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.

How do Indigenous studies methodologies and concepts bear on nineteenth-century literary studies? How does Indigenous studies reconfigure accepted signposts of the field of nineteenth-century studies, from its temporal ending and beginning points, to scholarly objects of study? As much as these questions might seem to make the familiar scholarly move of asking what happens when we bring two fields together, we argue that Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) poses unique questions and directions to nineteenth-century studies. At the same time, we argue that engagement with Indigenous studies must go beyond simply reading works that feature or are written by Indigenous peoples to more substantively engaging with NAIS as a methodological orientation and field. We posit that NAIS contains methodologies for understanding not just Native American literatures but topics that have long been mainstays of nineteenth-century American literary studies, including dispossession, race, citizenship, language ideologies, and gender.

While recent scholarship in the Latinx nineteenth century has emphasized the print culture processes informing Spanish-language textual production, the field has also been energized by a focus on prominent authors. This article traces the tension between emphasizing a representative subject (author) versus the way print culture provides insight into lived experiences in sociopolitical contexts. The piece turns to debates over the novel Jicotencal and the attraction of Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton and José Marti as representative figures to trace scholarly developments over the last two decades. Looking toward future directions, the chapter envisions ongoing attention to archival holdings and intersections with critical projects such as queer and Indigenous studies. The last section emphasizes the importance of translation for research in the Latinx nineteenth century.

This essay uses concepts drawn from the field of New Materialism, which posits that material objects possess forms of agency that shape human culture rather than just being passively acted upon, to move the history of the book beyond common assumptions that “the book” is a physically coherent and obviously identifiable entity. Looking closely at how the transportation infrastructure of the nineteenth-century print market determined and complicated American understandings of what a book was, it uses the legal and aesthetic debates triggered by evolving distinctions between bound and unbound texts to explore the historically malleable nature of “the book.” Concentrating particularly on the US postal system, which constantly struggled to define and regulate the printed matter passing through it during the nineteenth century as publishers sought to access cheaper circulation rates by presenting book-like material in periodical formats, this study of quasi-books ranges from Washington Irving’s Sketch Book (1819–1820) through the “mammoth weeklies” of the 1840s to the “Library” series of the 1870s.

In the last ten years, as nineteenth-century Americanists have turned their attention to disability as an analytical category for their own field, they have used and developed new tools and modes of analysis to map a much more complex disability landscape. In this chapter, I turn to Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) to ask what a fictionalized autobiography written from the experience of a disabled Black woman can show us about the complexity and limitations of our critical understandings of disability in the period. Whereas we have been trained to look for disability in nineteenth-century American literature as represented flatly and relegated to the margins, Wilson keeps disability at the center of her narrative. Such a reading employs the method of historical cripistemology – that is, it begins from the experiences and knowledge of disabled people in the past – here, Harriet Wilson’s – to reframe our understanding of literature and culture. In Our Nig, Wilson uses her own experience to break with familiar Black and white forms for narrating disability in the antebellum period. Taking up Our Nig from this perspective demonstrates how careful attention to disability in nineteenth-century American literature and culture – particularly literature written by disabled people – can help us recover the broader scope and greater variety of disability representation in the period, as well as its import for helping us reenvision how we read literature in the period more broadly.

This chapter surveys queer theoretical investigations of nineteenth-century American literature while turning an eye to its future potential. Since the 1990s, the emergence of queer studies shifted focus away from the identitarian scope of lesbian and gay studies to one that engages queer acts, desires, objects, and temporality, to name a few. Queer offers a way out of that Foucaultian maxim, by which in the late nineteenth century the “homosexual became a species.” No longer needing to “know” if one was gay, the rest of the nineteenth century became ripe for a capacious engagement with bodies, affects, and desires. Despite this prominence in queer studies, trans studies is largely absent from early American literary studies. I argue that scholarly pushback on nineteenth-century sexology and its problematic theory of “inverts” has all but left the actual embodiments of those who thwarted gender to the wayside. Neither has the field confronted how nonwhite, brown, and Black people were marked via inversion, such as female hypermasculinity and male effeminacy. If queer studies revisited nineteenth-century literary texts with new vigor, this paper proposes the same through a trans studies reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil,” Archibald Clavering Gunter’s A Florida Enchantment, and Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s Herland.