“From Columbia to Colombia: A Cultural Appropriation of Liberty in the Age of Revolutions, 1775-1807,” October 31 Colloquium with University of Texas-Austin Prof. Lina del Castillo

Mapping “Columbian” and “Colombian” imaginaries onto one another, University of Texas Associate Professor of History and Latin American Studies Lina del Castillo’s talk will examine how the goddess Columbia’s inclusive armies that Phillis Wheatley Peters evokes in “His Excellency General Washington” re-appear, in appropriated form, in the multi-racial Colombian forces of liberation forged by Francisco de Miranda in the early 19th century. The talk will take place on October 31 at 3:30pm in Jesse 410, and this post will be updated with live stream links as they become available.

Abstract

Why is “Colombia,” in South America, spelled with two “o”s and not “Columbia”? To best answer this question from history, we must explore two remarkable figures from the Age of Revolution: Phillis Wheately Peters (c. 1753-December 5, 1784) and Francisco de Miranda (1750-1816). After publishing her first book of poems in 1773, Wheatley gained freedom from slavery and dedicated a poem to General George Washington, who had it published in 1776. The poem allegorizes the goddess “Columbia,” whose armies (inclusive of people of color) would win freedom from Britannia (and from slavery). By 1784, when Miranda claimed to have met Wheately Peters in Boston, Columbia was everywhere. Few attributed the goddess to Wheately Peters, however. Miranda joined in this cultural erasure, appropriated Columbia, and adjusted the name to match the Spanish language’s spelling conventions. Delving into late 18th-19th-century poetry, correspondence, newspapers, broadsides, pamphlets, and books, this article demonstrates how Miranda’s “Colombia” tapped into trans-Atlantic imaginaries seeking to wrest key territories from Spanish control. Significantly, the lecture suggests how the armies Wheatley Peters conjured for Columbia seemed to stow away aboard Miranda’s Leander expedition of 1806 while docked in Jacmel, Haiti, as he called for people of color to join the Colombian armies of liberation. Miranda’s attack failed. In part, this was because he landed in Coro, Venezuela, the site of a brutal campaign of repression against a multi-racial uprising seeking to abolish slavery in 1795. Spain’s spy network also foiled the attempt. A Colombian imaginary nevertheless survived.

Lina del Castillo is Associate Professor of History and Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her B.A. in History from Cornell University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Miami. Her research focuses on the intersections between 19th-century republicanism, scientific thinking, the public sphere, and visual culture. Del Castillo’s first book, Crafting Republic for the World: Scientific, Geographic, and Historiographic Inventions of Colombia, examines how an array of nineteenth-century Spanish Americans marshaled new histories, new sciences, and new geographies to offer radical new ways of understanding the past. Del Castillo’s second book project, Colombia’s Paper Empire: Cosmopolitanism, Print Culture, and Geopolitics in the Age of Revolutions, examines how a transnational and transatlantic cosmopolitan community came to invent, print, embrace, and finally disown a continental Colombian vision. Del Castillo’s research has been sponsored by the University of London, the Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame, the John Carter Brown Library, the Fulbright, and the National Science Foundation.