 I'm Gretchen Murphy from the University of Texas, and I'm here with R.J. Boutel. He's the author of The Race for America, Black Internationalism in the Age of Manifest Destiny. Hi, R.J. Hi, Gretchen, how are you? I'm good, good. Well, thanks to the National Archives, we're here today to talk about R.J.'s book. And yeah, I guess I'll just get us started by saying, you know, your book looks at Black internationalism in the U.S. in the 1850s, and it shows how it took shape through manifest destiny, the ideology of manifest destiny and the way that it was playing a role in the culture at the time. So just say a little bit about, you know, how do you see manifest destiny as connected to Black internationalism? Yeah, thank you. And thank you to the National Archives for having us today. So manifest destiny is an ideology and a discourse that emerges in the mid-19th century. And part of what it is doing is as the U.S. is starting to gain a sense of itself as a nation and starting to gain a kind of confidence as a nation, manifest destiny provides a script that sort of explains how the U.S. has come to become a very strong international power, and it sort of charts this future for the U.S. So as a discourse, manifest destiny is explicitly Christian. It says that God has chosen a specific group of people that have been religiously persecuted and have been sent to a new place. That is the new world. And in the new world, they're going to perfect civilization. They're going to perfect government. They're going to perfect society. They're going to perfect culture. And as a result of this kind of ideology, what it ends up doing in the mid-19th century is authorizing and justifying the U.S. starting to expand often violently into the western territories, into Central America, into parts of Canada. And as this expansion is happening, there are lots of other questions about our identity as a nation that are coming up as a part of that, including where slavery fits into our identity as a nation. Because one of the interesting things about manifest destiny that I argue in the book is that it tends to get whitewashed as being about a kind of national exceptionalism as about a kind of U.S. exceptionalism. But when you go back and read the actual texts in which manifest destiny is described, it's explicitly a racial ideology. It's about how Anglo-Saxons are a sort of chosen race and a chosen people who because of their racial superiority are designed to sort of shepherd the rest of the Americas into this new era, the sort of millennial era in which society is going to be perfected. So for black people in the United States, it's very difficult for them to see a place for themselves in those kinds of rhetorics, at least on the surface. What I show in the book is that as manifest destiny starts trying to describe the United States relations to the other places in the western hemisphere, whether that be in North America or whether that be in Central America, the Caribbean, South America, black people start to take advantage of those discourses in order to articulate their own relationships to people outside of the U.S. Specifically black people, but also other people of color, indigenous people, and European people that have settled in places outside of the Americas. So in this period in the 1850s, what we really see is these two worlds kind of colliding and coming together and being interwoven in these really interesting ways. So a particular flashpoint in my book is the U.S. invasion of Mexico, the U.S.-Mexico War, which concludes in 1848. After that war, the U.S. forces Mexico to cede a large section of Mexican territory to the U.S. and the U.S. meaningfully expands for the first time since really the Louisiana purchase on kind of a large scale. So for proponents of manifest destiny, this is kind of evidence that the project is working, that the United States is becoming this great nation, that we are expanding, that we are growing, that we are going to spread our particular version of republicanism throughout North America. But expansion at this time is also an issue that is very much tied up in the question of slavery. Any new territory that was incorporated into the United States, we had to decide whether it was going to be a slave state or a free state. And as a result of that in things like the Treaty of Guadalupe de Alago in 1848 and then in the compromise of 1850, we see these changes that at once sort of validate the project of manifest destiny as far as its proponents are concerned, but also start to make black people in the United States really pessimistic about their future in the United States. The Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, which makes it the case that any person in the United States was forced to comply with the laws of slavery and would have to assist in the restoration of refugees from slavery who had run away from slavery, would have to assist in helping their enslavers recover them. That sort of catalyzes this massive wave of migration from free black people in the north who all of a sudden no longer feel safe where they've been living in the north and trying to flee even further north to Canada or to start to look for other places in the Americas or even outside of the Americas to settle. There's a real kind of turning point in terms of their pessimism about whether or not slavery is ever going to be abolished in the United States and whether or not racial prejudice is ever going to be abolished in the United States. Yeah, and yeah, Liberia is kind of a starting point in the book. Your first chapter is looking at