"Still Longing for the Old Plantation": The Visual Parodies and Racial National Imaginary of US Overseas Expansionism, 1898-1903.

American Studies International, October 1999, Vol. XXXVII, No. 3

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All up and down de whole creation,Sadly I roam,Still longing for de old plantation,And for de old folks at home.

Stephen Foster, “Old Folks at Home” (orig. 1851)1

They say that Cuba is not contiguous; . . .that the Philip-pines are not contiguous. They are contiguous. Our navywill make them contiguous. . . . I would rather take part inorganizing our colonial system than to do anything elseon this earth. I would rather map out and advocate impe-rial policy than to have been the leading statesman of thelate war.

Letters from Albert J. Beveridge to George W. Perkins (May 3, 1898)and to Charles G. Dawes (May 10, 1898), respectively.2

By ignoring forms of disorder within the national imagi-nary—that is, perpetuating the fantasy of an untroubledand unitary order—practices of violence maintain their on-tological function. They operate to protect boundaries be-tween the “American people” and a dangerous world “out-side,” while the inside is pluralized as a unitary citizenbody.

Michael Shapiro, Violent Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War 3

“Still Longing for de OldPlantation”: The Visual Parodies and Racial National Imaginary ofUS Overseas Expansionism, 1898-1903Kelvin Santiago-Valles

Kelvin Santiago-Valles is associate professor in the Sociology Departmentat Binghamton University-SUNY. He recently authored a chapter in Raceand the Invention of Modern American Nationalism (1999) and has pub-lished in Social Text, American Historical Review, and Historia y Sociedad.He is working on a book examining how Europeans and Euro-North-Ameri-cans racialized themselves vis-à-vis Puerto Ricans and the racializationcodes among Puerto Ricans in the Caribbean and in the United States.


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It has become commonplace to mention the importance of the USmedia in promoting the 1898 war against Spain.4 What needs fur-ther discussion is the role of cartoons (fig.1)5 and other satirical il-lustrations enabled the white reading public of the US at the turn ofthe century to comprehend at a glance the new landscapes and body-scapes being apprehended by US troops. Visual parodies of this sortcontributed an integral part to an emergent “space of order . . . [whichwas constituting a racial] knowledge”6 making possible US over-seas colonialism and neocolonialism at this time. But what was thegenealogy of this “racial knowledge” in the United States vis-à-visthe War of 1898?

This paper mainly examines how US cartoons regarding the Warof 1898 and its aftermath (1899-1912) both produced and visuallyexpressed the broader racial cartography and exhibitionary spec-tacles of national whiteness (increasingly though unevenly recon-ciled across regional-sectional and class lines) and its concurrentmilitary masculinity within the late-nineteenth-century UnitedStates.7 Caveat: I am not concerned with the individual intentions ofthe illustrators and their employers but, rather, with the broaderhistorical context, structural logic, and interconnections of their vi-sual-textual practices.8 First, let us survey some related themes thatpopulated these turn-of-the-century US satirical illustrations.

Figure 1


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The Great TransformationIf the War between the States represented a War within the Race—

i.e., US whites—over establishing the primacy of a single nation-state inside the North American republic, for US European-Ameri-cans the 1865-1898 period shifted this same struggle “from the battle-field into the arena of political, economic, and cultural life.”9 Thelast half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth centurybrought about a veritable explosion throughout the entire Occident—including the United States—of exhibitionary domains, together withtheir corollary technologies of inspection and desire: art and sciencemuseums, dioramas and panoramas, national and international fairs,arcades and department stores, travelling productions and the alle-gorical tableaux, illustrated publications and mass advertisements,sideshows, and internal and external tourism.10

With reduced working hours due to European- and Euro-North-American industrialization and the social turmoil and changes itcaused,11 these display apparatuses and their visual spectacles helpedfashion sheltered instructional spaces where the skilled sectors ofthe working classes and the middle classes could come togetherunder the moral-pedagogical influences of the latter. In this man-ner, at the end of the century new media and their mass audiencespartook in a new version of national unity that created a new visionof white, imperial national identity.

Between the 1860s and the 1890s there was a meteoric rise inNorth American publishing and in particular of illustrated publica-tions (e.g., dailies, weeklies, monthlies, quarterlies, print-covers forsheet music, postcards, picture books, illustrated calendars, tradecards, leaflets, and posters). Cartoons are one aspect of this pictorialboom.12 In addition to the increase of leisure time for greater sectorsof this country’s population, this surge in the number of illustratedpublishing was due also to: 1) a growing demand—initially impelledby the Civil War—for comprehensive news coverage not only in writ-ten form but also in pictures (photographs, line sketches, and washdrawings); 2) the generalization of the public-school system and acorresponding rise in literacy levels; 3) technological advancementsin high-speed presses, cheaper yet quality paper, and half-tone plates(enabling the photographic reproduction of artwork); 4) the pricewars among magazine publishers; 5) the proliferation of pictorialmaterial for merchandising purposes; and 6) the creation of a profit-able market for illustrated books.13


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At the same time, US society was experiencing class wars, racialterror, massive demographic shifts, and social upheavals that mul-tiplied, in part, due to the economic crisis and the reorganization ofthe labor process during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.14

These events provoked much debate within culturally hegemoniccircles,15 as exemplified by the exchanges between Rev. Josiah Strongand steel baron Andrew Carnegie: the latter emphasized the defenseof propertied interests against all the laboring classes—regardlessof their racial composition—and disapproved of US adventurismabroad (“The Gospel of Wealth”), while the former and victoriousposition advocated overseas expansionism and the unity and su-premacy of all whites across class divisions (“The Social Gospel”).16

