“The Estuary of the Americas”: Re-envisioning the 19th-Century Gulf World

This paper draws inspiration from the Caribbean theorist Edouard Glissant to reconsider how we as historians conceptualize the Americas. While nation-based studies remain the norm across the continent, many historians in the United States, the Caribbean and Latin America have in recent decades embraced comparative, connected and transnational approaches to the history of ideas, travel, migration, imperialism, slavery, post-emancipation societies and other topics. In the U.S. academy, American Studies departments have led the charge to decenter the United States and their work has shown the power and potential of utilizing at once broader and more narrow frameworks of analysis to explore phenomena that extended beyond the borders of the nation. US Americanist historians have also challenged US exceptionalism in various ways, some by reconsidering the history of the US South in the context of the greater Caribbean, others by taking seriously transnational solidarities that spanned borders. Further south still, historians in Latin America and the Caribbean have also been looking beyond the nation to bring to light histories that were not simply connected, but intertwined.  

Glissant’s idea of the “estuary” draws our attention not only to the circulation and connectivity that we associate with the Greater Caribbean, but impels us to recognize how that same fluidity and connection drew the American landmasses to the north and south of it together, especially through major rivers like the Mississippi and the Orinoco. My work is situated in the heart of that estuary, the Gulf World. This paper explores the travels, itineraries and perceptions of individuals from indentured servants to elite political exiles who navigated the nineteenth-century Gulf World in surprising ways drawing Cuba, Mexico and the United States together.