black folks who are going to Liberia, the colonization movement and emigration. And you really feature like a range of black thinkers in the book. But in my opinion, some of them really offered a much better model of black internationalism than others did. So in your first chapter about Liberia, there's a reverend Daniel Peterson, a black, black reverend who raised money and, you know, went to Liberia, not for very long, just a few months, I think, but with the intention of promoting emigration as a project, you know, he didn't stay, he went back and then, you know, published a book about it. And your account of it really does not present it as a as a triumph of black internationalism. You see a lot of flaws in it. A lot of flaws is even just, I think, almost symbolized by the title that he that he gives the book he calls it the looking glass, and really kind of suggests like he's the mirror to see himself in but is there, you know, something outside this like line of interference, or, you know, another that he's that he's not seeing, maybe, you know, that he wasn't really able to see, you know, what was going on in Liberia and what the lives of the African living there were like and what possibilities there were that that he was sort of overriding in, in thinking about it, you know, in terms of himself. In thinking about that as like a starting point. Because I think it's interesting that you, you know, you don't spend a lot of time critiquing it or I think that your critique is always sort of balanced by thinking about what else is he accomplishing and how is this also, you know, an important starting point for black internationalism instead of something that we would write off or discount so I just wanted to see if maybe you could spend a little little time talking about the specifics and you know give us a little bit of this. Interesting figures that are at the center of the study. Yeah, absolutely. And, and Peterson is such a complicated figure. And I really try to approach that with with nuance. The colonization project really begins in the 18 teams, where philanthropists and fundraisers from the United States, white philanthropists in particular, collect a bunch of money and purchase land on the west coast of Africa to create a colony that they want to sponsor the relocation of free African Americans from the US to Liberia. This is sort of a a proto backed Africa movement that is sponsored and organized by white people. And as seen as kind of like a third way of resolving the issue of slavery in the United States right so rather than abolishing slavery outright and rather than allowing it to perpetuate kind of slowly eroding the institution by slowly sponsoring black people leaving the United States. So the the height of this movement is really kind of the 1820s and then it sort of really loses steam. Although colonizationists do effectively create the colony of Liberia. There are a number of black people who removed to Liberia from the United States. But with that turning point in the 1850s on that I was describing a minute ago, there is this renewed interest in in Liberia. And at this point, Liberia is an independent Republic they declared their independence in 1847. And part of what that helps to do is it allows black people in the United States to see Liberia a little bit differently. So they're now no longer viewing it as this kind of puppet state by the American colonization society, but rather a fully independent black government where they could actually go and participate in a nation building project where they would be in the majority and they could define citizenship the way that they wanted. So Peterson is part of a wave of free black people who travel to Liberia with funding from different colonization societies in the early 1850s and he goes there and he's enthusiastic about the project and he he describes Liberia as a very successful young Republic. But in doing all of this, he's really validating this idea that Liberia was going to be the beginning of a kind of extension of manifest destiny in Africa, a kind of black manifest destiny in Africa. Where African Americans from the US, who had learned about republicanism and capitalism and Christianity, while in the United States could then import and bring all of those ideas and ideologies with them to Africa, and therefore start kind of colonizing and civilizing indigenous Africans. So it becomes this sort of expansionist project that people were imagining in Africa that black people would be undertaking as kind of this extension of US Empire. And Peterson seems to be all on board with that right when you read his when you read his autobiography he talks about how there are opportunities for black people that in Liberia that there were not in the US that indigenous Africans are in desperate need of Christianity and civilization and that African Americans from the US need to bring that to them. What's fascinating about the colonization movement in this moment is that it hinges on this idea that black people in the United States have been successfully Americanized and are therefore able to go somewhere else and sort of Americanize people there. And one of the things that Peterson's autobiography demonstrates is that if he has already successfully been Americanized that he doesn't need to go anywhere else. And he very importantly argues that he has kind of checked all of the boxes of what it means to be a US citizen before he ever leaves to go to Liberia. Now with that said he still sort of validates the project of colonizing Liberia and he has these really just you know