By the end of the nineteenth century, and under the ascendingaegis of US monopoly capital, the North American republic’s rapid,protectionist industrialization program was increasingly beingdriven by the need for new sources of low-wage labor, new mar-kets, and new sources of cheap raw materials.17 Problems such as,on the one hand, securing new markets and increasing US access tomore inexpensive raw materials and more abundant cheap laborand of, on the other hand, locating new “meeting points betweensavagery and civilization”18 and new “escape valves”19 for Ameri-can manhood would not be solved successfully unless the UnitedStates was recognized as a world power. From such a perspective,to echo Secretary of State (1898-1905) John Hay’s famous phrase,1898 was truly “a splendid little war.”20 This war benefited NorthAmerican social forces which wanted the United States to displaceGreat Britain and maintain Germany at bay in the Americas. Such amaneuver was closely related to those US interests who wanted tocontrol the inter-oceanic canal to be constructed in Central America.The military occupation of Cuba and Puerto Rico by US troops waspart of this much larger constellation of operations. But the array ofsocial forces behind the War of 1898 were equally, if not more, inter-ested in obtaining a safe route for the invasion of Asia by US mo-nopoly capital which, at the time, was suffering from considerableWestern European competition in the area now known as the Pa-cific Rim.21


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Intoning the “Song of the South”But what was the context of the Social Gospel’s other compo-

nent: cross-class white-solidarity and the vindication of the post-Civil War reunion of a once torn [white] brotherhood? During the1865-1898 period, this regime of truth heightened the national-cul-tural—and, at times, racial—distinctions between those allegedlymore authentic Europeans of Anglo-Saxon descent from Central-Northern Europeans who had initially settled North America (theIrish excluded), and the dubiously European settler-colonialists fromItaly and Eastern Europe who were rapidly outnumbering the origi-nal Protestant white colonizers.22

More importantly, this same episteme enabled a racial demar-cation between (a) the antebellum and post-Civil War kinship gen-erated among the supposedly civilized, self-controlled, enterpris-ing, and respectable white-men of all social classes (laborers, in par-ticular) and (b) the unmanly “lesser races” that troubled the UnitedStates from within and flanked it from without.23 Throughout thenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries there was a direct correla-tion between “whiteness” and “manhood”: a truly civilized maleadult within Western cultures, could not be a man if he was notwhite—and vice versa.24

From the last quarter of the nineteenth century to the first quar-ter of the twentieth century, re-establishing intra-racial [white-”American”] harmony not only involved consolidating the relativelyless structured system of apartheid in the North. It especially in-volved celebrating the explicit, highly organized, and rampant apart-heid culture of the US South and its imagined antebellum memo-ries, in particular its alleged inter-racial harmony. Above and belowthe Mason-Dixon line, the pre-Civil War South was refashioned asan idyllic bastion of hospitality and benevolent paternalism, distin-guished by racial peace (“happy darkies”), gendered tranquility(“family values” and defense of “womanhood”), and cross-classcooperation (slave-planter and planter-farmer “teamwork”).25 The“New South” was defined by this fervently assumed legacy, albeitunder the new pattern of Black peonage, racial terror, the convict-lease system, reconstituted cotton latifundia combined with localmanufactures, and socioeconomic subordination to Northern indus-trial centers.26


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The immense popularity—among white readers—of “dialect sto-ries” (Northern and Southern) fueled the canonization of these plan-tation utopias: e.g., Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus: His Songsand Sayings (1880), Thomas Nelson Page’s In Ole Virginia; or, MarseChan and Other Stories (1887) and Red Rock: A Chronicle of Recon-struction (1898), J. Harris Knowles’s From Summer Land to Sum-mer (1899), and Howard Weeden’s Bandanna Ballads (1899).27 Simi-lar visions received the imprimatur of Social-Darwinist science andculture in the national and international fairs (1876-1916). Allegori-cal tableaus (e.g., “The Great Republic,” 1876) and travelling pro-ductions (e.g., “Black America,” 1895) of the last quarter of the nine-teenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century alsoconstituted the cultural landscape that informed audiences in view-ing the period’s racial hierarchy in the US, particularly among thewhite middle class, who “saw them as pedagogical tools for theunrefined masses.”28

The late nineteenth century’s culturally prevalent emphasis onmilitary prowess and muscular manliness was one of the enablingmechanisms behind the Southern continuation of this fanciful ante-bellum nostalgia29 and its Northern exoneration and/or emulation.30

In this manner, (a) the rehabilitation of Confederate veterans andtheir Southern supporters—who went from being immoral and un-manly traitors to being heroic and virile defenders of a noble (if lost)cause—was coupled with the acceptance across white-America of(b) internal expansionism (e.g., the last Indian Wars), (c) the Jim Crowregime in the South (including Lynch Law), and (d) US gunboat di-plomacy during 1898-1933.31 This vision too had its literary equiva-lent, whose best exponent was Thomas Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots:A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, 1865-1900 (1902).32 Withinthis context, the War of 1898 played a crucial role in lessening “feel-ings of sectional recrimination”33 by “uniting the American peoplein a way they had not known in more than a generation,” promisingto “erase the last scars of the Civil War and Reconstruction.”34

For the first time since the War between the States, a US Presi-dent appointed prominent ex-Confederate officers to lead US troopsagainst Spain: major-general commissions were awarded to bothFitzhugh Lee of Virginia and Joseph Wheeler of Alabama, the latterbeing appointed to head the assault on Spanish forces in Santiagode Cuba.35 An ironic and well-known symbol of this reconciliationwas having Major General Wheeler serve in the same army withGeneral Nelson Miles thirty-three years after Wheeler (together with


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Jefferson Davis) had been imprisoned in the custody of this sameGeneral Miles after the Battle of Appomattox.36

This was the “America” that erupted into the international sceneat the turn of the century. It was an “America” which read the Car-ibbean and the Pacific as a screen where this cross-class bloc of whitesolidarity could project, among other things, the late-nineteenth-cen-tury imagery of a reconciled national whiteness and military mas-culinity through the resurrection of pre-Civil-War Southern miragesand their exoneration and/or emulation by the North.

“Oh! [Havana]/ Oh! don’t you cry for me. . .”Much like its verbal counterparts, mainstream US-white jour-

nals and illustrated books’ use of visual disparagement of the “lesserraces” was extremely popular and widely disseminated among boththose publications and/or readers who opposed overseas US ex-pansionism and those publications and audiences who were in fa-vor of it. Pictorial mockeries of Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Filipinos,Hawai’ians, Chamorros, et al., too, were especially populated bystock characters from the repertoire of romantic racism and its USantebellum nostalgia.

