ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a broad synopsis of four major trends underwriting the features of antebellum landscape representation discussed in other chapters of this book: travel narratives, natural history books on race and environment, academic textbooks on political economy, and Abolitionist publications treating Black labor. These subjects intersect by articulating similar notions of racial belonging, adaptability, and entitlement—the rationales, ostensibly spiritual and biological, devised to justify expansion into indigenous territory, Black exclusion from the colonized regions, and, afterward, the inculcation of a mode of subjectivity among white men that was dutifully respectful of propertarian theories of rights. An overarching claim in this book is that the Anglo-American cultural imaginary understood the aesthetic appreciation of landscape as a sign of aesthetic superiority that justified sovereignty over the continent, and this chapter will provide a wealth of textual evidence for this, thereby underwriting much of what is said in the other main chapters.