frankly gross and condescending descriptions of the people of Africa in which he describes them in the kinds of ways that we would expect a white anthropologist to be describing people in Africa so we can see some of the ways that he's internalized some of the ideas that are undergirding manifest destiny these things like US exceptionalism this thing these things like this kind of Christian nationalism. And it ends up putting him in this strange position where he is arguing for the capacity of people of black people to be incorporated into the US nation as citizens. But also saying that while some black people still should probably go to Africa and help to colonize Africa. I'm just not one of them. So yes so Daniel Peterson is a really complicated example of how we see these discourses kind of colliding and the ways that black intellectuals could kind of break down and remake or sort of borrow components of manifest destiny but in doing that they're still sort of bound to some of the uglier parts of manifest destiny as they try to imagine alternatives. Yeah. Yeah, there's kind of a phenomenon that that I encountered and wrote about when I was writing about African American soldiers fighting in the Spanish American war. And I think you kind of sum up the problem as the question of how does the US achieve a sprawling empire designed to colonize and assimilate people without compromising the very whiteness that purportedly underwrites its authority to colonize and assimilate these others. When, when I was looking at this problem I called it shadowing the white man's burden to shadow can mean to kind of follow, but it can also mean to to color something to make it no longer this this mythic whiteness. You know, I sort of found that in writings by black soldiers in the Philippines, African Americans kind of had the capacity to challenge and undermine what you call the geo racial logic of this Anglo Saxon manifest destiny. And they can they can kind of undermine it, whether or not they're supporting imperialism or challenging it right like the, you know, explicit content that's supporting imperialism still has this, like subversive element if the colonizing project itself is depending upon this neat binary of black and white working in a certain way along the lines of empire. Yeah, I think it's, it's interesting that you know when you're rooting this in the 1850s, and thinking about this as sort of an origin point for black intellectual history. You know why this problem is sort of so important for this, this, this moment in the emergence of black internationalism. Yeah, it's, it's such a good question. And I think one of the ways that that I would approach that is to sort of turn to somebody like Martin Delaney who, for instance, says, Okay, if this is how you're defining us exceptionalism if this is how you're defining the sort of greatness of the United States. If this is what you're describing as kind of the basis of of what makes the US this nation that has this manifest destiny that it's going to accomplish. I can demonstrate how black people in the United States also check all those boxes. So in a very famous speech that he delivers at the 1854 national immigration convention. Martin Delaney basically talks about how the greatness of the United States and all of the things that are supposed to be great about the United States are really the products of black culture in a lot of ways, right? That the kind of economic power that the US has is based on agricultural innovations that came from enslaved Africans who in places like South Carolina, for instance, the rice industry that gets built in South Carolina and ends up making South Carolina an incredibly rich colony is based on West African agricultural practices. And the whole system for growing rice comes from African knowledge. Delaney points out that a lot of the sort of mining practices and other kinds of agricultural practices all of these owe to African American ingenuity, in addition to African American labor. So he kind of points out that we have as much right to claim this manifest destiny as anyone else. And then you have other people like James McEwen Smith, who sort of attacks the kind of racial basis of manifest destiny to show that Anglo-Saxonism is a social construction, right? Anglo-Saxonism is not a kind of real and meaningful biological designation. And it is just kind of a history and a story of a group of people that are themselves a recombination of a lot of different groups of people. So in his writings about Central America, for instance, he talks about the importance of diversity and multiculturalism and the sort of preservation of diversity and multiculturalism as a way to sort of continue the kind of ingenuity that is necessary to realize a manifest destiny. But in doing so, he basically demonstrates that what we understand as race is a fiction, it's a social construction, it's not real. And to assign meaning to it as if it's real and to build foreign policy and to build a nation on the idea that it is, and to move forward as if it is, is ultimately going to undermine the project of advancing and progressing civilization. So these are some of the kind of subversive ways that black intellectuals are jumping into these discourses and sort of taking what's useful and throwing away what's not or using aspects that they strongly identify with to illustrate problems with other aspects of manifest destiny. And you get a lot of these kinds of creative recombinations and I ultimately end up describing this as a kind of a counter history because so many of these projects that