On the one hand there were “mammies,” as may be seen in this1898 cartoon (fig.2).37 All the banal markers are here: the volumi-nous asexual skirts, the plump figure, long-sleeved blouses, and thebandana around the head, all popularized in the early 1890s in UnitedStates by the trademark “Aunt Jemima.”38 However, in this 1898comic drawing, the “mammy’s” distinctively pathological friendli-ness, excessively forgiving demeanor, and protective attitude to-wards her [former, white] owners and their domestic peace is dis-torted, begetting an enraged harpy, eager to drive her Iberian mas-ter out of the house. Spanish colonial rule had to be horrible indeedif even the “mammy,” who “loves everyone and forgives past er-rors—even her own enslavement”39 no longer knew her-self or herplace!

On the other hand, there were also “samboes” (or “coons”): thisway of epitomizing Pacific-Islander- and Hispanic-Caribbean popu-lations (fig.3, p26)40 replicated the distinguishing features of thehappy-go-lucky, dim-witted buffoon, often displaying his charac-teristically exaggerated and senseless grin. The invariably grotesquelarge lips and deformed protruding eyeballs, framed by dark skin,were also important markers of racist paternalism and colonial(ist)legitimation—inside and outside the United States.


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Yet the US pedigree of “sambo” depictions was by no meanslimited to the bona fide cartoon genre. It also included the realm offine art paintings throughout the nineteenth century,41 as well ascommercial merchandising: e.g., the Cream of Wheat trademark of“Rastus” the chef (fig.4).42 But such was also the case of the “art”line drawings and half-tone “realistic” illustrations of the War of1898 appearing in the pages of Harper’s Weekly : whereas W.A.Rogers’ depiction of white [US] soldiers is quite literal, his renditionof African American soldiers reflect the sambo’s grotesque, tell-talegrin (fig.5)43; the same occurs with R.F. Zogbaum’s representations

Figure 2. Mammies


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of black Puerto Ricans in the port city of Ponce (fig. 6, p.28).44 It mustbe borne in mind that visual tropes such as “sambo” were not exclu-sive to the white North-American public but also circulated in Eu-rope and European-[Latin-]America during the late-nineteenth andearly-twentieth centuries, particularly in reference to populationsunder Western colonial(ist) rule: call it the (Occidentalist cartoonist’sand illustrator’s) White Atlantic.45

Figure 3. Above “samboes.”

Figure 4. Left. “Rastus.”


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Figure 5. Sambo soldiers.


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Figure 6. Zogbaum’s Puerto Ricans in Ponce


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Figure 7. Beastly pickaninnies


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The Political Anatomy of “Pickaninny” Bodies in the Caribbean andPacific Islands

One of the most prevalent—if not the standard—visual tropedeployed by turn-of-the-century US cartoonists to depict the “na-tives” of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Hawai’i, Ladrones(Guam), and the other new US tropical “dependencies” was theimage of the “pickaninny”.46 As in the case of “sambo,” the broaderpictorial and historical context of the “pickaninny” in the UnitedStates was not reduced to the cartoon form but included formal por-traits.47 Let us examine more closely the visions, desires, and theorder of knowledge these Caribbean and Pacific-Islander “darkies”enabled and some of the contradictions these images entailed.48 Forbrevity’s sake, I will itemize my final observations on the uses ofconjuring the “pickaninny” vis-à-vis the War of 1898, its aftermath,and its broader socio-political context.

1. These caricatures left no doubt about the “pickaninny’s”beastly physiology (fig. 7).49 Here was a much younger “sambo”:black-lined bug-eyes resembling a raccoon’s, the enormous lips of afish, a grotesquely riotous grin, and the dark, small build, and wildbehavior of monkeys and chimps—associating these animalistic bod-ies with untamed temperaments. This was the same gnoseologicaluniverse encompassing, for instance, a May 5, 1898 New York Tri-bune editorial that already had drawn the logical conclusions withrespect to the absurdity of allowing the beastly Filipinos to governthemselves: “Cannibals govern themselves. The half-ape creaturesof the Australian bush govern themselves. . . . so do the wildest tribesof Darkest Africa. But what kind of government is it?”50 GeneralSamuel B. Young (one of Major General Shafter’s divisional com-manders in Cuba) scored a similar point regarding the Cuban rebeltroops when he declared that “the insurgents are a lot of degener-ates, . . . They are no more capable of self-government than the sav-ages of Africa.”51

2. More precisely, “pickaninnies” had child-like features and adiminutive, pygmy stature (fig. 8),52 insinuating an arrested devel-opment (the psycho-biological disorder of backwardness) and theneed for these feral “natives” to be both broken-in and paternalisti-cally trained in the ways of [Western/white] civilization. Just likethe recently emancipated slaves in the US South, these Caribbeanand Pacific-Islander “pickaninnies” needed more than fatherly in-


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struction: they specifically required tutelage, i.e., the particular in-structional relationship that existed between a child-pupil and hisor her adult-paternal teacher.

Such a perspective informed, not only the socio-political appren-ticeship status of disenfranchised African-Americans in the US South.For Major George M. Barbour (US sanitary commissioner forSantiago de Cuba), this was precisely why Cuba had to be placed“Under our supervision and with firm and honest care for the fu-ture.”53 Congressman Sereno E. Payne was even more explicit dur-ing the 1900 congressional debate on the case of “Porto Rico’s” in-habitants: “Keep them all in leading strings until you have educatedthem up to the full stature of American manhood...”54 The racial child-hood55 of these Caribbean and Pacific-Islander populations had al-ready been identified by Senator George F. Hoar’s public remarkson the Senate floor (during the July 5, 1898 debate on the status ofHawai’i) when he argued that consulting the “natives” of those is-lands on whether they consented to being annexed “would be asreasonable [as] to take the vote of children in an orphan asylum oran idiot school.”56

3. “Pickaninnies” also had an eminently malleable, protean form(an ontological disorder?)—which presented possibilities and con-tradictory implications. On the one hand, these were bodies whichcould be molded and reshaped to produce a transformed, more or-derly “native”: in other words, the fatherly, pedagogical, and moralchanges of the US civilizing mission were not merely necessary but,in fact, possible (fig.9).57 The promise of this “native” plasticity werecorroborated in the glowing, 1899 press reports on the creation—under US supervision—of the new “insular police” forces in Cubaand Puerto Rico.58

On the other hand, “pickaninny” bodies were doubled simulacra:both (a) infant copies of adults and (b) “native” mimicries of au-thentically civilized people, i.e., US whites, (fig. 10).59 Like the apesand monkeys they resembled, “pickaninnies” could initially be mis-taken for actual human beings. This malleability indicated a labileand ambiguous persona, incapable of ever becoming a fully mod-ern individual and of ever acquiring bona fide political personhood([Occidental] citizenship). This is what, in part, springs from DeanC. Worcester’s appraisal of the Filipinos as not actually constituting“‘a people’ in the sense in which that word is understood in theUnited States,” insofar as Filipinos were “not comparable in anyway with the American people or the English people.”60


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Figure 8. Top. Figure 9. Bottom.


