New World Nation-Building

'New World' Nation-Building: Hemispheric Revolution and the Postcolonial Dimensions of American Political Thought traces the emergence of what I call Pan-American Discourses, a hemispheric vernacular of postcolonial emancipation that I argue connected more than thirty popular republican movements seizing control of the Americas during the Age of Revolutions (c.1770-1830). The book relies on archival analysis to connect cases of hemispheric solidarity among Indigenous, Black, and Mestizo-led revolutionary movements in Mexico, Colombia, the United States, and the Andes. These cases demonstrate that marginalized communities used hemispheric vernaculars to legitimize demands for egalitarian reforms such as the abolition of slavery, tributary practices, and caste systems, as well as for the establishment of civic equality, land rights, the redistribution of property.

Beyond its historiographic analysis of hemispheric revolutionary movements, the book makes two interventions in the field of political theory more broadly. First, it demonstrates that marginalized communities transformed the principles of Republican Political Thought by centering ethno-racial standpoints, religious identities, and Indigenous genealogies in their visions for postcolonial emancipation. These political innovations are illustrated via objects of popular discourse, such as marching songs, pamphlets, poems, and visual artifacts that emerged from the movements. Second, the book reconstructs the canon of American Political Thought (APT) by redefining the communities, contexts, and places associated with the notion of characteristically "American" politics. It does so by defining APT as a hemispheric, postcolonial project bound to the conditions, publics, and political possibilities of the "New World" during the Age of Revolutions. 

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