Precursors of Hemispheric Writing: Latin America, the Caribbean, and Early U.S. American Identity

Abstract

Postrevolutionary American writing does not have a strong tradition of being linked to the transnational. Texts that discursively cross national borders or that blend and mix different cultures and histories are usually related to the late nineteenth, the twentieth, or the twenty-first centuries. The “transnational turn” that has been identified in American studies by various critics, if it is put into a historical dimension at all, is mostly traced back to late nineteenth and early twentieth-century developments (Fisher-Fishkin 2005; Elliott 2007). Scholars such as Anna Brickhouse therefore speak of a widely spread “presentism” of transnational analyses based on the assumption that “literary transnationalism in the Americas and the critical perspectives it invites are natural outgrowths of the massive human migrations, urban pluralism, and cultural globalization the hemisphere has witnessed over the course of the twentieth century” (2001, 407). As Brickhouse continues, many of the literary configurations that are linked by critics to the twentieth century “were in fact addressed by writers in the Americas as explicit questions and problems well before the modern and contemporary periods to which they have largely been consigned” (2001, 408).