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4. However, more than simply malleable, “pickaninnies” wereindeed interchangeable. Not only was little “Cuba” similar to little“Porto Rico” or little “Hawaii,” but often they were exactly the same.Their characteristics blurred into each other, erasing any signs ofcultural-national uniqueness or geographic specificity—other thanthe completely haphazard label designating particular islands (seefig. 1). Despite their surface differences, in the final analysis all ofthese “pickaninny” populations were equally animal-like and wild,equally infantile, equally malleable, and therefore all devoid of in-dividuality. And, since these were not individuals, once againtutelage was necessary. Moreover, their very interchangeabilitymeant that no specialized or socio-culturally specific expertise wasrequired to instruct and administer them—as exemplified by theease with which the same US colonial and neo-colonial personnel(military, governmental, educational, sanitary, and/or missionary)moved from one island to the other between 1898 and 1933 acrossthese far-off tropics.61

But Caribbean- and Pacific-Islander- “pickaninnies” also blurredinto US “pickaninnies”: not only were North American“pickaninnies” also positioned alongside Cuba, Puerto Rico, andthe Philippines as part of “Uncle Sam’s Burden,”62 but Cuban andFilipino “pickaninnies” were represented as speaking what USwhites imagined “[Southern] Negro dialect” to be.63 Moreover, suchimagery was not limited to caricatures or even magazine illustra-tions: the trans-plantation of these tropes from the US South to Car-ibbean and Pacific-Islander contexts also involved interweavingphotographic and written texts in turn-of-the-century illustratedbooks.

For instance, in the middle of a chapter titled “First AmericanInvasion of Cuba,” one 1898 picture book included the followingphotograph titled “Coming Citizens of the Afro-American Race [inthe United States]” (fig.11), complete with that other racist motif:the eating of watermelons by “pickaninnies.”64 Another illustratedtravel book published in 1903—this time focusing on “Porto Rico”contained a photograph with a virtually identical composition (fig.12): a group of 9-10 black children, posing arranged in a line, withpart of peasant shack in the background—sans motherly figure andwatermelons; significantly, the photograph is titled “ThePickaninnies Dinner Party.”65


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Figure 10. top Figure 11. bottom


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As Grace Elizabeth Hale has written of the minstrel show, “white[US] photographers hung their representations of blackness not onthe bodies of minstrel performers but upon their own black sub-jects. Capturing images, then, meant less any transparent relationthe lens provided than the white photographer’s direction of theidentities nonwhite figures performed.”66 White US photographersindulged in much the same practices when photographically repre-senting Hispanic-Caribbean and Pacific-Islander populations in thismanner during the turn of the century.

Pictorial connections of this sort clearly insinuated that the moral-instructional methods (and socio-political restrictions) that neededto be exercised in the Caribbean and the Pacific Islands could andshould borrow from the experience of how “Negroes” were beingsocially “guided” and “uplifted” in the United States. For instance,

Figure 12.


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it was no accident that some of the same Social-Gospel white pro-fessionals and perspectives behind the “Lake Mohonk Conferenceson the Negro Question” (1890-1891)64 were also the ones behind the“Lake Mohonk Conferences of Friends of the Indian and Other De-pendent Peoples” (1901-1910) to address those “questions . . . affect-ing the peoples of the Philippines, Porto Rico, and Hawaii.”68

ConclusionsRegardless of whether its focus was the United States or the new

overseas colonies and neo-colonies, this pictorial imaginary of ro-mantic racism was very much a part of the spectacle-as-observationgeneralized on a mass scale during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, along with its exhibitionary domains and ma-chineries of desire (museums, fairs, arcades, department stores, ad-vertisements, side shows, tourism). For instance, both the “AuntJemima” logo adopted by the Davis Milling Company as well as theoriginal, commercially produced postal cards and trade cards in theUnited States (many of which were heavily populated by “happydarkies”) saw the light of day at the 1893 World Columbian Exposi-tion in Chicago.69 As of this time and throughout the early-twenti-eth century, picture postcards--and their recurrent use of racist hu-mor, cartoons in particular--became extremely popular commemo-ration items and souvenirs, as well as leading promotional vehiclesfor many businesses, especially for domestic products, but in no waylimited to that line of goods.70 “Pickaninnies,” “mammies,” and“samboes” had surfaced during the mid-nineteenth century in al-manac illustrations and particularly in sheet-music advertisementsassociated with the “darky melodies” of minstrel shows; such mar-keting strategies expanded considerably during the “coon song”craze of the 1880s and 1890s.71

I have described the discursive feedback between the allegoricalvernacular of military prowess, muscular manliness, antebellumnostalgia, the new white-supremacist reconciliation between theNorth and the South, and the role of the War of 1898 in reproducingand expanding all of the above. Since “pickaninnies,” “mammies,”and “samboes” were an integral component of this very same arrayof hegemonic textual practices at this time, it was perfectly logical,then, for such caricatures to emerge as the ideal referents enablingUS educated, white laborers and the propertied classes at the turnof the century to make sense visually of Caribbean- and Pacific-Is-lander populations.


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As in other representational forms (painting, memorabilia, litho-graphs, calendars, advertisements, etc.), visual mockeries ofHawai’ians, Cubans, Filipinos, Chamorros, and Puerto Ricans ren-dered these landscapes and body-scapes as “an already read text.”72

This cartoon genre duplicated the very same “familiar,” “local color,”and the “primitive” exotica, that the broad, cross-class, white read-ing public in the United States (with its higher levels of literacy andmore leisure time) expected to find south of the Mason-Dixon line.73

Within this parodic expression of a reconstituted US white-nationalimaginary, the Caribbean and the Pacific were merely extensions ofthe US South and its corresponding iconography of things alwaysalready known yet always already strange.

