Colored American Nationalism in the Age of Colonization

My paper examines discussions of “American” identity in The Colored American (TCA), a weekly newspaper printed from 1837-41 in New York and Philadelphia and edited by Samuel Cornish, in light of the wave of... [ view full abstract ]

My paper examines discussions of “American” identity in The Colored American (TCA), a weekly newspaper printed from 1837-41 in New York and Philadelphia and edited by Samuel Cornish, in light of the wave of pro-colonizationist print in U.S. periodicals that advocated black emigration from the U.S. to Liberia. I show how TCA’s editor and its contributors claimed their “American” status, and a place in the U.S., by dissociating “American” identity from U.S. citizenship and a government that did not guarantee rights to Colored Americans. Instead, both Cornish and the newspaper’s contributors promoted a climate-based conception of “American” identity that hearkened back to turn-of-the-century natural history discourse. Importantly, this natural-historical identity allowed TCA writers to theorize a multiracial “American” nationality by arguing that nationality was a trait acquired from the environment by people inhabiting a common geography, rather than a category fixed by birth or a racial ontology. Cornish recognized the power in controlling the rhetoric of “American” identity in the age of colonization. His editorials engaged with prominent textual representations of black people in the U.S. from Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1783) to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835). Cornish’s counter-readings of these white-authored texts exemplify how TCA used climate and natural history not simply to claim “American” identity, but to reimagine it on new epistemic grounds. My paper shows how, in an oppressive political climate, the American climate itself became a means of distinguishing the nation from the state, and of revising the history of “American” identity.