the black intellectuals that I look at are imagining are speculative or their fantasies or their proposals. These aren't things that are often actually physically realized. But the fact that they're not realized is not a reason not to study them because it gives us alternatives to think about how what ended up happening. In the 1850s, what happens over the next 50, 60 years when we try to tell that story as historians, it ends up seeming like everything that happens is inevitable. But when we go back to the 1850s, there's a lot of different ways that the Americas could end up developing that are based on a lot of, you know, going left rather than going right or, you know, taking this turn instead of this turn. And in going back and looking at some of those paths that we didn't go down going back at some of the looking back at some of the paths that black intellectuals imagine that we never ended up going down. We can see kind of alternative trajectories of history that can help us to reconsider international relations and continue to do so. Yeah, I saw a strong strand of like utopian thinking in in their planning with utopian sort of meaning, you know, hear this, this capacity to imagine otherwise and think about yeah what what other possible shapes are there for relationships between these different kind of nodes in the new world and communities that could be created there. There's a James McCune Smith writes under the pen name commune a paw and you sort of show that that is a way that this this idea of this kind of utopian and imaginary this like counter history of a of a different Americas being brought out because it's the title of a Washington Irving story about what a sort of multiracial colony that was ultimately displaced by New York. Can you say more about that. Yeah, absolutely. So as part of his kind of sort of folklore stories about early New York, kind of prior to English colonization of New York and the development of of New York City. In particular, Washington Irving is writing about this community up there before called commune pot so the black writer James McCune Smith in the 1840s and 50s when he's writing for Frederick Douglass paper in the 1850s adopts this as his pen name. And that was always really interesting to me why he chose that as his pen name and making Smith sort of cheekily refers to himself as a descendant of commune a paw. And when I was reading McCune Smith. These essays that he's writing for Frederick Douglass paper. He writes this review of a ethnography about Nicaragua by the white anthropologist EG squire. So EG squire is this anthropologist who travels to Nicaragua. And writes this, you know, 900 page study of the Nicaraguan people and culture. With the explicit purpose, because he's also a diplomat from the United States and he sort of is sent to Nicaragua with the explicit purpose to get rights from the Nicaraguan government to build this canal through through Nicaragua. And that canal is on the US views that is very important because it's basically going to allow them to trade with Asia into significantly speed up inter coastal trade between the Atlantic coast and the Pacific coast. This is all happening kind of right after the California gold rush. So, squire travels to Nicaragua as part of this kind of diplomatic effort by the US to get the rights to build this canal so we sort of sent there as an emissary of US Empire. And McCune Smith reads his book and he says this is just garbage science it's just really bad. And when we look at squires data, his data and his conclusions don't really make any sense. They're sort of out of step with one another. So McCune Smith kind of goes back and combs through the data and says, if all this data is right it's actually leading you to a very different conclusion. So McCune, so sorry, squire tries to say that, you know, the population in Nicaragua is already overwhelmingly white. So it'd be very easy for us to colonize Nicaragua and sort of set up settlements in that area once we build the canal. And then McCune Smith uses the same kind of demographic data to say, actually, this is this data is saying that this country is like 97% people of color. And as a result, this would be a really good place for black people to relocate from the United States to particularly given the sort of economic futures that were able to be envisioned from Nicaragua, given that this canal would sort of really transform inter-oceanic trade. What's fascinating though is McCune Smith doesn't imagine a kind of black republic taking the place of Nicaragua. What he argues instead is that Nicaragua could become this kind of new communipaw, this sort of multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural community. And he sort of talks about how because of the amount of trade that would be happening in Nicaragua, and because of the kind of topographical diversity, there are all these rainforests and there are rivers and there are mountains, that people would be coming from all over, people would be developing differently, people would be coming from different cultures, speaking different languages, coming in with different ideas from different class backgrounds, and that that kind of diversity is what is necessary for kind of cultivating and progressing civilization long-term. And in imagining that sort of utopian project, which of course never actually happens, right? It's kind of strictly this kind of utopian fantasy that McCune Smith is writing about. But in articulating that, what he sort of exposes is that if manifest destiny as it's being imagined and practiced from the