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American Mediterraneans: A Study in Geography, History, and Race
The story of the “American Mediterranean,” both an idea and a shorthand popularized by geographers, historians, novelists, and travel writers from the early nineteenth century to the 1970s.
The naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, visiting the Gulf-Caribbean in the early nineteenth century, called it America’s Mediterranean. Almost a century later, Southern California was hailed as “Our Mediterranean, Our Italy!” Although “American Mediterranean” is not a household phrase in the United States today, it once circulated widely in French, Spanish, and English as a term of art and folk idiom. In this book, Susan Gillman asks what cultural work is done by this kind of unsystematic, open-ended comparative thinking.
American Mediterraneans tracks two centuries of this geohistorical concept, from Humboldt in the early 1800s, to writers of the 1890s reflecting on the Pacific world of the California coast, to writers of the 1930s and 40s speculating on the political past and future of the Caribbean. Following the term through its travels across disciplines and borders, American Mediterraneans reveals a little-known racialized history, one that paradoxically appealed to a range of race-neutral ideas and ideals.
The naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, visiting the Gulf-Caribbean in the early nineteenth century, called it America’s Mediterranean. Almost a century later, Southern California was hailed as “Our Mediterranean, Our Italy!” Although “American Mediterranean” is not a household phrase in the United States today, it once circulated widely in French, Spanish, and English as a term of art and folk idiom. In this book, Susan Gillman asks what cultural work is done by this kind of unsystematic, open-ended comparative thinking.
American Mediterraneans tracks two centuries of this geohistorical concept, from Humboldt in the early 1800s, to writers of the 1890s reflecting on the Pacific world of the California coast, to writers of the 1930s and 40s speculating on the political past and future of the Caribbean. Following the term through its travels across disciplines and borders, American Mediterraneans reveals a little-known racialized history, one that paradoxically appealed to a range of race-neutral ideas and ideals.
221 pages, Paperback
Published May 20, 2022
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July 27, 2022
I have to confess that before hearing of Susan Gillman’s book, I didn’t even know that “mediterranean” was a common noun, a term for a large body of water nearly surrounded by land. Gillman taps into a history of how the term has been used, specifically in the American context, for drawing comparisons, and for teasing inferences about the relationships between the classical Mediterranean (European, African, and Asian) and mediterranean areas in the Americas — most poignantly, to me anyway, the Caribbean.
Gillman’s book is a study of the “American mediterraneans” as an historical idea or an organizing metaphor, conveying at different times an object for scientific study, an historical regularity, a tourist attraction, and sometimes just an Anglo-European lens through which to make America familiar. Or by comparison to cast American mediterraneans as either inferior or superior to their classical counterpart.
The discussion is bookended by Alexander von Humboldt and Fernand Braudel, encasing it in questions about the relationships between geography and history. Some version of geographical determinism would point to recurring historical patterns in mediterranean areas, a theme that runs through the discussion, sometimes in the background and sometimes as an explicit thesis to investigate.
Humboldt himself was a scientist, so he brought a vocabulary of regularities, recurrences, and instances to a field whose subject matter could otherwise be thought composed entirely of unique places and events.
That America would even have “mediterraneans” is a Humboldtian idea. It invokes geographical types and instances of a general concept.
Once you’ve applied the idea to the Americas, you set loose a whole flock of questions about the relationship of American mediterraneans to the classical Mediterranean. A mediterranean, as this sea in the midst of diverse lands, provides a crossroads for trade, languages, conflicts and conquests, subjugations, cross-fertilizations, racial mixings and enforced racial segregations.
What kinds of commonalities do we find among mediterraneans — do we find commonalities of conflict and conquest, of language groups, of historical processes in general?
The most obvious American mediterranean is the Caribbean. On a map, the Caribbean looks roughly like a mirror image of the classical Mediterranean Sea. And like that classical Mediterranean, it affords a mixing of cultures, languages, and peoples, suggesting possibly common histories of race, slavery, economic structures, rebellion, and empire.