Such caricatures operated as serviceable road signs, helping “civi-lized” American readers find their bearings with respect to newspaces and bodies in the far-off tropics by bringing these samespaces/bodies closer—literally—to the “Old Folks at Home.”74 Thesevisual spoofs simultaneously confirmed and served to produce theidentifiable, received—and, now, transplanted--truth of an antebel-lum nostalgia extremely popular across white [North] America. Casein point: the overwhelming majority of the cartoons I surveyed inmy investigation did not come from Southern newspapers.

In this manner, these same cartoons established the particularly“American” properties of these Caribbean and Pacific-Islanderscenes and peoples—property: both as attributes and as belongings—functioning as direct counterparts to such turn-of-the-century gemsas books like Pictorial History of America’s New Possessions, OurIslands and Their People, 75 Our New Possessions, 76 EverythingAbout Our New Possessions, 77 United States Colonies and Depen-dencies, 78 among others. The humor which these caricatures em-bodied and the bodies caricatured in this manner linked the sellingof domestic products and illustrated publications (sheet-music,newspapers, weeklies, magazines, etc.) with the legitimization ofthe Manichean allegories and Occidentalist civilizing missions.79

Cartoons helped make this white-ruled, US-dominated geographyboth possible and intelligible.


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1. In Richard Jackson, ed., Stephen Foster Song Book (New York: Dover, 1974), 101-102.2. Quoted in Claude G. Bowers, Beveridge and the Progressive Era (Cambridge, MA:

Houghton Mifflin Company, 1932), 70, 71.3. Michael Shapiro, Violent Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 30.4. Marcus M. Wilkerson, Public Opinion and the Spanish-American War, A Study in War

Propaganda (New York, 1932); Charles H. Brown, The Correspondent’s War: Journalists in theSpanish-American War (New York: Scribner’s, 1967); Gerald F. Linderman, The Mirror of War:American Society and the Spanish-American War (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press,1974), 148-173; David F. Trask, The War with Spain in 1898 (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co.,1981), 24-3651-59; G.J.A. O’Toole, The Spanish War: An American Epic-1898 (New York:W.W.Norton, 1984), 19-34, 90-123; Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History ofAmerican Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 61-65; Robert Rutland, The Newsmongers:Journalism in the Life of the Nation, 1690-1972 (New York: The Dial Press, 1973), 266-269; FrankL. Mott, A History of American Magazines-Vol.4, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1957), 233-236.

5. The Philadelphia Inquirer (August 28, 1898): 1.6. I am borrowing part of the language that Foucault uses to define what he means by episteme.

See: Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York:Vintage Books, 1970), xxi-xxii.

7. I already have analyzed elsewhere--in the case of early-twentieth-century Puerto Rico--howspecific sectors (colonizer and colonized) reproduced and elaborated on the racial dimensions ofthese “rhetorics of imperialism”: Kelvin Santiago-Valles, “Subject People” and Colonial Dis-courses: Economic Transformation and Social Disorder in Puerto Rico, 1898-1947 (Albany: StateUniversity of New York Press, 1994); Kelvin Santiago-Valles, “The Mark of Colonial Difference in‘Porto Rico’ during the Early-20th Century: Writing ‘Race’ and Racialized Writing in the Shadow ofthe War of 1898,” paper presented at the 1998 Faculty Research Seminar “Legacies of 1898,”Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, University of Iowa, Iowa City, June 15-July 2, 1998;Kelvin Santiago-Valles, “The U.S. (White) National Imaginary, Colonialist Discourse, and ‘Race’ inthe War of 1898,” guest paper presented at the Seminar “1898-1998: After the American Century?”Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, September 15-18, 1998; Kelvin Santiago-Valles, “Leo Stanton Rowe and the (Racial) Science of Government in‘Porto Rico’: Solving the Double Mystery of Ruling Over ‘Natives’ and of Understanding Their‘Nature,’” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association, Seattle,Washington, November 19-22, 1998; Kelvin Santiago-Valles, “‘Higher Womanhood’ Among the‘Lower Races’: Julia McNair Henry and the ‘Burdens’ of 1898,” Radical History Review, 73(Winter, 1999): 47-73; Kelvin Santiago-Valles, “The Sexual Appeal of Racial Differences: U.S.Travel Writing and Anxious American-ness in Turn-of-the-Century Puerto Rico,” in Reynolds J.Scott-Childress, ed., Race and the Invention of Modern American Nationalism (Garland Press,1999), 127-148.

8. For examples of how colonized populations in the Philippines, Hawai’i, Cuba, Guam, and theother islands under U.S. imperial rule (besides Puerto Rico) responded to, and contested, differentaspects of the “White Man’s Burden,” see: Reynaldo Ileto, Payson and Revolution: PopularMovements in the Philippines, 1840-1910 (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979);Ronald Takaki, Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawai’iPress, 1985), 127-176; Penelope Bordallo, “A Campaign for Political Rights on Guam, MarianaIslands, 1899-1950,” M.A. thesis, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, 1982; Louis Pérez, Jr, CubaUnder the Platt Amendment, 1902-1934 (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1986); VicenteRafael, “White Love: Surveillance and Nationalist Resistance in the U.S. Colonization of thePhilippines,” in Donald Pease and Amy Kaplan, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism(Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 185-218; Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-CubanStruggle for Equality, 1886-1912 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 91-160; Elizabeth Buck, Paradise Remade: The Politics of Culture and History in Hawai’i (Philadel-phia: Temple University Press, 1993), 101-177; Francis X. Hezel, SJ, Strangers in Their Own Land:A Century of Colonial Rule in the Caroline and Marshall Islands (Honolulu: University of Hawai’iPress, 1995); Vince Diaz, “‘Paved With Good Intentions...’: Roads, Citizenship, and a Century of


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United States Colonial Rule in Guam,” paper for the “Legacies of 1898” Seminar, Obermann Centerfor Advanced Studies, University of Iowa, June 15-July 2, 1998.

