This new addition to the publisher's long-running New World Studies series offers insightful readings of mostly US antebellum sources that envisioned a future for the anglophone republic. Its archive comprises fiction, journalism, medical writings, speeches, political pamphlets, and biblical rhetoric. Many scholars have explored how nineteenth-century discourses, and the American Renaissance more generally, helped to bolster Manifest Destiny. O'Brien, however, identifies “an alternative genre of romance, one that blurs all sorts of boundaries as it imbricates race and sex with expansion and rebellion” (4). This resistance was led by female authors who focussed their attention on race and abolition. Cross-racial love affairs are a key to their activism, as is the Haitian Revolution of 1791, which makes rebellion an albatross for US nation-building.
Chapter 1 examines the hysteria surrounding the presumed hypersexual black bodies of the Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture and his followers. For supporters of patriarchy and racial purity, the ghosts of Haiti returned in the guise of Nat Turner and other slave rebels at mid-century. This resulted in an imagined collusion between slave-rapists and their white concubines (read: liberated women). Fear of an amalgamated, and less male-centered, nation is what the visionary writers in O'Brien's study seek to combat. The second chapter, for instance, takes up romantic unions in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. O'Brien argues that Jacobs's autobiography “challenges the racialized and gendered assumptions of U.S. citizenship; it disrupts and reshapes the contours and boundaries of an Anglo-masculine political hierarchy that many of her contemporaries accepted as an organic manifestation of the natural order of things” (32). Jacobs is more subject than object in the chapter. O'Brien reads her childbearing cross-racial union with Samuel Tredwell Sawyer – which has caused problems for some scholars – as a push for race and gender equality in keeping with her political activism.
In chapter 3, O'Brien elucidates Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda's Sab by stressing its disruption of both Cuban Creole and Anglo-American projections of empire. In this case, the interracial romance between the slave Sab and Carlota (a woman who functions as an allegory for Cuba) snuffs the revolutionary fervor of the former in line with his imagined kinship with the island's deceased natives. The novel is thus semi-transgressive: “In Sab material conditions outweigh the rebellious and transcendentalist impulses of the heroic characters, but their grasp for freedom still manages a poetic challenge to those material constraints” (72). While this chapter has the potential to inspire scholars in American studies to expand their purview beyond US literature, it is disappointing that O'Brien never works with the original Spanish in order to stress the ways in which slavery and miscegenation are read within a Cuban literary context.
The next two chapters deal with unfinished and/or only partially extant novels. The recovery work alone makes these the most useful in the book. O'Brien devotes chapter 4 to Elizabeth Livermore, an activist who envisioned a new amalgamated republic based upon Christian doctrine. O'Brien's attention to Livermore's Bible politics in her novel Zoë reminds scholars of the continuity between Christian universality and abolition. According to the author, “Like a true romanticist and transcendentalist, Livermore locates radical equality in the soul” (87). Her merging of politics and metaphysics provides a contrast to Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lydia Maria Child's US literary archetypes of race and miscegenation. Despite its title, Julia Collin's The Curse of Caste continues this theme of hopeful miscegenation. Discussion of the novel in chapter 5 centers on how southern gothic tropes depict a plantation-owning family that is brought to ruins by its own history of illicit romance. The novel is a pedagogical agent that challenges southern gentility in line with what O'Brien terms “Reconstruction optimism.”
Chapter 6, in which O'Brien provides a discussion of Frances Watkins Harper's Minnie's Sacrifice, provides a sharp contrast. Here, too, heroines – particularly black mothers – disrupt white patriarchy; however, Harper's novel also “illustrate[s] the impossibility for the nation to accommodate, much less to protect, the rights of black people – particularly women” (144). O'Brien provides context by discussing the split between the abolitionists and the women of the AERA, an antiromantic reality that results in the less optimistic view expressed by the novel. While not as comparative and hemispheric as suggested by the “Americas” in its title, Race, Romance, and Rebellion joins books on the trans-American nineteenth century authored by Anna Brickhouse, George Handley, Kirsten Silva Gruesz, and Debra Rosenthal. The study is particularly recommended for its treatment of race and gender in the United States. While it would have benefited from a discussion of indigeneity and race-mixing as a complicating factor in, among other New World sites, Brazil (José de Alencar's Iracema comes to mind), O'Brien contributes to our understanding of the period beyond the usual critiques of white patriarchy. Like the strain of romance she favors, her book champions hopeful voices quelled by history.
