Hazardous Crossings: The Transatlantic Figure in American Print, 1784-1855

My dissertation, Hazardous Crossings: The Transatlantic Figure in American Print, 1784-1855, examines how transatlantic African and Jewish bodies in print provoked anxieties over the instability of the republic’s rhetorical, racial and territorial borders. By focusing on the figure of the Atlantic crossing within early American public discourse, this dissertation builds on recent and emerging oceanic studies critical paradigms. The first half of Hazardous Crossings analyzes representations of North African Muslims and Jews crossing the Atlantic to threaten the republic during the Barbary crises period (1784 – 1815). In this section I examine works by Washington Irving, Peter Markoe, Susanna Rowson, and Charles Brockden Brown, among others. I argue that Muslim and Jewish figures in these works disrupt republican public sphere conventions of translation, pseudonymity and abstraction. The second half of the project connects these disruptions to the texts and performances of Jewish and African diasporic identity. These include Mordecai Manuel Noah’s attempt in 1825 to establish a Jewish colony in Western New York as well as the efforts of free African Americans to resist the rhetoric of the American Colonization Society in the same period. By comparing contemporaneous Jewish and African American models of diasporic identity, I explore the various Atlantic networks that shaped the growth of African American print within publications such as Freedom’s Journal and the writings of Frederick Douglass and James McCune Smith. In doing so, I build an archive that emphasizes the influence of Africa and the Atlantic space on the nineteenth-century American public sphere.