American Mediterraneans

Book excerpt: "In this book, Susan Gillman uncovers the ways that geographers and historians, novelists and travel writers, used "American Mediterranean" as a formula from the early nineteenth century to the 1970s. She asks what cultural work is done by this kind of unsystematic, hypothetical, even open-ended comparative thinking. Although "American Mediterranean" is not a household term in the United States today, it once circulated widely in French, Spanish, and English. Gillman tracks two centuries of this geohistorical concept across different networks of writers: from nineteenth-century geographers to writers of the 1890s who reflected on the Pacific world of Southern California, and to literary writers and thinkers of the 1930s and 40s who drew on this comparative tradition to speculate on the political past and future of the Caribbean. As Gillman shows, all these figures grappled with the American legacies of European imperialism and slavery. Following the term through its travels across disciplines and borders, Gillman reveals a little-known racialized history, both long-lasting and fleeting, one that paradoxically appealed to a range of race-neutral ideas and ideals. American Mediterraneans adds and explicates a new element in the stock of race discourses in the Americas"--