9. Cecilia E. O’Leary, “‘Blood Brotherhood’: The Racialization of Patriotism, 1865-1918,” inJohn Bodnar, ed., Bonds of Affection: Americans Define Their Patriotism (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1996), 53.

10. In the case of the United States, see: Dana A. Brand, The Spectator and the City: Fantasiesof Urban Legibility in Nineteenth-Century England and America (Ann Arbor: University MicrofilmsInternational, 1986); Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York:Schocken Books, 1975); Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, andCustomers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988);Robert Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions,1876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen, Channels ofDesire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982);Simon J. Bronner, Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880-1920(New York: W.W. Norton, 1989); Frank L. Mott, A History of American Magazines-Vol.4 (Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957); Dorey Schmidt, ed., The American Magazine, 1890-1940 (Wilmington: Delaware Art Museum, Exhibition Catalog, fall, 1979).

11. Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century NewYork (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What WeWill: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press,1982).

12. Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (NewYork: Basic Books, 1978), 61-120; Robert Rutland, The Newsmongers: Journalism in the Life of theNation, 1690-1972 (New York: The Dial Press, 1973), 193-279; The Golden Age of AmericanIllustration, 1880-1914 (Wilmington: Delaware Art Museum, 1972); Schmidt, ed., The AmericanMagazine; Mott, A History of American Magazines.

13. James Best, American Popular Illustration: A Reference Guide (Westport, CT: GreenwoodPres, 1984), 4-6; Dorey Schmidt, “Magazines in American Culture,” in Schmidt, ed., The AmericanMagazine, 6-7; The Golden Age of American Illustration, 8-9; Mott, A History-vol.4, 1-14, 43-70.

14. David Montgomery, Worker’s Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technol-ogy, and Labor Struggles (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Nell Irvin Painter,Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987); CharlesBergquist, Labor and the Course of American Democracy: U.S. History in Latin AmericanPerspective (London: Verso, 1996), 45-63.

15. Of course, there were non-hegemonic sectors in the United States who framed thisdiscussion in an entirely different light. Such was the case of some prominent African Americanwomen writers like Ana Julia Cooper, Frances Harper, and Ida B. Wells Barnett who coupled theiropposition to overseas imperialism with their struggle against the disenfranchisement of the AfricanAmerican communities and against racial terror within U.S. borders, thus linking internal andexternal U.S. colonialism. See: Hazel Carby, “‘On the Threshold of Woman’s Era’: Lynching,Empire, and Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory,” in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., “Race,” Writing,and Difference (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986), 303-309; Herbert Shapiro, WhiteViolence, Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst, MA: The University ofMassachusetts Press, 1987), 84. See, also, William B. Gatewood, Jr., Black Americans and the WhiteMan’s Burden, 1898-1903 (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 180-221, 300-319.

16. For instance: Murat Halstead, Pictorial History of America’s New Possessions (New Haven,Connecticut: Butler & Alger, 1899), 515-530, 552-557, 582-605; Josiah Strong, Expansion UnderNew World Conditions (New York: n.p., 1900); Whitelaw Reid, “The Territory with which We AreThreatened,” The Century Magazine vol.LVI, no.5 (September, 1898): 788-794; Carl Schurz,“Thoughts on American Imperialism,” The Century Magazine vol.LVI, no.5 (September, 1898): 781-788; Talcott Williams, “The Ethical and Political Principles of ‘Expansion.’” Annals of the AmericanAcademy of Political and Social Science, XVI (July-December, 1900): 1-16; Edwin C. Pearce,Expansion Means Disaster (n.p.: New England Anti-Imperialist League, 1900). See, also: WalterLaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898 (Ithaca: CornellUniversity Press, 1963), 17-24, 72-79, 96-101; Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the WhiteRepublic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London; Verso, 1990),


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343-344, 369-370; Robert L. Beisner, Twelve Against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898-1900(New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, 1968); O’Toole, The Spanish War, 386-387.

17. Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1990), 257-259; LaFeber, The New Empire, 3-60, 150-196.

18. This was how Frederick Jackson Turner defined the frontier. See: Frederick Jackson Turner,The Early Writings of Frederick Jackson Turner (Madison, Wisconsin: 1938), 51-52, 185-186, 198-202, 228. See, also, Peter Sveaas Andersen, Westward Is the Course of Empires. A Study in theShaping of an American Idea: Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier (Oslo, Norway: 1956); RichardSlotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985); LaFeber, The New Empire, 63-71.

19. This phrase belongs to the 1890s Populist leader William H. Harvey who thus glowinglydescribed the overseas territories. Quoted in LaFeber, The New Empire, 65. See, also, Bergquist,Labor and the Course of American Democracy, 53.

20. From a letter Hay wrote to Theodore Roosevelt on July 26, 1898. William Roscoe Thayer,The Life and Letters of John Hay-Vol.2, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915), 337.

21. Elsewhere I have examined some of the details and consequences of this proces--particularlyin the Caribbean, particularly as they pertained to Puerto Rico: Santiago-Valles, “Subject People”,20-28, 61-67. See, also: Thomas McCormick, “Insular Imperialism and the Open Door: The ChinaMarket and the Spanish-American War,” Pacific Historical Review, 32 (May, 1963): 155; LaFeber,The New Empire, 197-417 Ramiro Guerra, La expansión territorial de los Estados Unidos (LaHabana: Instituto Cubano del Libro, 1973), 305-309, 337; Philip Foner, La guerra hispano/cubana/americana y el nacimiento del imperialismo norteamericano, 1895-1902, vol.1 (Madrid: AkalEditores, 1975), 376.

22. See: Thomas Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (Dallas: Southern MethodistUniversity Press, 1963), 287-309; Stephen Steinberg, The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class inAmerica (New York: Atheneum, 1981); Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in theUnited States (New York: Routledge, 1986), 64-65; Mathew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of AnotherColor: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1998).

23. George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-AmericanCharacter and Destiny, 1817-1914 (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1971),165-319; Shapiro, White Violence, Black Response, 64-92; Nell Painter, Standing at Armageddon,110-230; Takaki, Iron Cages, 148-279; Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, 247-377;David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the Working Class (London:Verso, 1991); Andrew Neather, “Labor Republicanism, Race, and Popular Patriotism in the Era ofEmpire, 1890-1914,” in Bodnar, ed., Bonds of Affection, 86-89, 96-101; Bergquist, Labor and theCourse of American Democracy, 70-72.