Our tendency is to buy in to a “new world”/“old world” perspective on the Americas and Europe, making the American mediterraneans somehow younger than the classical Mediterranean, maybe with the history of that “old world” Mediterranean to be repeated in our own.
But of course the American mediterraneans, as physical geographies, are just as “old” as the classical Mediterranean, just not as part of Anglo-European history.
And the pre-colonial peoples are present in the American mediterraneans, but more as context and even decor than as core participants. The “mediterranean” as idea or metaphor after all is something brought, as Gillman’s account illustrates, from the Anglo-European world, an import that transforms American geography into something significant through its similarities and differences with the classical Mediterranean.
The American mediterraneans, as we know them since Anglo-European colonization, are a friction-heavy grinding and mixing of races and cultures vying to tell the definitive story of their regions. So much so that California history (the Pacific coast being counted among the American mediterraneans), as Gillman illustrates, is riven with fictional Spanish heritage. In so many cases, as in California place names and in the early design of Stanford University’s grounds and buildings, the mythology is memorialized in such a way as to give it a seal of credibility. And in more contemporary commercial times, brand names and marketing messages help to cement the fictional heritage.
The 1884 novel Ramona, by Helen Hunt Jackson, is an especially influential case in point. The novel was intended as a kind of Uncle Tom’s Cabin call to awakening about the native people of the Pacific coast, although the main character is given a Spanish, not native, name. Gillman tells the story of Ramona as an event in itself, digging its own fictional roots into the California soil, through its adoption in “historical” place and street names, California-appropriate baby names, and brand names that evoke California’s (fictional) heritage. It’s never too late to create a past.
Given that America, mediterranean and otherwise, was subject to such an upheaval and intended remaking as it was, fiction is the genre we might expect to convey its heritage.
Non-fictional texts also play a role in building historical consciousness. The time relationship between the Caribbean mediterranean and the classical Mediterranean is flipped in what happens in and around C.L.R. James’ historical work, The Black Jacobins. Through it, the Haitian revolution becomes a model, or an inspiration, or something in- between, maybe a prophecy, not only for future Caribbean revolutions, e.g., in Cuba, but also for African decolonization over a hundred years later.
One interesting point to note, maybe in passing, in the friction between oppressed peoples or races in the Americas and their oppressors is that the oppressed include both indigenous peoples and populations brought to the Americas by their oppressors themselves during colonization. In the latter case, any rebellion or self-assertion is not a re-assertion of a native conquered people but something else sitting higher in the historical/cultural timeline.
Mass scale colonization, the slave trade, and the fate of indigenous peoples make for a complicated story of heritage in the Americas, and fertile ground for story-telling that gives us our sense of what’s “real” in our geo-history.
All of this is my experience of reading Susan Gillman’s book. I came away with a deepened appreciation of the role of story-telling in the creation of heritage. At the same time, I came away with a related sensitivity to the big questions about the relationships between geography and history.
Maybe a little perversely, the direction of the arrow in any kind of geographical determinism began to flip back and forth in my mind. We can certainly talk of the influence of physical geography on cultures and their mixings in history. But we can also talk of the influence of the histories that we construct on our geographical characterizations, e.g, on casting those American seas and coastlines as “mediterraneans” in the first place.
Gillman’s book is a study of the “American mediterraneans” as an historical idea or an organizing metaphor, conveying at different times an object for scientific study, an historical regularity, a tourist attraction, and sometimes just an Anglo-European lens through which to make America familiar. Or by comparison to cast American mediterraneans as either inferior or superior to their classical counterpart.
The discussion is bookended by Alexander von Humboldt and Fernand Braudel, encasing it in questions about the relationships between geography and history. Some version of geographical determinism would point to recurring historical patterns in mediterranean areas, a theme that runs through the discussion, sometimes in the background and sometimes as an explicit thesis to investigate.
Humboldt himself was a scientist, so he brought a vocabulary of regularities, recurrences, and instances to a field whose subject matter could otherwise be thought composed entirely of unique places and events.
That America would even have “mediterraneans” is a Humboldtian idea. It invokes geographical types and instances of a general concept.
