* List of Illustrations * Introduction *1. The American Mediterranean *2. The White Republic of the Tropics *3. The Promise of Exile *4. The Labor Problem *5. Latitudes and Longitudes * Epilogue * Notes * Acknowledgments * Index
In an ambitious and compelling book, Matthew Pratt Guterl asks us to rethink accounts of race, slavery, and national identity within a framework of the Americas. In revealing the hemispheric underpinnings of the South's master class of slaveholders, he sheds important new light on American history. This is also a wonderful book to read. Guterl is a remarkably elegant, at times virtuosic, writer. -- Caroline Levander, author of Cradle of Liberty A model of transnational history that reconceives the era of emancipation from a truly exciting hemispheric perspective. Guterl decisively demonstrates that the post-emancipation South cannot be properly understood unless it is viewed in connection with those parts of the Caribbean and Central and South America that also confronted labor problems in the aftermath of abolition. -- Steven Mintz, author of Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood With this elegantly written study, Guterl powerfully re-situates the U.S. South within the 'American Mediterranean,' and in the process he uncovers the story of a Southern, slave-holding master class that understood itself both as 'American' and as a part of the wider arena of slave-holding power in the New World. With its focus on the complex relation between labor and transnationalism, this is a timely and much needed book. -- Anna Brickhouse, University of Virginia This startlingly original, interdisciplinary study compels one to think afresh about the geographical status of the American South. Guterl marshals an impressive range of materials to demonstrate how Southern slaveholders participated in a pan-American class whose shared consciousness relocated them within a circum-Atlantic topography that included the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America. In uncovering this heretofore ignored cartography, he has revealed a deeper history of New World slavery and freedom. -- Donald Pease, Dartmouth College
Matthew Pratt Guterl is Professor of Africana Studies and American Studies at Brown University.
In an ambitious and compelling book, Matthew Pratt Guterl asks us
to rethink accounts of race, slavery, and national identity within
a framework of the Americas. In revealing the hemispheric
underpinnings of the South's master class of slaveholders, he sheds
important new light on American history. This is also a wonderful
book to read. Guterl is a remarkably elegant, at times virtuosic,
writer.
*Caroline Levander, author of Cradle of Liberty*
A model of transnational history that reconceives the era of
emancipation from a truly exciting hemispheric perspective. Guterl
decisively demonstrates that the post-emancipation South cannot be
properly understood unless it is viewed in connection with those
parts of the Caribbean and Central and South America that also
confronted labor problems in the aftermath of abolition.
*Steven Mintz, author of Huck's Raft: A History of American
Childhood*
With this elegantly written study, Guterl powerfully re-situates
the U.S. South within the 'American Mediterranean,' and in the
process he uncovers the story of a Southern, slave-holding master
class that understood itself both as 'American' and as a part of
the wider arena of slave-holding power in the New World. With its
focus on the complex relation between labor and transnationalism,
this is a timely and much needed book.
*Anna Brickhouse, University of Virginia*
This startlingly original, interdisciplinary study compels one to
think afresh about the geographical status of the American South.
Guterl marshals an impressive range of materials to demonstrate how
Southern slaveholders participated in a pan-American class whose
shared consciousness relocated them within a circum-Atlantic
topography that included the United States, the Caribbean, and
Latin America. In uncovering this heretofore ignored cartography,
he has revealed a deeper history of New World slavery and
freedom.
*Donald Pease, Dartmouth College*
Guterl's work expertly weaves together many of the themes of the
comparative struggles of 'masters without slaves,' and more
generally of postemancipation societies.
*Choice*
[This] probative and rich book paints a compelling portrait of a
region both shaped by and contributing to the dynamic and
transnational processes of nineteenth-century modernity...Guterl's
study reminds us how little we actually know about Civil War
diplomacy with non-European powers. His use of hemispheric studies
and discussion of the coolie trade imply, without expressly
stating, the need to broaden our Atlantic approach to also include
the Pacific Rim.
*Journal of Southern History*
This rich meditation considers the hemispheric reach of white ideas
about slavery and abolition in the nineteenth-century U.S.
South...Guterl's engaging book serves the analytically rewarding
function of turning a map upside down to contemplate new
orientations and connections.
*American Historical Review*
[A] compelling book...American Mediterranean is a model of
effectively deployed interdisciplinary method. In service to his
larger arguments, Guterl plumbs the complex depths of traditional
sources like newspapers, personal correspondence and travel
accounts, more surprising archival materials like the creolized
fashions worn by Louisiana plantation mistresses, and even the
racialized iconography stamped on southern currencies (his analysis
of these money aesthetics was one of the book's highlights for me).
Guterl is at his best when engaged in close textual readings. His
enlightening and elegant exegesis of Martin Delany's 1859 radical
antislavery novel, Blake, or the Huts of America, for example,
shows convincingly how Delany unveiled "the planter's sense of
slavery" as "cosmopolitan and global, and prospering...outside of
the authority of the nation-state." ...American Mediterranean is a
beautifully written, inventively argued study, the kind of
infectious book that makes one think, and raises a lot of
interesting questions...What Guterl has given us is a worthwhile
study of how one national group of slaveholding elites imagined
this wider transnational polity.
*Caribbean Studies*
Readers will find in American Mediterranean a compelling case for
transnational studies of the South.
*North Carolina Historical Review*
Guterl's work is the first piece of history to explore in-depth the
South and the Caribbean during the era surrounding the Civil
War...The author accomplishes his goal of tying the South to the
Caribbean culturally, economically, and socially. Historians of the
Old South, the Atlantic World, and the sectional crisis all will
benefit from this book.
*South Carolina Historical Magazine*
Everyone interested in the history of the Old South should read
this fascinating book.
*Louisiana History*
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