This chapter proposes a new analysis of Mexican Romanticism, from José María Heredia to the Reforma generation. It considers how many of its canonical authors, such as Guillermo Prieto, Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, and Ignacio Ramírez, write an important part of their production privileging the first-person plural, and thus, effectively make the collective subject central. This We should, in turn, be read in the light of their considerable political agency. This chapter argues that what defines the complex temporality particular to the Romantic poem is that both the I and the We simultaneously pose each other as presupposition. The I can only exist as a singularity that the We is unable to assimilate and thus excretes. Yet, at the same time, it is only through the outside gaze of the person who does not belong to it that a group may crystallize as a true collectivity.

In the wake of the Mexican Revolution and its long aftermath, a distinguished lineage of Mexican poets that were also – and perhaps more importantly – outstandingly gifted essayists, made a sustained effort to reconstitute a national tradition fully inserted in Occidentalism. This chapter examines this great synthesis of the critical poets, beginning with Alfonso Reyes, followed by the Contemporáneos group, and arriving at the major accomplishments of Octavio Paz. The chapter focuses on Paz, establishing the different sources of his ideas on critical poetry and then examining some of his most significant compositions in this vein, with a particular focus on “Himno entre ruinas.”

This chapter is devoted to the forms of public activation of poetry. Such poetic performances comprise the spectacular (and heavily attended) mode of public performance that marked the success of Modernista poet Amado Nervo, and, later, the declamaciones by Berta Singerman. The decline of this type of dramatic performance was followed by more intimate poetic activations that can be traced through the recordings of collections such as Voz Viva de México. Even this sotto voce reading – in which the music of the verse plays a central role –has been challenged more recently by poets attuned to spoken word and poetry slam practices, and who have garnered considerable and well-deserved attention, among them Rojo Córdova, José Eugenio Sánchez, and Rocío Cerón.

The death of Spain’s sickly and heirless King Carlos II in 1700 began the War of Spanish Succession (1701-1714), which brought the French House of Bourbon to the Spanish throne and initiated a series of wars that would shape much of Spain’s eighteenth century. Spanish-British conflict was at the center of the subsequent War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739-1749); and the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763). The desire to control Spanish American markets for consumer goods and for African slaves were at the center of these conflicts, and also shaped the eighteenth-century reform agenda known as the Bourbon reforms, which included measures designed to liberalize trade within the Spanish empire, streamline imperial administration, and transform indigenous Americans into productive workers and consumers of Spanish goods. The chapter also examines the early Age of Revolutions in Spanish America, surveying the indigenous rebellions in Peru that are often referred to as “the Túpac Amaru rebellion,” but were actually three separate, overlapping conflicts. It briefly examines Spain’s contributions to the American Revolutionary War, and concludes by discussing Spain’s involvement in and reaction to the Haitian Revolution.

The history of Central America during the Age of Atlantic Revolutions poses a conundrum. Between 1808 and 1821, the kingdom of Guatemala failed to display any sustained or widespread opposition to the Spanish colonial order. This apparent lack of engagement with the Atlantic revolutionary experience suggests that the colony was an anomaly in an empire that witnessed multiple examples of revolutionary sentiment. However, like the majority of the Spanish Empire, the isthmus did not confront the political chaos produced by the collapse of the Bourbon monarchy with either equanimity or unanimity. Here, as elsewhere, peninsular authorities hunkered down in a defensive stance, fearing both foreign subversion and creole pretensions. Here, as elsewhere, local grievances flared into ill-defined uprisings and regional interests gained ground against the metropolitan and colonial capitals. Here, as elsewhere, opportunists manipulated the crisis to advance personal agendas, while idealists sought to sow the seeds of real revolution among the wider population. Yet, here, as elsewhere, a popular majority failed to mobilize against the established order and preferred to either keep faith with colonial institutions or hold out hope for the possibility of imperial reform until independence became the only viable option.