United States, we're actually to realize its goal of establishing this kind of white hemispheric empire, or at least this hemispheric empire in which white people were always the overwhelming majority, always the ones in position of power, always the ones sort of at the heads of different cultural institutions, that that would end up creating a kind of homogenous culture that would actually have a sliding backwards rather than moving forward. Because there would be this sort of this sense of urgency to assimilate and homogenize and have everyone kind of become the same, rather than having this kind of constant renewal of culture through the introduction of new people with new ideas, and sort of new backgrounds and new ways of thinking about things, that that kind of constant rejuvenation is necessary for progress. And that becomes a way of sort of exposing that manifest destiny is ultimately pretty short-sighted, and that sort of long term it's not going to be sustainable because it is driven by this impulse toward assimilation and homogenization. Yeah. Yeah. So, you're, you're trained as a literary scholar, and so am I. And I thought that, you know, it was interesting in your book, there's a moment where you kind of talk about your methodology and you say, although I'm a literary scholar, I'm not really looking at a lot of texts that we typically think of when we think of the literary poems, novels. There is there's one novel that has a sustained discussion Martin Delaney's 1859 novel Blake. You know, you discuss that a bit, but a lot of it is journalism, and this, this, you know, writing that kind of comes out of, you know, describing these these these potential projects or life writing, you know, personal narratives. And you, but you say, you know what really what makes this literary is the method that you're using. And so I wanted to kind of just sort of call that out and ask us to talk a little bit about what you're bringing to this material as a literary scholar. I really noticed you spent a lot of time with individual texts kind of looking for what is implied in the language through figurative devices metaphor. And so yeah, I was hoping you could say a little bit more about what it's like studying this material as a literary scholar rather than as a historian. Yeah, absolutely. So, I guess the first thing to say is that so much of black writing before the 1850s is not what we would call literature. It is there's a lot of life writing, what what Joyce Lynn Moody calls kind of life writing in the African American tradition, things like Frederick Douglass's narrative, the slave narrative, these kinds of autobiographical texts. There's a lot of political tracks and sort of essay writing. There's a lot of writing that's happening in newspapers. And you find some poetry here and there you find short stories here and there but the overwhelming amount of writing is happening in genres that are not sort of novels, poetry, fiction, drama, things like that. And Black Studies has really sort of embraced that. So in the study of the 19th century that we don't necessarily need to be looking at novels and poetry to be talking about literature. And that we can look at some of these other forms of writing that are nevertheless influenced by literature and are drawing on a lot of literary and rhetorical devices that are coming from literature, even if their forms are a little bit different. Because I think what one of the things that especially political literature is trying to do is diagnose social problems, diagnose political problems to use fiction to kind of work through those in a way that histories attachment to facts is allows us to do certain kinds of things, but literature is a sort of embrace of fiction and imagination and creativity allows us to do other things. So I think by looking at some of these texts, not in a way where I'm sort of taking what they're saying at face value, or taking them for sort of factual meaning at the particular terms of phrase, the use of metaphor, the use of allegory, the use of illusion, and how these texts use a lot of those literary devices to expose something or get at something or talk around something that they wouldn't be able to otherwise through kind of more direct modes of speech. And it's kind of important to keep in mind the sort of publishing environment at this time, right. Even for, even for black writers who had the kind of financial and social support networks that would sort of allow them to write things that were a little bit more radical or a little bit more dangerous with a still a degree of protection. The sort of marketplace of ideas at this time isn't very accommodating to black radicalism. So, metaphor, for instance, a lot and sort of other kinds of rhetorical devices, allow black writers to say things and to explore things and to kind of prompt people to think through the implications of things in ways that more direct modes of speech wouldn't necessarily allow. Yeah, and another kind of approach that I see taking that I think might come from your, your, your background as a literary scholar are the moments where you ask a lot of questions that the historical record doesn't necessarily have have answers for. You call this critical fabulations at one point where you just sort of speculate on the experience in this case it's of the passengers on the boat that took the Reverend Daniel Peterson to Liberia. And there's a there's a there's an account of their voyage and you know it gives some details of things that happen, but you, you know you kind of pick apart these details and ask questions. For