A New World of Revolutions

My book A New World of Revolutions: Popular Imaginations and Movements Across the Americas (forthcoming with Princeton University Press) argues that hemispheric politics, discourses, and cultural production were central to the development of postcolonial movements Age of Revolutions (c.1770-1830). I also demonstrate that hemispheric politics and identities framed the development of republican politics and its emancipatory possibilities in the Americas. The book relies on archival ephemera such as marching songs, poems, manifestos, newspapers, plays, and visual artifacts to trace the saliency of hemispheric narratives as they traveled with revolutionary movements from the United States to Argentina. Further, I  demonstrate that hemispheric principles had a concrete effect on the revolutionary agendas of these movements, where Indigenous, Mestizo, Pardo, Creole, and enslaved communities deployed hemispheric identities, as Americanos, to legitimize demands for egalitarian reforms. These included the abolition of slavery, tributary practices, and caste systems, as well as the establishment of civic equalities, land rights, the redistribution of property.

Beyond its historiographic analysis the book makes three primary interventions in the field of political theory. First, it demonstrates that marginalized communities transformed the principles of republican political thought by centering ethnoracial standpoints, religious identities, and Indigenous genealogies in their visions for postcolonial emancipation. Second, by thinking from hemispheric identities and cultural production, the book redefines the principles, contexts, and peoples that comprise the canon of American political thought (APT) and situates the tradition as emerging from a distinctly postcolonial context bound to the conditions, publics, and political possibilities of the "new world." Third, by drawing on archival ephemera, visual artifacts, and cultural production, the book aims to expand the archive of political thought as well as illustrate varied approaches for studying the political innovations of popular movements and their publics.

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