Once you’ve applied the idea to the Americas, you set loose a whole flock of questions about the relationship of American mediterraneans to the classical Mediterranean. A mediterranean, as this sea in the midst of diverse lands, provides a crossroads for trade, languages, conflicts and conquests, subjugations, cross-fertilizations, racial mixings and enforced racial segregations.
What kinds of commonalities do we find among mediterraneans — do we find commonalities of conflict and conquest, of language groups, of historical processes in general?
The most obvious American mediterranean is the Caribbean. On a map, the Caribbean looks roughly like a mirror image of the classical Mediterranean Sea. And like that classical Mediterranean, it affords a mixing of cultures, languages, and peoples, suggesting possibly common histories of race, slavery, economic structures, rebellion, and empire.
Our tendency is to buy in to a “new world”/“old world” perspective on the Americas and Europe, making the American mediterraneans somehow younger than the classical Mediterranean, maybe with the history of that “old world” Mediterranean to be repeated in our own.
But of course the American mediterraneans, as physical geographies, are just as “old” as the classical Mediterranean, just not as part of Anglo-European history.
And the pre-colonial peoples are present in the American mediterraneans, but more as context and even decor than as core participants. The “mediterranean” as idea or metaphor after all is something brought, as Gillman’s account illustrates, from the Anglo-European world, an import that transforms American geography into something significant through its similarities and differences with the classical Mediterranean.
The American mediterraneans, as we know them since Anglo-European colonization, are a friction-heavy grinding and mixing of races and cultures vying to tell the definitive story of their regions. So much so that California history (the Pacific coast being counted among the American mediterraneans), as Gillman illustrates, is riven with fictional Spanish heritage. In so many cases, as in California place names and in the early design of Stanford University’s grounds and buildings, the mythology is memorialized in such a way as to give it a seal of credibility. And in more contemporary commercial times, brand names and marketing messages help to cement the fictional heritage.
The 1884 novel Ramona, by Helen Hunt Jackson, is an especially influential case in point. The novel was intended as a kind of Uncle Tom’s Cabin call to awakening about the native people of the Pacific coast, although the main character is given a Spanish, not native, name. Gillman tells the story of Ramona as an event in itself, digging its own fictional roots into the California soil, through its adoption in “historical” place and street names, California-appropriate baby names, and brand names that evoke California’s (fictional) heritage. It’s never too late to create a past.
Given that America, mediterranean and otherwise, was subject to such an upheaval and intended remaking as it was, fiction is the genre we might expect to convey its heritage.
Non-fictional texts also play a role in building historical consciousness. The time relationship between the Caribbean mediterranean and the classical Mediterranean is flipped in what happens in and around C.L.R. James’ historical work, The Black Jacobins. Through it, the Haitian revolution becomes a model, or an inspiration, or something in- between, maybe a prophecy, not only for future Caribbean revolutions, e.g., in Cuba, but also for African decolonization over a hundred years later.
One interesting point to note, maybe in passing, in the friction between oppressed peoples or races in the Americas and their oppressors is that the oppressed include both indigenous peoples and populations brought to the Americas by their oppressors themselves during colonization. In the latter case, any rebellion or self-assertion is not a re-assertion of a native conquered people but something else sitting higher in the historical/cultural timeline.
Mass scale colonization, the slave trade, and the fate of indigenous peoples make for a complicated story of heritage in the Americas, and fertile ground for story-telling that gives us our sense of what’s “real” in our geo-history.
All of this is my experience of reading Susan Gillman’s book. I came away with a deepened appreciation of the role of story-telling in the creation of heritage. At the same time, I came away with a related sensitivity to the big questions about the relationships between geography and history.
Maybe a little perversely, the direction of the arrow in any kind of geographical determinism began to flip back and forth in my mind. We can certainly talk of the influence of physical geography on cultures and their mixings in history. But we can also talk of the influence of the histories that we construct on our geographical characterizations, e.g, on casting those American seas and coastlines as “mediterraneans” in the first place.
Displaying 1 of 1 review