example, there's, there's, there's an account of a few indigent stowaways being among the passengers of the boat and you ask for three of these poor strangers stowaways worried that the spectacle of Kenny's heroics would expose them as the difference between the 53 passengers listed on the official manifest so sorry this is a bad sentence to begin with. Did the indigent passenger spaces betray regret realizing only now perhaps fatally underprepared they how fatally underprepared they were for the transatlantic voyage, or really attempting to mask their shame when they encountered the impeccably dressed Peterson did their ragged appearance discomfort their well dressed counterparts to nearly recalling the institution they all sought to escape. Did these class divisions give way to solidarity during the 38 days at sea, did passengers bond over the little bird they caught and released after a storm. In the sea turtle they lowered a boat and went after the gruesome skinning and dressing of a shark captain Miller harpooned, or the unusual repast that followed. As they shared stories over the dry meat did they wonder why sharks swam so eagerly astride their vessel, or did they know the grim answer. It's a critical fabulations and it seems like it's a way for you to kind of look beneath what the official account is and asked about what the lived experience is on the boat. Why ask those questions when you don't have a way to answer them. Yeah, so. So first of all you're supposed to say that there are no bad sentences in the book Gretchen. Yeah, that was my reading. But no, so this idea of critical fabulation comes from Sadia Hartman and Sadia Hartman uses critical fabulation as a sort of black feminist methodology of accessing the stories of enslaved people that the historical records that we have just cannot account for. So in her essay about in which she sort of coins the term she's talking about this woman about whom only, you know, one or two lines are written in sort of the ship logs of a slave ship. And then how do you tell that person's story and how do you tell that person's story without sort of just creating something out of thin air or without sort of coming up with this romance of what we want to believe about this person. So drawing on on Hartman's method what I do is I grab what details I can find. And then I sort of organize the questions that that leads me to and by kind of stringing those questions together. You're able to, and this is something that Hartman does just absolutely beautifully in her writing is just sort of using questions to still sort of move the story forward without necessarily making any definitive claims, because to make a definitive answer would be to say that I know what somebody on a ship going to Liberia in the 1850s actually felt or was actually thinking. But what I can do is talk about all of the things that they might have been thinking all the things that they might have been worried about might have been concerned about might have been working through. These are my receipts for why they might have been thinking about those things through the kind of archival records that I that I have access to. But it becomes a way to kind of illustrate the complexity of this voyage that this wasn't just 53 people who all were gung-ho about going to Liberia and starting a new life for themselves. There were there were people in their 80s on that boat there were young children on that boat there were people who were single men there were people who were traveling with their families. They all had different concerns and different things that they might have been excited about or worried about. I think trying to get to the trying to get at the diversity of experiences and and concerns that are shaping that moment and some of the cultural issues that are shaping those concerns. It's it's a pretty literary method right because it's it's it's rooted in creativity it's rooted in you know if you look at critical fabulation it's the fabulation part of it right it's the sort of imaginative creative part of it. The critical part of it is where it is still rooted in the parts of the record that we do have access to but also kind of critical reading of of those records that we do have access to which. We know can't tell the whole story that they can't possibly tell the whole story. Yeah. One thing we talked about in preparing for this was that it's the 200th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine this year 1823 to 2023. And the Monroe Doctrine kind of threads through your book and I've written about it as well. So, yeah, I wanted to kind of ask a question about thinking about how your book reflects on where we are today in the US you you end the book actually with some reflections on this and the resurgence of white nationalism in the in the US and how sort of a make up make America great again. Discourse in contemporary US politics actually you know has has connections to manifest destiny and the ethno nationalism that that you see kind of kind of in there. And have some reflections on how manifest destiny, you know is sort of still with us today. So I wanted you to talk a little bit about that, but then also to talk a little bit about the Monroe Doctrine it comes up in your book because these some of these black intellectual thinkers are interested in other sites in the Americas and and the the idea that the Western Hemisphere sort of destined for democracy and therefore is also destined to be in the sphere of influence of the United States and perhaps under the control of the United States depending on