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This chapter explores the history of the American consciousness in search of what manifestations of the problems of the republican perspective may be found there. It follows the discussion in the eighteenth-century debate of the previous chapter, and then turns to the debates on virtue and corruption, as well as an apocalyptic dimension to Machiavellism. The fact that the apocalyptic discourse was still an available recourse illustrates how far American thought and speech still belonged to the Renaissance tradition studied earlier in this volume. The chapter then turns to the debates regarding the Federalist theory as well as the end of the Machiavellian moment in America—that is, the end of the quarrel with history in its distinctively American form.

This chapter begins with the successful inversion of United States slave traders' network of communication and transportation. In November 1841, a group of at least nineteen enslaved African American men held aboard the brig Creole violently captured control of the ship and forced the crew to chart a course for Nassau, Bahamas. There, with the aid of black Bahamians and British colonial officials, they gained freedom along with all but five of their enslaved shipmates. White contemporaries tended to view the Creole “incident” in terms of its contribution to an international trade conflict between the United States and Great Britain. The revolt, however, is important for what it illustrates about how enslaved African Americans worked to acquire, disseminate, and apply geographic and geopolitical knowledge and information—what the text refers to here as geopolitical literacy—and what that might mean for their broader Afro-American consciousness.

Against the background of colonialism and the emergence of de-colonial thinking, we first explore the trajectoryof the Euro-American consciousness and movement from the Atlantic coast tothe Pacific coast of the United States and from North America to the Asia Pacific,and suggest the specific ways in which Asian studies, Asian American studies, and Pacificstudies intervene in American exceptionalism as alternatives. Next, we considerthe formation and development of the Asia Pacific in terms of what Kuan-HsingChen calls “Asia as method,” and the construction of the Pacific Islands in relation towhat Epeli Hau‘ofa defines as “our sea of islands” and “the ocean in us.” While Cheninsists on decolonization as a mutual process for the colonized and the colonizeralike, Hau‘ofa envisions a new indigenous way of rereading geography and rewriting humanity against neocolonialist and neo-imperialist practice. By investigatingthe transpacific as moments of military, cultural, and geopolitical contentions aswell as sites of global economic integration and resistance, we develop transpacificAmerican studies as a new critical paradigm in transnational American studies.

This chapter examines the friendship between J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and French abolitionist Jacques-Pierre Brissot. Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer was long seen as the first expression of American literary consciousness. The book proved to be a best seller when it came out in England in 1782. London was then one of the major places where the French “literary underground” could publish magazines and books free of government censorship. A number of French journalists thus resided in London and contributed to various publications. One of them was Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville. Reading Letters formed a turning point in his career as an activist, prompting him to seek an acquaintance with Crèvecoeur.