 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 -->
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Genova, Thomas, author.
Title: Imperial educación : race and republican motherhood in the nineteenth-century Americas / Thomas Genova.
Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2021 | Series: New World studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021001158 (print) | LCCN 2021001159 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813946238 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780813946245 (paperback) | ISBN 9780813946252 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Motherhood—America—History—19th century. | Racially mixed people—America—History—19th century. | Education—America—History—19th century.
Classification: LCC HQ759 .G463 2021 (print) | LCC HQ759 (ebook) | DDC 306.874/309709034—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021001158
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021001159
Cover art: Spaniard and Return Backwards, Hold Yourself Suspended in Mid Air (De español y torna atrás, tente en el aire), Juan Patricio X. Morlete Ruiz, circa 1760. Oil on canvas, 41 5/16 × 49 ⅝ . (Digital image © 2021 Museum Associates/Los Angeles County Museum of Art; licensed by Art Resource, NY)
Contents
Preface
Introduction
1. Republican Motherhood and Citizen Educación
2. Mothers, Moors, Mohicans, and Mulattas in Mansilla’s Miranda
3. Una Maestra Norteamericana in the “South”
4. Foundational Frustrations in Cirilo Villaverde, Mary Mann, and Martín Morúa Delgado
5. “La Dignidad de la Mujer Cubana”: Racialized Gender Allegory and the Intervención Americana
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
Thomas Jefferson’s October 28, 1813, letter to John Adams on “natural aristocracy” often is regarded as a foundational articulation of US republican values. 1 Though generations of schoolchildren have studied Jefferson’s juxtaposition of the “natural aristocracy among men” grounded in “virtue and talents” with the “artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth,” fewer have read the document in its entirety. Mundanely enough, these lofty democratic ideals first appear as part of a discussion on animal husbandry and the best means of breeding a superior stock. The letter begins with a comment on a passage from Theognis, the ancient Greek defender of hereditary aristocracy, which “seems to be a reproof to man, who, while in his domestic animals he is curious to improve the race by employing always the finest male, pays no attention to the improvement of his own race, but intermarries with the vicious, the ugly, or the old, for considerations of wealth and ambition.” Jefferson laments that, in Europe, “the commerce of love” has been “made subservient . . . to wealth and ambition by marriages without regard to the beauty, the healthiness, the understanding, or the virtue of the subject from which we are to breed.” Instead of marriages of convenience, Jefferson advocates “the selecting of the best male for a Haram of well chosen females . . . , which Theognis seems to recommend from the example of our sheep and asses.” This “would doubtless improve the human, as it does the brute animal, and produce a race of veritable aristoi. For experience proves that the moral and physical qualities of man, whether good or evil, are transmissible in a certain degree from father to son.” Seeking to forge a “race of veritable aristoi,” Jefferson paradoxically rejects the principle of lineage while retaining that of heredity.
Jefferson’s egalitarian devaluation of rank based on birth, then, responds (somewhat counterintuitively) to the author’s preoccupation with the breeding of a new elite, the best “race” to govern the republic. The word “race,” of course, was much more polysemic in Jefferson’s time than it is in our own. In the various western European languages in which the Virginian was fluent, it encompassed everything from the socially meaningful biological fiction of geographically determined differences in human heredity to nationality to feudal caste to family lines, to breeds of animals. 2 From the context, it seems that Jefferson is referring to the British titled aristocracy (which he sees as morally debased), yet the polysemous term inevitably invokes all its interrelated meanings, which were not entirely differentiated from one another in the early nineteenth century. Whatever the exact nuance that “race” held in the polyglot Jefferson’s mind, his comments on selection and intergenerational transfer of inherited traits in the breeding of republican rulers demonstrate that the third president conceived of the national body in limited hereditary terms, rerouting family bloodlines—the constitutive metaphor of the monarchical system that the United States had just overthrown—through the republican national project.
For a contemporary audience, it is difficult to read of the Virginian’s racialized concern for the “subject from which we are to breed” and not think wincingly of his now-notorious sexual relationship with Sally Hemings. An enslaved woman of mixed race, Hemmings would serve as nursemaid to Jefferson’s children by his deceased wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson (who was also her half sister), while giving birth to six of the statesman’s children. How did “race” affect the breeding of a republican citizenry in that situation? How did Jefferson feel about his enslaved Afro-descended mistress raising the race of natural aristocrats that he and his white wife had produced? Could his children by Hemings join the ranks of this republican aristocracy? 3
Though uncomfortable, the question is valid. Reformers throughout the nineteenth-century Americas voiced concerns regarding the negative influence that lower-class servants might exert over the moral development of bourgeois children, a discourse that New World thinkers racialized. 4 Jefferson, for his part, believed that the proper formation of children’s minds was necessary for the creation of his republican natural aristocracy. Later in the letter from which I have been quoting, he comments on a failed bill in the Virginia legislature that would have “laid the axe to the root of Psuedaristocracy”:
This [law] proposed to divide every county into wards . . . ; to establish in each ward a free school for reading, writing, and common arithmetic; to provide for the annual selection of the best subjects from these schools who might receive at the public expense a higher education at the district school; and from these district schools to select a certain number of the most promising subjects to be compleated at an University, where all the useful sciences should be taught. Worth and genius would thus have been sought out from every condition of life, and compleately prepared by education for defeating the competition of wealth and birth for public trusts. 5
For Jefferson, then, not only must republican citizens be produced by “selecting the best male for a Haram of well chosen females”; they must be carefully educated to assume the responsibilities conferred upon them by the new political form.
Imperial Educación explores the place of mixed-race mothers such as Sally Hemings—painfully present through her egregious absence in Jefferson’s foundational text—in the national projects of the nineteenth-century Americas. What does it mean that republican citizenship as articulated in Jefferson’s notion of natural aristocracy—a foundational formulation with which thinkers across the Americas would have to dialogue as the United States rose to imperial prominence—is predicated on the exclusion of Afro-descended mothers? Why does Jefferson discuss racially selective breeding and public education in the same letter, as though the subjects were related? How does the Jefferson-Wayles-Hemings family drama reflect deeper tensions over race, gender, child-rearing, and citizenship in national families throughout the early New World republics?
I have accrued so many debts in the process of writing this book that I neither know where to begin nor where to end. I am also terrified at the inevitable prospect of leaving someone out, for which I apologize beforehand. What follows is an inadequate list of people and institutions to whom I offer inadequate thanks.
I will begin with material conditions of possibility. I would like to thank the Graduate Division at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for funding my early explorations into inter-American studies. The University of Minnesota system enjoys a privileged research infrastructure at a time when such resources are, unfortunately, becoming a privilege. My trinational project has been funded by several grants from the University of Minnesota Imagine Fund and Grant-in-Aid of Research, Artistry, and Scholarship program, as well as the Faculty Research