who's articulating these ideas. You know that that's kind of in the atmosphere of a conversation that they're entering into when they're thinking about these these different sites in the new world and what they could mean for black internationalism and you know as as as spaces for for resettlement so yeah so the question is thinking about how this how the how you relate this to today how you saw this that what you were talking about in the book connected to today, and then yeah maybe particularly thinking about the at the 200th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine is does manifest destiny matter more to us today than the Monroe Doctrine does. What do you think about that. Yeah, lots of really great questions in there. So just just to kind of start so the Monroe Doctrine as it's sort of initially articulated in 1823 is it's largely about a kind of the US articulating that it's going to take a defensive posture of the hemisphere right so it comes kind of right on the heels of all of these Spanish American colonies decolonizing and starting to form republics of their own and and what the what the Monroe Doctrine does is it says well this is our sphere of influence. And the US will sort of defend our interests in the Americas because this is sort of our our territory sort of this America for the Americans kind of idea. By the 1840s and 50s this takes on a little bit more of an aggressive posture where the US then sort of blends the Monroe Doctrine, which sort of articulates this idea that the Americas are a distinctive hemisphere unto themselves that are going to be governed governed by Democratic republics as opposed to monarchies like in Europe. But then that the US has to actually help all of these other republics become better republics and can therefore adopt these more kind of aggressive or neocolonial postures for them. And that's kind of where where my book picks up in the 1850s. And a lot of those projects have there ends up being kind of a long shadow of the Monroe Doctrine, sort of co extensive with the Cold War right we can see elements of the Monroe Doctrine in the Cuban Missile Crisis the Iran Contra scandal. You know, with the passing of Henry Kissinger I think we've been recently revisiting a lot of these conversations about us foreign policy in the 70s and 80s and sort of how aggressively the US was trying to protect its interests within what it saw as its sphere of influence. But increasingly today, to the extent that we still see that we're seeing it in sort of, you know, questions about military support for Taiwan against China or for Ukraine against Russia. But within the within the Americas, what we see is a kind of evolution of what's really at the heart of the Monroe Doctrine is this idea that the United States and the sort of American experiment in the American project is so great and so important that it needs to be defended at all costs. And I think that that part of the Monroe Doctrine is in some sense so will with us, although we've seen kind of a modulation of that. The Monroe Doctrine is kind of pushing back against the isolationism of the early Republican period, sort of between 1776 and the 1820s. And now we're seeing kind of a swing back toward a particular kind of isolationism, particularly with these questions around the US Mexico border. The current kind of immigration crisis and refugee and sort of sanctuary seeking crisis at the US Mexico border is the result of decades of US foreign policy in Mexico, in Central America, in South America that have destabilized a lot of these countries that have destroyed the economies of a lot of these countries and have created conditions where a lot of these countries are dangerous or unlivable for a lot of people. And that's sort of resulting in this kind of northern movement to the US Mexico border. But then the project of US American exceptionalism and greatness then sort of pivots to this sort of need to protect itself that manifests as isolationism. So I don't know that the Monroe Doctrine, certainly as it originally appeared is still sort of with us and still sort of meaningful in terms of today's kind of political debates or questions over foreign policy. You know, one of the things I argue in the code to the book is that the kind of claims about American greatness that we are seeing and the sort of lost greatness that we're seeing in the MAGA movement and the make America great again movement very much have their roots and manifest destiny which is also about kind of getting back to these Anglo-Saxon roots of sort of small local government and then sort of realizing this project of unprecedented greatness that is in some sense viewed as a kind of a destiny of sorts. We have a question from the audience here. So I'm going to go ahead and read it. Do you think that the Afrofuturism movement is a part of the expansion of manifest destiny. That's such a great question because yeah we were just talking about the utopianism that's kind of automating some of the, you know, visions of what what could be and what's possible for black settlement in Nicaragua or, you know, even in Martin Delaney's Blake maybe there's some like sort of utopic elements of how this, this revolution is going to come together. Yeah, so what about Afrofuturism I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. Yeah, it's a really great question because depending on sort of which aspects of Afrofuturism we're talking about I think we could answer the question a number of different ways I think the kind of the way that this is such a great question. And I'm trying not to just