Imagining Empire in Central America: Dime Novels and Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literary Landscapes

Gabriela Valenzuela“Imagining Empire in Central America: Dime Novels and Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literary Landscapes”True to form, Walker: the Fillibuster, a dime novel published in 1865, foregoes subtlety. In the first... [ view full abstract ]

Gabriela Valenzuela

“Imagining Empire in Central America: Dime Novels and Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literary Landscapes”

True to form, Walker: the Fillibuster, a dime novel published in 1865, foregoes subtlety. In the first three pages alone, “destiny” and “manifest destiny” appear six times to characterize the fictional reconstruction of William Walker’s journeys to Latin America. Written ten years after the nonfictional Walker first sailed from San Francisco to Nicaragua, the novel’s author (under the pseudonym of Aloutte) writes a sensational tale of a man fulfilling his calling. Walker triumphantly overthrows the Nicaraguan government, while enjoying praise from the United States public. 

Yet, despite the absence of any significant individual Latin American characters in the novel, collective resistance from Central American citizens ultimately thwarts Walker’s efforts. Although literary scholarship has examined the circulation of rhetoric of U.S. empire, in this paper, I am interested in Central America’s function as a literary landscape in popular nineteenth-century fiction. Although Central America appears to merely perform as a backdrop for Walker’s endeavors in Fillibuster, I analyze the importance of naming in this novel; and, I argue, the opposition the non-fictional Walker faced in Central America foils Alouette’s attempts to repackage a failed episode of U.S. empire into a tale of American exceptionalism. Instead, Central American resistance—both fictional and nonfictional—reveals the instability of this nineteenth-century ideology, and destabilizes notions of empire formation disseminated in dime novels and other forms of cheap fiction.