With a focus on Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, this chapter examines the sense of belatedness in abolitionist and postabolitionist literature published between the 1860s and the 1930s. Belatedness implied an affective relationship to the global temporality of abolition – a way of feeling time as shame that shaped literature in long-lasting ways. Writers like José Martí and Machado de Assis reflected on the apparently anomalous status of their nations, where slavery was not abolished until 1886 and 1888 respectively. By analyzing canonical literature in light of the Black public spheres that emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth century, this chapter explores questions such as the rejection of African cultures, Whitening ideologies, the fantasy of the submissive slave, the myths and realities of racial democracy, Maroonage, and other forms of slave resistance. Other writers analyzed include Maria Firmina dos Reis, Antônio de Castro Alves, Alfonso Henriques de Lima Barreto, Martín Morúa Delgado, and Francisco Calcagno.

Brazilian novelist, playwright, and journalist Antônio Callado (1917-97) became, in the second half of the twentieth century, synonymous with cultural resistance against the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-85). Documents and scripts found in 2014 at the BBC Written Archives unveil Callado’s experience as a writer working for the BBC Latin American Service in Britain, broadcasting anti-fascist propaganda in Portuguese to Brazilian audiences during World War II. In Brazil, Getúlio Vargas’ dictatorial regime Estado Novo (1937-45) was still emerging from internal clashes between pro-fascist and pro-Allies political factions, which preceded Brazil’s entry into the conflict in August 1942. In Britain between 1941 and 1947, Callado was able to engage with cosmopolitan intellectual networks and to explore literary influences that were not part of the aesthetic and political vocabulary of Brazilian modernists in the 1920s and 1930s. Callado’s socialist turn – which resulted in his political arrests in the 1960s and 1970s – was considerably influenced by his formative war-years. His experiences during World War II also deeply informed the political aspects of his writing, which denounced and derided Brazilian authoritarianism.

The production of coffee for export organized racial capitalism in Brazil and Colombia during the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. The literary fiction from this period reveals an effort by the intellectuals of these countries to conceptualize their nations in the face of the organization of their national economies around deeply racialized modes of production. This chapter surveys a wide range of this fiction, including texts by José Bento Monteiro Lobato, Fernando González, Mário de Andrade, and José Restrepo Jaramillo. It also puts this fiction in dialogue with nonfictional texts such as essays by the Swiss-French writer Blaise Cendrars and the Colombian economist Alejandro López. The chapter shows that the imbrication of racialization and capitalism is particularly evident after the end of the coffee boom in 1929, when writers became more skeptical of the triumphalist narratives of the coffee industry.

This chapter proposes to trace a map following the economic and literary route of money in Latin America between 1890 and 1930, in tune with what was happening in Western Europe and the United States. Money, with all its ubiquity between real and virtual financial capital, had an expansive and global power that altered local imagination: In Latin America, due to both literary and economic forces, we see the proliferation of what this chapter dubs “fictions of money.” Furthermore, it focuses on the Argentine, Brazilian, and Guatemalan cases, given the striking publication of financial novels immediately after the economic crises provoked by fluctuations in the stock market and unbridled speculation, which served to process the actual circulation of money and to negotiate the social experience related to it.

Brazilian novelist, playwright, and journalist Antônio Callado (1917-97) became, in the second half of the twentieth century, synonymous with cultural resistance against the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-85). Documents and scripts found in 2014 at the BBC Written Archives unveil Callado’s experience as a writer working for the BBC Latin American Service in Britain, broadcasting anti-fascist propaganda in Portuguese to Brazilian audiences during World War II. In Brazil, Getúlio Vargas’ dictatorial regime Estado Novo (1937-45) was still emerging from internal clashes between pro-fascist and pro-Allies political factions, which preceded Brazil’s entry into the conflict in August 1942. In Britain between 1941 and 1947, Callado was able to engage with cosmopolitan intellectual networks and to explore literary influences that were not part of the aesthetic and political vocabulary of Brazilian modernists in the 1920s and 1930s. Callado’s socialist turn – which resulted in his political arrests in the 1960s and 1970s – was considerably influenced by his formative war-years. His experiences during World War II also deeply informed the political aspects of his writing, which denounced and derided Brazilian authoritarianism.

Elizabeth Bishop’s contact with Brazilian literature began in the 1950s and extended over a long period of fruitful dialogue with Brazilian writers. Particularly, four poets and a prose writer had important roles in Bishop’s translations and her own poetic production: Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Manuel Bandeira, Vinicius de Moraes, João Cabral de Melo Neto and Clarice Lispector. Correspondences between Bishop and Andrade include the coincidence of recreating memories of childhood and depicting Rio’s urban repertoire. Bishop’s connection with Bandeira range from her poem “To Manuel Bandeira, With a Present” to various other writings. The closest to Bishop, Moraes is present in translation and memories of Ouro Preto. Melo Neto’s and Lispector’s resonances in Bishop’s poetry are respectively visible in “The Burglar of Babylon” and “Brazil, January 1, 1502.” In a discussion that includes epistolary texts, translations, and poetry, this chapter offers a contextual reading of Bishop’s relation with these writers.