kind of go on a long, a long sort of close reading of something like Martin Delaney's Blake as an Afrofuturist novel but I think what you see in a lot of these. A lot of these black writer activists articulations of alternatives to manifest destiny are both an appeal to an, an Africanist past, whether that is explicitly making arguments about sort of the history of civilization in Africa. History of civilization have largely been erased or whether it's sort of harkening back to particular atavistic aspects of African or diasporic culture. But then there's also always this kind of utopian future looking aspect of it, where it's kind of about bridging the past and the future which is something I see as really critical to to Afrofuturist literature. I also think that what a lot of particularly some of the more science fiction leaning Afrofuturist literature is doing is really sort of embracing this speculative mode sort of of imagining the world otherwise of imagining. Not only earth but the universe in ways other than what we currently know it to be. And I think that kind of imaginative speculative register is a really important part of how black intellectuals in the mid 19th century are thinking about manifest destiny and thinking about the future of the Americas. I think there's, there's more to say also about how a lot of, again, particularly science fiction and particularly kind of space oriented Afrofuturist fiction addresses the problem of colonization and sort of raises these questions about colonizing other worlds. In ways that I think feel, feel rooted in some of these critiques of manifest destiny that even as you're imagining something else. If you're imagining something else somewhere else there might already be people there and you need to kind of figure out what your relationship to those people is going to be. And you can either adopt a really chauvinistic view towards those people or, or perhaps other dispositions. So I think that particularly when I think about the science fiction sort of segment of Afrofuturist and that starts to get, get really interesting. I think about Octavia Butler's dog where we have, you know, sort of an alien race that is quite determined that it's that it's correct and sort of genetically altering and taking away the choice making abilities of the humans that they're encountering. I thought a lot about when I was reading parts of your book was Nisi Shaw's ever fair, which is kind of like a steampunk retelling of the Belgian decolonization of the Congo. And there are US US American African Americans, there are British folks who are who are there. And then there are indigenous African folks who are there and they're sort of all sort of mixed up in this, this pretty fantastical plot where there's also like, you know, you know, flying bicycles and you know things like that so thinking about, you know, really using counterfactuals to reimagine what a black international vision and a utopian vision could look like. So, couple book recommendations there for anyone interested in the Afrofuturism afterlife of black internationalism and manifest destiny. Well, I think we're getting close to the end here. I just want to see, you know, is there any, you know, what was your, what was your favorite part of researching this book. Oh, gosh. There were so many parts of this book that were really energizing for me. I think that the part that I had the most fun writing was definitely the chapter on Canada. The chapter on the US Canada borderlands. I really get into the relationship between these two different black activists, so Henry bibb and his wife Mary bibb and then the black activist Mary and Chad carry. These kinds of deep principled ideological and political disagreements between these sort of two different camps and these two different sort of individuals and the ideas that they represent. And there's just lots of really great sort of back and forth between them that were really kind of spicy to read like they really kind of go after each other in different ways. But I think that was also exciting for me because as much as they were in disagreement with one another, they were both living in Ontario in the 1850s and really trying to think critically about how they could build something new from the ground up. And how they could actually build community among black exiles and refugees and fugitives from slavery, who are living in Canada at that time, and their ideas go off in a number of different directions but it was really exciting to see, see them in that kind of practical details of what this would look like. And that felt meaningfully different from a lot of the other places in the book where we are dealing a lot more with kind of speculative modes or sort of big picture imaginations of the relationships between different nations and here it was really granular it was like, you know, how are we going to figure out how to buy land or distribute land or what kinds of crops should we be growing and, you know, should we have integrated schools or should we have separate schools for for black people where we can educate ourselves. And these, these are I thought all. It was a level of detail that I hadn't seen in a lot of other places and I think that was really exciting for me. Great. All right. Well, I think, I think we may be ready to wrap up and I just want to thank you for talking with me today and yeah recommend recommend that people go ahead and get yourself a copy of the race for the Americas. Thanks so much RJ. Thank you so much question I really appreciate it. All right. See you next time. Bye bye.