Theodore Child, an Englishman who acted as the Parisian agent for Harper's New Monthly Magazine, wrote a series of travel articles for the magazine in the early 1890s. At the time, the United States was emerging from a period of isolation to consider various forms of hemispheric leadership: dominant trade partner, military competitor or occupant, missionary, etc.. Each of these forms was tested in Latin America, the Caribbean, or the Pacific region in the 1890s. Furthermore, the drive to annex Hawaii in the same decade highlighted the possibility of formal incorporation into the national body. The State Department, which had been treated as something of a joke (Stephenson), was suddenly very active.
An important group of Child's articles surveys South American countries with both local colorist and neocolonial intent. My paper first examines a representative article, "Impressions of Peru," published in January 1891. In this article, Child's subjectivity as a member of the capitalist vanguard (Pratt) is challenged by the pressures of the Peruvian population. Child cannot contain and order the alterity that he views. His vision of economic empire, then, is unsettled; he is unable to imagine the ordered maximization of Peru's potential that would support a confident neocolonial discourse. What Child finds instead is a number of threatening practices. The immoral cooks of my paper title are Chinese immigrants who feed the city of Lima and, Child notes, become a significant part of a general lower-class population explosion. Child uses the imagery of abjection (Kristeva, Spurr) to depict improper domesticities, the disruption of population control by "filthy" racial and economic groups. Analogies between human bodies and national bodies abound in Child's article.
A similar analogy shapes Child's subsequent article, "The Escurial" (March 1893). Here, Child interrogates the body of Imperial Spain. This is a failed and horrific body, the body of the mad king. The Escorial is the site of the tombs of the emperors. The imagery of abjection that disrupted Child's survey of Peru becomes Gothic in the article on Spain: we see the destruction that the labor of imperial bureaucracy has wreaked on the governing race. The emperors are haunted, possessed. Child concludes "The Escurial" with his desire to avoid the contagion spread by the palace of death.
Why read Child so closely? This kind of question centers our contemporary retrieval of minor travel writers. There are a number of ways of responding. The fears on behalf of one's race that shape Child's responses to South America and Spain are an important part of the social and political culture of the 1890s; critics working on the rhetoric of race will find him, as a representative of Harper's New Monthly Magazine, to be an influential figure. Others might be interested in how social fears played a part in national dialogues over the role of the United States in its hemisphere--why was there not more emphasis on annexation as a relationship with territories in South America and the Caribbean? Critics may be interested too by the use of Gothic cultural mechanisms in the creation of apparently non-Gothic genres.
We might also consider that the threats described by Child reappear in depictions of Spain and Hispanics by scholars from the United States. Through Child's articles we can see the confluence of discourses that bring the "Black Legend" of Spanish subjectivity together in America. Originally propaganda against both Spain's Catholicism and its imperialism, the Black Legend credited the Spanish with being "unusually cruel, avaricious, treacherous, fanatical, superstitious, cowardly, corrupt, decadent, indolent, and authoritarian" (Weber 336). This legend, reinforced and disseminated in Harper's New Monthly Magazine in the 1890s, is part of the United States' vision not only of Spain but of the Hispanic peoples of North and South America. By reading Child's work, readers may see South America as an impressive landscape. However, they also learn to see the people of South America as communicators of disease, miscegenation, social disorder. These troubling imageries contribute to the problem of writing cross-cultural and multicultural histories in North America.
Finally, these articles in Harper's New Monthly Magazine offer an interesting spin to the perceptions that we have of the Northeastern establishment. Richard Brodhead's Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America shows that the purpose of regional writing was to appropriate and commodify culturally "backward" margins. It set out a "socially foreign threat" (134) and then worked to contain it in a harmonizing picturesque aesthetic, making "other ways of life the object of . . . admiration and desire, objects which they then felt free to annex" (133). What Child's work offers is a chance to observe the failure of neocolonial rhetoric in regional writing. Only through the acknowledgement of such failures can we truly appreciate what Foucault writes about power: its condition of possibility "is the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable" (93).
Works Cited
The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and
employer.
© Regents of the University of Minnesota, 1997.