Legacy

Etsuko Taketani's book foregrounds previously marginalized texts in order to argue for the significance of forms of antebellum U.S. colonialism that depart from "the historical model of Manifest Destiny and expansionism" (6). In her introduction, Taketani suggests that to overemphasize "operations of U.S. imperialism" that "were carried out under the rubric of 'Manifest Destiny'" in "Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, especially Cuba" forecloses "the probability of women creating alternative colonial and post-colonial visions—visions that were no less instrumental in the fabrication of the destiny of an American empire and foreign countries than the ideology of Manifest Destiny" (6). As a way of complicating such a model, Taketani focuses on a range of writing by white U.S. women that emphasizes different colonial and neocolonial settings such as China, Liberia, Burma, and the Middle East.

The book is divided into two parts. In part one, "Pedagogies of Colonialism," Taketani [End Page 74] examines "women's interventions in child education" as "both conducive to and subversive of colonialism" (9, 10). The first chapter explores issues of childhood and domestic colonialism in Lydia Maria Child's Juvenile Miscellany. Through detailed close readings of a few of Child's short stories, Taketani calls attention to "the way (British) colonialism is at once overthrown and developed into the less overt (U.S.) colonialism that is difficult to discern and oppose" (18). Chapter two takes up the antebellum geography textbooks authored by Sarah Tuttle and Lydia Huntley Sigourney, and chapter three explores how Eliza Leslie's and Catharine Beecher's educational writings about the reform of cross-dressing children reveal "how hetero-normativity is constructed as a norm—a norm that ultimately supports the interests of a particular group ('U.S./us'), justifying their right to domesticate and reform the other whose 'different' sexuality is indicative of its degenerate culture" (81).

In the second part of the book, entitled "An Alternative History of U.S. Imperialism," Taketani makes her most sustained and explicit efforts to show how "women's writings challenge the Manifest Destiny paradigm," which, she argues, assumes "binaristic and expansionist models that are quite different from the complexities of antebellum colonialism, particularly when colonialism involved a nexus of imperial powers (such as the United States and Britain)" (86). Chapter four, which focuses on Harriet Low's Macao journal, is perhaps the most interesting and successful chapter. Here, Taketani argues that Low's journal displays the complicity of the United States in the Chinese opium trade and thereby "[deconstructs] the official history of the United States as a heroic savior of China" (96). Other chapters in part two focus on Emily Judson's experiences as the wife of a missionary in Burma and her book, The Kathayan Slave, and Other Papers Connected with Missionary Life; Sarah Josepha Hale's vision of a postcolonial Liberia in her historical novel Liberia; or, Mr. Peyton's Experiments; and Maria Cummins's representations of diasporic whiteness in her Middle Eastern novel, El Fureidis.

Taketani's emphasis on colonial and neocolonial sites other than Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean helps us to understand the reach and complexity of U.S. colonial projects in this era. Even as she complicates the "Manifest Destiny" model, however, she sometimes reifies it, or takes it at its word, in other contexts. When her analysis suggests that the only way to complicate such a model is to look elsewhere, she risks eliding the fact that the "complexities of antebellum colonialism" in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean are also flattened and reduced by "binaristic and expansionist models" of Manifest Destiny (85). In these places as well, "a nexus of imperial powers" (such as the United States, Spain, France, and England) were involved in colonial projects, and issues of neocolonialism were as pressing and relevant as they were in Macao, Burma, Liberia, and the Middle East. In other words, Taketani sometimes implies that the "Manifest Destiny" model works for Mexico...