This chapter returns to American fascination with the Orient in the modernist era to consider the work of Asian writers in the US in a period of rising nativism and hardening policies of exclusion. The modernist aesthete and the modern liberal mark out defining poles for the reception of literary works by Asians in this period, and my discussion is structured around the influence of the high modernist orientalism of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell in the work of Sadakichi Hartmann and Yone Noguchi, the strictures of Pearl Buck’s interwar humanitarianism for the work of Lin Yutang and H. T. Tsiang, and finally a pair of writers unfettered by prevailing Orientalist modes, Carlos Bulosan and José Garcia Villa. All of these writers present transpacific imaginations unconstrained by their constituting bonds: they fashioned new selves, pitched anti-imperialist philosophies, and produced electrifying art.

This chapter argues that the European utopian tradition was significantly transformed by Latin American essayists in the early twentieth century. The author focuses on the Mexican writer Alfonso Reyes, whose works were crucial in defining the notion of “the New World” as a postcolonial space, as well as on José Vasconcelos’s widely read utopian essay La raza cósmica (1925).

This essay offers a three-part periodization of the Latin American novel in dialogue with 1960s dependency theory, arguably Latin America’s most important contribution to a wider Marxist tradition. Against the backdrop of a widespread turn toward textualist modes of analysis in the field of literary studies since the 1980s, this essay argues that dependency theory and the novel offer parallel means through which to analyze the structured nature of Latin American “difference” as arising from within – and not outside or beyond – the order of capital. Moving from nineteenth-century Brazilian realism to 1960s “Boom” narrative to contemporary Mexican noir, and drawing from pioneering critics such as Roberto Schwarz, Jean Franco, and Hernán Vidal, the essay argues that both dependency theory and the novel remain vital to excavating a history of the present.

Chapter 6 further documents and analyzes slaves’ criticism of early republican principles and antislavery policies. Antioquia slave leaders emerged as vanguard abolitionists in 1812, folding critical antislavery conventions from the judicial forum into emerging anti-Spanish, egalitarian, and republican doctrines. They proposed that the liberation of slaves should be an immediate purpose of the new republic, and suggested that slaves fully belonged in their homeland of Antioquia – a critique of limited republican citizenship. But republican leaders paid no attention to this exegesis of liberty, claiming that the slaves’ immediate liberation would bring about chaos. This tension would be inherited by the Republic of Colombia’s manumission law of 1821, which closed the possibility of immediate abolition. Still, powerful Popayán masters, denounced by the former slave Pedro Antonio Ibargüen as “aristocrats,” continued to defend inequality and bondage. They undermined even limited antislavery legislation on the groundless notion that setting slaves free from their masters would unleash a war of black against white and paralyze gold mining.

The slaves of Antioquia, studied in this chapter, experienced a constant tension between captivity and geographic mobility. Many easily and frequently talked to other slaves and to free people, sharing their hopes that an end of slavery was possible. Slave leaders tried collectively to press for the end of their enslavement. After Antioquia’s transformation into a republic devoted to individual freedom in 1812, slave leaders emerged as the first critics of the founding documents and legal principles of this new polity. Felix José de Restrepo and other members of Antioquia’s independent government partially listened to those criticisms. They amalgamated experiences and perspectives that were first developed in Cartagena and Popayán, inviting revolutionary colleagues to consider that legislators and forward-looking governments had an obligation to favor freedom over slavery. Antioquia passed Colombia’s first antislavery law in 1814. Based on the free womb principle, the law was correctly understood by slaves as a legal act with limitations and ambivalences. But the Spanish Restoration of 1816 halted this law and all other antislavery and anti-Spanish initiatives.

The ‘extended Caribbean’ provides a trans-American framework for linking José Martí and José Rizal at the Atlantic and Pacific ends, geographic and temporal, of the Spanish Empire, marking one possible moment of Caribbean literature in transition. This essay focuses on how each of these artist-activists uses translation of Spanish and English, as two of the colonial languages of the Atlantic and Pacific empires, in order to reveal the parallels between the two figures and their respective nationalist struggles during the 1890s. Put another way, the essay explores how far we can stretch the ‘Caribbean’ to account for the trans-global anticolonial imagination in the disappearing Spanish Empire of this time.