24. In the U.S. case, See: Bederman, Manliness and Civilization; Stuart Anderson, Race andRapprochement: Anglo-Saxonism and Aglo-American Relations, 1895-1904 (Rutheford, NJ:Farleigh Dickenson University, 1981); Neather, “Labor Republicanism,” 92-101; Frank Ninkovich,“Theodore Roosevelt: Civilization as Ideology,” Diplomatic History, vol.10 (Summer, 1986): 233-245.

25. Francis Pendleton Gaines, The Southern Plantation: A Study in the Development andAccuracy of a Tradition (New York: Columbia University Studies in English and ComparativeLiterature, 1925); C.Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge:University of Louisiana Press, 1951); Rollin G. Osterweis, The Myth of the Lost Cause, 1865-1900(Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1973); Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in SouthernMythmaking (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1970); William R. Taylor, Cavalier andYankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York: Braziller, 1961); Ann FirorScott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930 (Charlottesville: University Press ofVirginia, 1990); Shirley Abbott, “Southern Women and the Indispensable Myth,” AmericanHeritage, 34 (December, 1982): 82-91; Donnarae MacCann, White Supremacy in Children’sLiterature: Characterizations of African Americans, 1830-1900 (New York: Garland Publishing,Inc., 1998), 211-242; Kenneth W. Goings, Mammy and Uncle Mose: Black Collectibles andAmerican Stereotyping (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 8-11, 13; Grace Elizabeth


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Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York: Pantheon,1998).

26. Gaston, The New South Creed, 6-7; John Hope Franklin, “The Great Confrontation: TheSouth and the Problem of Change,” Journal of Southern History, 38 (February, 1972): 3-20; GavinWright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War (NewYork: Basic Books, 1986), 17-107; Takaki, Iron Cages, 195-205; Shapiro, White Violence, BlackResponse; Hale, Making Whiteness, 200-237.

27. Gaston, The New South Creed; Robert A. Lively, Fiction Fights the Civil War: AnUnfinished Chapter in the Literary History of the American People (Chapel Hill: University of NorthCarolina Press, 1957); Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 138-142; Hale, Making Whiteness, 44-79.

28. Silber, The Romance of Reunion, 127-138. See, also: Rydell, All the World’s A Fair;Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 25-41.

29. James R. McGovern, “David Graham Phillips and the Virility Impulse of the Progressives,”New England Quarterly, 39 (1966): 334-355; Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 1-31, 77-120,170-215; O’Leary, “‘Blood Brotherhood,’” 54, 57-60.

30. C.Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History (Baton Rouge: University of LouisianaPress, 1960), 109-140; Joyce Appleby, “Reconciliation and the Northern Novelist, 1865-1880),”Civil War History, vol.10 (June, 1964): 117-129; Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “ObjectivityQuestion” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988),74-78; Patrick Gerster and Nicholas Cords, “The Northern Origins of Southern Mythology,” Journalof Southern History, 43 (November, 1977): 567-582.

31. Silber, The Romance of Reunion, 66-196; Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 45-53,190-192, 218; Maurine Beasly, “The Muckrakers and Lynching: A Case Study in Racism,”Journalism, 9 (Autumn-Winter, 1982): 86-91; Gaines Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, theLost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865-1913 (New York: Oxford University Press,1987), 145-159.

32. See: Fredrickson, The Black Image, 280-281, 307-308; Silber, The Romance of Reunion,180-181, 185-186.

33. O’Leary, “‘Blood Brotherhood,’” 67.34. O’Toole, The Spanish War, 196.35. Trask, The War with Spain, 157, 219, 250; O’Leary, “‘Blood Brotherhood,’” 60, 72-73;

Cosmas, An Army for Empire, 93, 148-151, 179; O’Toole, The Spanish War, 196; Silber, TheRomance of Reunion, 183-185.

36. Frank Freidel, The Splendid Little War (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1958), 99-100.37. America’s War for Humanity (New York: N.D. Thompson Publishing Company, 1898), 167.38. See: Goings, Mammy and Uncle Mose, xxi, xxiii-xxiv, 28, 31-32, 64-66; Jan Nederveen

Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1992), 154-155, 178, 228; Patricia Turner, Ceramic Uncles and CelluloidMammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture (New York: Anchor Books, 1994), 45-50;Marilyn Kern-Foxworth, “Plantation Kitchen to American Icon: Aunt Jemima,” Public RelationsReview, 16:3 (fall, 1990): 55-65; Hale, Making Whiteness, 151-153.

39. Goings, Mammy and Uncle Mose, 32. See, also: Hale, Making Whiteness, 94-119; DianeRoberts, The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and Region (New York: Routledge,1994).

40. Literary Digest (February 4, 1899): 128, originally from The Detroit Journal.41. Such is the case of three oil-canvases from 1830, 1865, and 1910 reprinted in: Guy C.

McElroy, ed., Facing History: The Black Image in American Art, 1710-1940 (San Francisco andWashington, D.C.: Bedford Arts Publishers and The Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1990), 18, 64, 197.

42. Harper’s Weekly, (September, 30, 1899): 968. See, also: Goings, Mammy and Uncle Mose,34-37; Joseph Boskin, Sambo: The Rise and Demise of an American Jester (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1986), 139-140; Marilyn Kern-Foxworth, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and Rastus:Blacks in Advertising, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994).

43. Detail of illustration by W.A. Rogers titled “Life at Camp Wikoff,” Harper’s Weekly,(September 10, 1898): 892.


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44. Detail of illustration by R.F. Zogbaum titled “With our troops in Puerto Rico, on the SanJuan road, Ponce”, Harper’s Weekly, (October 1, 1898): 964-965.

