HyperCultura (Oct 2012)
Religion and ‘Race’ as Ur-Cultural Referents in Ninteenth-Century ‘America’, or How to Practise Transculturalism before the Age of Transculturalism
Abstract
Abstract This paper examines the seminal contribution of two 19th-century Americans, John L. O’Sullivan and Josiah Strong, towards promoting socio-political attitudes with a marked nationalist and imperialist thrust. On the face of it, any such agenda is blatantly opposed to the current notion of transculturalism. What yields to a transculturalist reading of their respective writings is the mythology they championed, one whose biological, historical, religious and civilisation determinations fashioned ‘the American people’ into at once the best exemplar of western European qua human stock and a model of rupture with, indeed transcendence of, Europe’s ethico-political bankruptcy. Intertwining as they did, though in different ratios, discourses of history, religion, Darwinism, ‘racial science’ and social Darwinism, the Lutheran journalist and the Congregationalist minister helped create a specious discourse of global integration through assimilation for propagandist, missionary and polemical purposes. Unfortunately, not only did its undertones outlive their original context but they subtly permeated early 20th-century ‘scientifically’ devised immigration acts and poor laws.
