%0 Journal Article
%T An Am¨¦ricain in Africa: The Transatlantic Creations of Paul Belloni du Chaillu
%A Adam Lifshey
%J Journal of Transnational American Studies
%D 2011
%I 
%X The most popular American writer the year the Civil War began was not, perhaps, American. A nation on the verge of splitting asunder enthusiastically consumed stories of its national identity being consolidated in Africa in a book by Paul Belloni du Chaillu, a young man of ambiguous origins and spectacular credibility issues. His 1861 bestseller Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa about his pith-helmeted exploits marked him as an intrepid scientist or armchair fantasist or, possibly, both. Regardless, his rise from anonymity to transatlantic sensation in a moment of acute national crisis suggests that something important was created and perceived in the shifting identitarian signs of his person and his work. Du Chaillu was not simply a European adventurer or American journalist or African homesteader, all of which he became, for capital of all sorts moved through him in multinational and continental forms. As a result, Du Chaillu deserves a space of prominence in any configuration of a nineteenth-century transatlantic canon. He also merits attention as the author of the last great antebellum American narrative. The fact that the qualifier ¡°American¡± in that statement is utterly debatable is entirely, given 1861, the point.
%K Paul du Chaillu
%K transatlantic
%K Explorations
%K Adventures
%K Equatorial
%K Africa
%K gorilla
%U https://submit.escholarship.org/ojs/index.php/acgcc_jtas/article/view/7014