“The Silver Queen”: US Imperialism and A Song of Ice and Fire

I am submitting a paper concerned with investigating the events of Cisneros Affair of 1897. In the course of my research, I found that the vast majority of prior scholarship focused on the affair in the context of US Imperialism and print culture. Consequently, scholars rarely examined the actual events of the affair, and so the majority of scholarship accepted the American version of events in which Cisneros is an undeserving victim of Spanish Imperialism as deeply gendered and racially charged but accurate overall, . However, several scholars acknowledged evidence of an alternative telling of the story in which Cisneros attempted to kill a Spanish officer. A wide ranging survey of scholarship and primary sources presents a strong argument for an alternative interpretation. I argue there is a strong possibility that Cisneros was not a helpless innocent but in fact schemed to murder a Spanish officer for the cause of Cuban Independence.

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Disentangling US Feminism from US Imperialism

Feminist Accountability ◽

10.18574/nyu/9780814777169.003.0009 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 185-213

Author(s):

Ann Russo

Keyword(s):

Social Policy ◽

War On Terrorism ◽

Empire Building ◽

Us Imperialism ◽

The Us ◽

Us Empire

Recognizing how enmeshed mainstream feminist discourses are in US empire building, this essay offers ways of disentangling US ideas about solidarity from efforts of imperial conquest through a lens of accountability. The essay takes as a case in point the ways that feminist efforts have fed into the “war on terrorism” as it has played out in the US occupation and war in Afghanistan post-9/11 as well as in the context of Islamophobic and anti-Arab social policy and violence in the US. An accountability lens shifts to a solidarity grounded in mutuality and interconnectedness.

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