Gretchen J. Woertendyke

Geography, genre, and hemispheric regionalism

Abstract This essay introduces the concept of hemispheric regionalism as a way of understanding the expansive scales of oceanic and hemispheric perspectives. Drawing on Bruno Latours actor-network theory, hemispheric regionalism flattens the map, and makes visible three things: (1) the different coordinates in play; (2) the importance of the sea in these relations; and (3) the vehicles that travel between different geographic regions. Genre is that vehicle; popular romance mediates the distance and differences across the sea between the US and Cuba in the long nineteenth century. In its ability to retain multiple histories on its surface, the popular romances circulating prior to the Civil War, and long before dime novels, worked to entertain and make sense of the future of US–Cuban relations. The 90-mile waterway between the coasts became the most popular site of literary experimentation in news, notices, and periodicals awash with fascination and anxiety about Cuba. Editor, publisher, and writer Maturin Murray Ballou provides unique insight into the intersection of hemispheric regionalism and the work of romance in the period. It is, ultimately, the genres capacity to manage multiple points of time along with its broad accessibility that appealed to writers such as Ballou. Through the popular romance, Ballou skillfully negotiated the anachronism of a hemispheric South that included the US and Cuba. Finally, Ballou thrived in a booming literary marketplace making him one of the more successful editors and writers of the antebellum years.