The "Awful Disclosures" of the West Indies: Nativist Genealogies and Catholic Blackness in Leonora Sansay's Secret History

Abstract:This essay examines the longer literary history of religious nativism that coalesced in early US perceptions of the Caribbean. Reading Leonora Sansay's 1808 Secret History alongside antebellum anti-Catholic propaganda, it demonstrates how early Americans relied on depictions of the revolutionary West Indies to validate ongoing Protestant concerns about Catholicism's perceived threat to moral and racial purity. Portrayed as spaces of transgression among diversely raced bodies, Sansay's Saint Domingue and Cuba anticipate the anxieties that would arise in later anti-Catholic writing. Such depictions illuminate a more geographically diffuse and historically prolonged discourse of nativist thinking, one wherein the revolutionary West Indies comes to serve as a touchstone for forging an enduring partnership between whiteness and an implicitly Protestant US.