ENGL 074B. U.S. Empire Literature

There is a longstanding debate on whether the United States is or is not an empire. Born out of anticolonial revolution, the U.S. has also from its inception been ritually celebrated as an empire-something that started to be customarily denied after the Philippine-American War. This course centers the stories of the colonized outside/within the U.S. to interrogate the U.S. (as an) empire. After examining pronouncements of U.S. “manifest destiny” and theorizations of the U.S. as (the opposite of) an empire, we will read literature from or about the three main phases of U.S. imperialism. First, we will look at the settling of the American West and the dispossession it entailed, the continuation of the genocide that was the precondition of the Thirteen Colonies. We will then chart the extension of U.S. Western Expansion abroad in and around 1898, in which the U.S. annexed Hawaii and Spain’s remaining colonies-Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines-while dominating the Western Hemisphere. Finally, we will explore U.S. world-building after World War II in which “liberation” once again, as the Vietnam War and 9/11 eras show, works as a mode of empire. In tracing this history through literature, we will consider the ways that the U.S. tells a story about itself as the antithesis of empire amid minor attempts to tell another story. Readings may include American Progress, The Revenant, “The Homeland, Aztlán,” Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Fools Crow, Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen, “Our America,” “To Roosevelt,” “The White Man’s Burden,” “To The Person Sitting in Darkness,” Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, Insurrecto, The Cosmic Race, The Sympathizer, and United States of Banana.
20th/21st c.
Humanities.
1 credit.
Eligible for GLBL-paired, PEAC, CPLT
Catalog chapter: English Literature
Department website: https://www.swarthmore.edu/english-literature

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