The introduction outlines the main issues tackled in the volume and presents urban collectivization during the Great Leap Forward as a case study for the search of a socialist everyday, different from and alternative to the capitalist one. It highlights how this search embodied a specific understanding of the political economy, and how it highlighted contradictions within the Maoist project of revolution. Finally, it describes the sources and methodology adopted in the book.

This chapter discusses the concept of revolution in Carpentier’s works, as it moves from an enthusiastic critique of the modern social order to leftist melancholia. As Rojas shows in his readings of Carpentier’s articles for Carteles and correspondence with José Antonio Portuondo, Carpentier did not take a clear stance toward Stalinism while living in Paris. When living in Venezuela, his Diario is full of critical allusions to the party’s “yoke.” However, a poetics of revolution can be found in his narrative and can be characterized as melancholic in its emphasis on cyclical patterns and on unfinished revolutions. Carpentier’s focus on the global revolutions that made the modern world order beginning in the eighteenth century narrows down in his last epic novel, La consagración de la primavera.

This essay offers an overview both of Alejo Carpentier’s writings and González Echevarría’s own work as a literary critic, especially as it pertains to his monograph, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (1977). He traces the arc of Carpentier’s works, beginning with ¡Ecué-Yamba-Ó! and ending with El arpa y la sombra pointing to recurrent, highly original themes such as Afro-Cuban culture, classical music and jazz, colonial history, and exile, all the while noting Carpentier’s dialogue with a younger generation of Latin American writers. González Echevarría comments on the influence exerted by the concept of “the marvelous real” on Boom writers and magical realism. The essay ends by reflecting on Carpentier’s lies about his biography and points to similarities in his last novel, El arpa y la sombra (1978), between the character Christopher Columbus’s penchant to lie and his foreignness, and Carpentier himself.

This chapter explores Allen Ginsberg’s stay at the now-famous Beat Hotel. Ginsberg, along with his lover Peter Orlovsky and fellow Beat poet Gregory Corso, spent an important sojourn at this spot in Paris. Located in the Latin Quarter, this run-down hotel would come to house other Beats such as William S. Burroughs and Harold Norse as well. Ginsberg’s time there was productive. He produced “At Apollinaire’s Grave” while in Paris and began his long poem “Kaddish” as well, while simultaneously seeing the sights and meeting a variety of famous French poets and artists.

A shared relationship to the city of Paterson, New Jersey, provided common ground for Ginsberg and William Carlos Williams. A key figure in modernist poetry, Williams helped to modernize Ginsberg’s verse through both example and personal instruction. The influence is especially notable in the early work collected in Ginsberg’s Empty Mirror and in poems of the mid 1950s, leading up to Howl, published with an introduction by Williams. Eventually, the two diverged over the structure of the poetic line and the relation of the poet to popular culture. Nevertheless, both in his poetry and in his teaching, Ginsberg continued to honor Williams as one of his masters.

This chapter explores a number of key questions concerning Ginsberg’s choosing India to revive his spiritual, historical, and class-conscious searches through his travels. Ginsberg, as he was Jack Kerouac’s protégé, repeated Jim Crow patterns of white–Other engagement throughout his life and could therefore be seen as insensitive. Another key question has to do with the authenticity of such searches – was Ginsberg really seeking Hindu advice as to how to organize poetry and protest, now that India had been freed from the British? All of these questions raise the issue of Hindu revivalism, which meant taking off the cape of colonial submission that rendered Hinduism to be a kind of penitent orientalism. In the end, was Ginsberg’s trek unique, or did it coincide with other colonial adventures?

While Ginsberg was certainly influenced by earlier generations of writers stretching back to the Metaphysical Poets, contemporary writers were also instrumental in helping him craft his own poetic vision. Foremost among them was his friend Jack Kerouac, who became a source of inspiration, guidance, and mentorship for Ginsberg throughout his life. This chapter explores the twenty-five years of profound yet tumultuous relationship that developed between the two writers, from their encounter in New York City in 1944 to Kerouac’s death in 1969. While their passionate and sometimes turbulent friendship sparked Ginsberg’s creative energy, Ginsberg drew heavily on Kerouac’s themes and stylistics – including his writing method of “spontaneous prose” – which became central to his own poetical voice. Though their relationship eventually fractured in the 1960s owing to political differences and rivalry, Kerouac continued to play a crucial role in shaping Ginsberg’s growth both as a writer and as an individual.