45. Such is the case of the 1905 French shoe-polish advertisement under a telling brand name“Bamboula”: roughly corresponding to the period French term for a cheerful, party-going, but not-too-bright African. Similar French visions of “sambo”--this time, in the person of a beaming anddependable Senegalese rifleman--surface in a 1917 French poster for the Banania breakfast dish.(See, Pieterse, White on Black, 85, 160, 161.) But “sambo”-like figures additionally materialized insome late-nineteenth-century lithographs merchandising Cuban cigarettes, as well as in someBarcelona and Madrid journal cartoons commenting on the War of 1898. (See: Vera Kutzkinski,Sugar Secrets: Race and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism (Richmond: University Press of Virginia,1993), 59; Manuel Méndez Saavedra, 1898: la guerra hispanoamericana en caricaturas (San Juan:n.p., 1992), 171; cartoon in the Madrid weekly Don Quixote reprinted in The Detroit Journal(October 1, 1998): 2.)

46. The term “pickaninny” (or “piccaninny”) comes from the Spanish and the Portuguese wordsfor “very small child” (“pequeño niño” and “pequenino”), terms allegedly originating in thePortuguese colonies of West Africa and in the Spanish- and Dutch-speaking Caribbean to designatetiny black [enslaved] children. From there, the expression was adopted by British plantation culturesin the West Indies and North America during the mid-seventeenth century, subsequently spreading tothe Cape Colony and Australia. See: Laura Donaldson, Decolonizing Feminisms: Race, Gender, andEmpire Building (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 75; Goings, Mammy andUncle Mose, 37; The Compact Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1991), 763.

47. An entire genre of elite painting since the late-eighteenth century had included similarlydistorted images presented as fine art. The typically deformed physiognomy is evident, for example,in two paintings from 1813 and 1862 reprinted in: McElroy, Facing History, 14, 52.

48. There were other (non-black) child-like caricatures of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines,etc., as well as those with racially mixed but no less infantilized “natives”, but the “pickaninny”seemed to be the parodic motif of choice. (See: Méndez Saavedra, 1898, 128, 156; MinneapolisJournal, Cartoons of the Spanish-American War (Minneapolis: Journal Printing Company, January-1899), no page numbering; Literary Digest, (June 4, 1898): 662.)

49. The Philadelphia Inquirer (August 9, 1898): 1.50. Quoted in Leon Wolff, Little Brown Brother: How the United States Purchased and Pacified

the Philippines (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1991 [orig.1960]), 84.51. Quoted in Walter Millis, The Martial Spirit (Cambridge, MA: The Literary Guild of

America, 1931), 362.52. Literary Digest (September 3, 1898): 275, originally from The Chicago Record.53. Quoted in George Kennan, “The Cuban Character,” Outlook, vol.63 (December 23, 1899):

1022. See, also, Pérez, Cuba Between Empires, 272-273, 431.54. Congressional Record, 56th Congress, 1st Session, vol.33 (1900), 1946.55. The concept of racial childhood was quite common within nineteenth- and early-twentieth

century, hegemonic Occidental cultures in general and the United States in particular. See: V.G.Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind: Black Man, Yellow Man, and White Man in the Age of Empire(Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1969), 232-237; Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 77-120.

56. Quoted in Drinnon, Facing West, 311.57. The Detroit Journal (September 17, 1898): 1.58. See, for example: Franklin Matthews, “The Reconstruction of Cuba,” Harper’s Weekly

(March 18, 1899): 271-272; T.M. Alexander, “The Puerto-Rican Insular Police,” Harper’s Weekly(December 30, 1899): 1327.

59. The Cincinnati Post (November 24, 1898): 6.60. Worcester, The Philippines, Past and Present, 672-673.61. This was one of the tenets of Occidentalist colonial administration--whether British, French,

or North American. See, for example, Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979),37-38.

62. John J. Johnson, Latin America in Caricature (Austin: U of Texas P, 1980) 175.63. See, for example, Johnson, Latin America, 167, 169, 209.


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64. America’s War for Humanity, 440.65. Joseph Seabury, The World and its People. Book 12. Porto Rico: The Land of the Rich Port

(New York: Silver, Burdett, and Company, 1903), 52.66. Hale, Making Whiteness, 154.67. Ralph E. Luker, The Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial Reform, 1885-1912

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 24-28.68. “Preface,” Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Lake Mohonk Conference of

Friends of the Indian and Other Dependent Peoples-1904 (n.p.: Lake Mohonk Conference, 1905), 1.Although these Conferences began dealing with “dependent peoples” overseas in 1901, thecolloquium only changed its name in 1905. See, Proceedings of the 19th Annual Meeting of the LakeMohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian-1901 (n.p.: Lake Mohonk Conference, 1902).

69. Goings, Mammy and Uncle Mose, 28; Boskin, Sambo, 130-131.70. Boskin, Sambo, 131-139; George and Dorothy Miller, Picture Postcards in the United

States, 1893-1913 (New York: Carkson N. Potter, 1976); Frank Staff, The Picture Postcard and ItsOrigins (New York: F.A. Praeger, 1966).

71. Boskin, Sambo, 122-123, 128, 130; Pieterse, White over Black, 132-139; McElroy,“Introduction,” xvi-xix; Lott, Love and Theft, 111-173; William Schaefer and Johannes Riedel, TheArt of Ragtime (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1973), 161-175.

72. Here I am borrowing from Barbara Johnson’s definition of a “stereotype.” See, BarbaraJohnson, A World of Difference (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).

73. On such a role in the case of parodic characterizations of African-diaspora populations, see:McElroy, “Introduction,” xix; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The Face and Voice of Blackness,” inMcElroy, Facing History, xxix.

74. “Old Folks at Home” was the title of an 1851 Stephen Foster song which formed part of thenineteenth-century black-face minstrelsy repertoire. See, Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface,Minstrelsy, and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 16, 33,187, 190-191.

75. Our Island and Their People as Seen with Camera and Pencil, 2 vols. (St. Louis:N.D.Thompson Publishing Co., 1899).

76. Our New Possessions: Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Philippines (New York: American BookCompany, 1899).

77. Thomas J. Vivian and Ruel P. Smith, Everything About Our New Possessions (New York:R.F. Fenno & Co., 1899).

78. William D. Boyce, United States Colonies and Dependencies (Chicago: Rand McNally &Company, 1914).

79. Abdul JanMohamed, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of RacialDifference in Colonialist Discourse,” in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., “Race,” Writing, and Difference(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986), 78-106; Donaldson, Decolonizing Feminisms, 86.

"Still Longing for the Old Plantation": The Visual Parodies and Racial National Imaginary of US Overseas Expansionism, 1898-1903.

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