Empire and American visions of the humane

This dissertation has as its objective the investigation of American and Americanist writings, construed in a broad, hemispheric sense, that seek to forge a New World understanding of intercultural contact. I use the term "America" in its hemispheric sense, because I base my study on two writers canonized in the Latin Americanist tradition, Bartolome de las Casas (1484-1566) and El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539-1616), and two in the Anglo-North American tradition, Herman Melville (1819-1891) and Walt Whitman (1819-1892). Each of these writers explores a humane understanding of the relationships among individuals and between and among cultures in moments of historical crisis. I juxtapose the Spanish American writings of the conquest with the American nineteenth century, the United States's own age of conquest, in order to show how the writers of these two periods struggle to negotiate humanism's ethical drives, and to explore the way that imperialism and a humanist or humane understanding of the other become inextricably conjoined. Just as the Spanish writers experience the clash between humanism and empire during the birth of Old World imperialism, so too did American writers of the nineteenth century witness the clash between humanism reshaped by the enlightenment (democratic republicanism) and a neo-imperialism reconfigured for an autochthonous New World power (the United States).;I posit the Spanish American conquest as the cultural model for this nascent American imperialism. Growing interest in the conquest and its imagery tapped into the perceived complexity of the history of Spanish domination as a more apt precursor to the United States's growing sense of itself as "world historical" and as a principal player in the history of civilization. In other words, this dissertation explores the ways that colonial discourses are translated into postcolonial ideologies, and the way that postcoloniality in the Anglo-American context reclaims and struggles with Spanish Imperialism in the service of a renewed vision of a distinctly American imperial project.