Bringing Home the Picture: Mark Twain’s Anti-Imperialism as Visual Mediation

Abstract:This essay examines Twain’s anti-imperialism as a theory and method of visual mediation. In so doing, the essay reveals the degree to which Twain appropriated methods of colonial visual culture to formulate his critiques of imperialism, and it reconsiders the relationship between Twain’s anti-imperialism and his late embrace of a mechanistic, determinist philosophy of history and of human nature. The essay brings together a wide range of Twain’s late work—including Following the Equator, King Leopold’s Soliloquy, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” What Is Man?, “The United States of Lyncherdom,” and Twain’s autobiographical dictation on the Moro Crater Massacre—to consolidate a theory and method of “bringing home the picture” from Twain’s wide-ranging experiments in visual mediation. The essay argues that Twain’s primary contributions to anti-imperialist thought lie principally in the mediational strategies he developed to transmute geopolitical abstractions into immediate images.