"The Itinerant Man": Crèvecoeur's Caribbean, Raynal's Revolution, and the Fate of Atlantic Cosmopolitanism

Recovering the Caribbean dimensions of J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur's art and thought raises at least as many new critical problems as it illuminates familiar ones. Full understanding of the man and his masks demands a supple awareness of shifting and overlapping attitudes toward Caribbean colonies and colonists in England, France and North America, of the variable winds of literary fashion in each of these locales, and of the intra- and interimperial trade disputes that often lay beneath specific attitudes and tastes. Works such as "Sketches of Jamaica" should continue to pose exemplary problems for 18th century American studies as it moves toward a multilingual and transnational understanding of the colonial Americas.