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Abstract
Acclimatization negotiates adaptation to difference through the management of climate – manifestations of which center, in the nineteenth century, around practices to be adopted and ideological processes to be adapted for imperial expansion outside the temperate, metropolitan centers of culture. The problem presented by tropical climates – popularly considered the white man’s grave – thus serves as a container for the problem presented by race. Taking the erasure of the slave trade from narratives of acclimatization as a point of departure, Claiming Acclimation argues that the afterlives of enslavement practices inform expansionist U.S. policies in the nineteenth century and evince territorial right on the basis of climate management and adaptation in the Caribbean. Attempts to acclimatize would-be colonists, imperialists, and entrepreneurs to the “American” tropics draw upon strategies initially developed to preserve the health of enslaved Africans as they were pressed into tropical and semi-tropical plantation economies that demanded biological, sociological, and linguistic adaptation; acclimatization is recast as a challenge posed to white imperialists, elides the casualties claimed by climate in enslaved populations before the abolition of the slave trade, and naturalizes the survivors of “seasoning” to the tropical environment.
This dissertation contributes to the fields of hemispheric American literature, postcolonialism, and climate historicism through its attention to the region’s uneven racial economies. Acclimatization becomes an instrument of disenfranchisement that trades upon racial anxieties; where adaptation to the tropics is desired as means of increasing U.S. economic and political power, it also risks involuntary racial, social, and cultural degeneration. The project examines U.S. travel narratives, novels, and accounts that explore these tensions through the monopolization of sugar technologies, medical theorizations of native resistance and colonial remittance, and the politicization of linguistic creolization. Acclimatization, however, proves desirable only as a contingent or conditional state; embedded in the ideology of acclimatization, as the erasure of seasoning practices shows, is the loss of autonomy.
