This essay examines the literary emergence radical abolitionism in the context of the national, hemispheric, and transatlantic circulation of print. It begins with an overview of the present state of literary scholarship on abolitionist writing and then goes on to analyze several interrelated historical-textual events occurring around 1830. They include the publication of David Walker’s Appeal, William Lloyd Garrison’s emergence as an abolitionist editor and spokesperson, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, and the Jamaican uprising of 1831–32.

This essay lays out the history of the term “America” as a geographic notation that came to be conflated with the US nation-state, and how, in revealing and exploring that elision, hemispheric studies emerged. The essay then argues for reconfiguration of the field as “trans-American studies,” which would emphasize movement and transition beyond America and across America.

Julia Lee identifies temporal, spatial, and affective innovation in 21st century transpacific fiction. Locating formally innovative contemporary Asian American writing in the post-1965 contexts of migration, global economies of labor, environmental anxiety, language difference, and racialized violence, Lee shows how writers have represented new technologies of immediate communication across oceanic flows of migrants, commodities, information, and waste in disjointed, parallel, and non-sequential narrative structures. Childhood trauma lingers across time and geography in a story about a Filipino nurse by Mia Alvar, while novels by Min Jin Lee, Ruth Ozeki, and Thi Bui layer Asian and American modernities, postmodernities, and contemporary present-tenses.

This chapter considers the hemisphere as a geopolitical heuristic for Asian American literature. While the era of 1965 to 1996 is considered pivotal for new growth in Asian American populations in the United States because of liberal reforms in immigration policy, it was also one in which the expansion of the global Cold War led US power to brutally target newly decolonized and revolutionary societies in its fight against Communism. This chapter examines how diasporic Asian literatures from the period illuminate the mechanisms of “development” from the Cold War to the neoliberal, postsocialist present. Beyond registering the presence of Asians in the Americas since the sixteenth century, the chapter argues that various “hemispheric imaginings” grapple with the disavowed operations of political violence by which Latin American and Asian nations were “transitioned” from a region of nonaligned, postcolonial republics to capitalist states ruled by comprador and transnational elites. At the same time, a hemispheric imaginary provides a method for reading artists’ visions of alternate, shared futures and South–South, transracial solidarities that continue to haunt the postcolonial world.