This chapter explores developments in hemispheric and transamerican studies by grounding discussions of colonialism and incommensurability in narrations of place-names. It moves from the Pacific to the Midwest, using Commodore David Porter’s Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean, from the War of 1812, as a case study. Porter is of note not only because he was an important source for Herman Melville’s Pacific writings but also because his military travel writings sought to make the Marquesas part of the US political and popular imaginary. In renaming-to-claim the islands, Porter worked to undermine Indigenous epistemologies and histories. The chapter then turns to the Midwest, examining the Latin American place-names across the region – names that offer a nineteenth-century prehistory to accounts of widespread Midwestern Latinx presence. Surprisingly, stories of Porter’s battle off the coast of Chile in Journal of a Cruise have fed an imperialist “Latin American mapping” of Indiana through the naming of the city of Valparaiso, in Porter County. Using stories of place naming from the Indigenous Pacific and Latinx Midwest, the chapter highlights the vital necessity of hemispheric and transamerican literary studies for the nineteenth century.

Is modernism the most apt term for the literary efflorescence that took place in the first decades of the twentieth century across a range of regional and cultural contexts? What are the advantages and disadvantages of considering the heterogeneous collective of the Americas together? This essay spotlights significant Latinx writers, texts, and exchanges seldom included in conversations about American modernism, as it discusses the development of Latinx literature and Spanish-language literatures within the geographical bounds of what is now the US. Doing so reveals the crucial contributions of Latinx poets and the role of translation in fueling literary innovation.

This chapter frames the OSPAAAL within the longer historical arc of the interwar League Against Imperialism (LAI). It argues that the OSPAAAL recovered five major ideological tendencies of the LAI’s understudied Americas-based section, the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas (La liga anti-imperialista de las Américas, LADLA), created in Mexico City in 1925. Despite the similarities of the political projects of these organizations, they exhibited a major difference in that the LADLA, in its early years, demonstrated less commitment to Black struggles in the Americas and was more focused on organizing with Indigenous communities. Through fashioning itself as a non-race-based global movement that prioritized Black struggles, the OSPAAAL aimed to correct this limitation of its predecessor. However, although the OSPAAAL focused on Black struggles from its inception, it did so largely with respect to African Americans in the United States and South Africa, repeating the tendency of its predecessor to elide the problems of anti-Black racism in Latin America.

Mary Pat Brady’s chapter poses an alternative approach to hemispheric fiction by reading not according the scales of concentric geometries of space (local, regional, national, transnational), but instead reconceptualizing what she terms “pluriversal novels of the 21st century.” She argues for attending to the complexly mixed temporalities, perspectives, and languages of novels that reject the dualism of monoworlds (center/periphery) for the unpredictability of stories anchored in multiple space-times. While this is not an exclusively 21st-century phenomenon, she shows that pluriveral fiction has flourished recently, as works by Linda Hogan, Jennine Capó Crucet, Julia Alvarez, Gabby Rivera, Karen Tei Yamashita, Ana-Maurine Lara, and Evelina Zuni Lucero demonstrate.