This chapter explores how Carpentier’s activities as a musicologist and music critic extended beyond Cuba and influenced composers, cultural brokers and music scholars throughout the continent. His theorization of a Latin American identity inspired by ideas of creolization and eclectic experimentation provided composers and music critics with useful concepts that helped them reframe their new music as universal through the local while sidestepping the musical “postcard nationalism” that was associated with populist movements after World War II. I examine the legacy of one of Carpentier’s most significant contributions, La música en Cuba (1946), and his relationship to Cuban composers in the decades that followed. I focus on the writings and compositions of scholars and composers who relied on Carpentier’s works to better understand their own musical traditions and compositions, such as Carlos Sandroni, Juan Blanco and Leo Brouwer, who syncretized Carpentier’s lo real maravilloso with Western postmodernist discourse.

This chapter maps Allen Ginsberg’s magnificent epic which dissects the US in the Vietnam era. It shared the National Book Award in 1973. Anchored by “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” the volume’s pivotal poem, it boasts the key line, “I here declare the end of the war,” and includes seventy-five other poems, among them elegies for Neal Cassady and Che Guevara. The chapter shows how Ginsberg links fragments – newspaper headlines, radio broadcasts, lyrics from popular songs and more – into a coherent lament for America itself. It also dissects the journal the poet kept while traveling across the nation and that provided him with the raw material for The Fall of America.

Chapter 6 examines five of the nine modal cases of political instability in the region (the seventh chapter examines the other four). These are the ones where T is neither below nor above one standard deviation of its mean. My model anticipates 77 percent of the years with successful military coups in Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Peru, Panama, Brazil, and Venezuela. Unlike the highly unstable cases I analyze in Chapter 5, each of the modal cases stumbled into more liberalized political orders. Chapter 6 also explores why military coups ended democratic experiments or reformist interludes in Argentina, Guatemala, El Salvador, Peru, and Brazil.

This chapter introduces the long tradition of American thinkers and leaders emphasizing a priority for citizenship education. It then has three sections: (a) Tocqueville’s Affirmation of American Civic Education; (b) Montesquieu’s Philosophy of a Modern and Moderate Civics – including the view of how Christianity can play a moderating role in a modern, democratic-republican civics; and (c) The American Founders on Civic Knowledge and Civic Virtue for Self- Government – including Washington’s great emphasis upon and leadership in civic education.

After introducing the twentieth-century academic skepticism about civics and any component of patriotism in it, and the significant educational deficit and civic harm this approach has caused, this chapter turns to two sections: (a) Tocqueville’s Praise of America’s Reflective Patriotism patriotism – including the six components he sketches in a reflective patriotism, with the role of Christianity balanced against self-interest; and (b) American Civic Exemplars of Patriotism and Reform – featuring questions raised by the study of Douglass, Lincoln, Stanton, Anthony, and King.

This introductory chapter provides a rationale for the study of Allen Ginsberg and his poetry while outlining the major themes, issues, and motivations of the volume. Ginsberg is an essential figure in twentieth-century US poetics. His work is an important part of the larger turn from “closed” to “open” verse forms in the postwar period, and his role as perhaps the major countercultural figure in the 1960s and 1970s meant that his work garnered an international audience. The goal of this volume is to provide readers with the context necessary to understand how Ginsberg’s life and interests shaped his work; how his work, in its turn, entered the greater poetic discourse of the time; and finally, how Ginsberg sought to influence not just American but indeed global political and cultural realities of the postwar period. Taking a broadly chronological approach, this volume charts the wide variety of contexts crucial to understanding not just Ginsberg, his writing, and his career, but many of the larger trends of the long twentieth century as well.

This chapter explores Ginsberg’s poetic adaptations of Mahayana Buddhist ethical teachings known as the Six Perfections. It considers: 1) how Buddhism began (for Allen Ginsberg) and what wisdom within it drew him to develop his poetic sensitivities; 2) how generosity of spirit implicit within a Buddhist ethical framework (known as the Six Paramitas) relates to the continuous syncretism within his work; 3) how liberal openness in his work is essentially a practice of patience; 4) how Buddhist non-Manichean critique became, increasingly, the central ethical constraint of the writing; 5) how joyful humor makes Ginsberg’s evangelism tolerable to secular liberals; and 6) what it means to say that concentration is a form of consecration in Ginsberg’s work.

The Alejo Carpentier Foundation was created in 1993 with the purpose of preserving materials and offering researchers the patrimony left by the author, as well as publishing his work in Cuba and abroad. Regarding the dissemination of the author’s works, the institution, which owns the copyrights for the novelist, has maintained and extended its relations with publishing houses from numerous countries that make his oeuvre known in diverse world languages. The Foundation supports in many ways the study of Carpentier’s life and works (publications in different media outlets, scholarships, consultations, courses, and international colloquiums), but, above all, it facilitates research of a considerable fund of first rate documentation, which is structured as active literature (the editions of his works in multiple languages), secondary literature (the many studies on his work), his personal library and the Carpentier Papers archive. The above is discussed in this chapter following a chronological sequence.