The conclusions distill the key findings of this book’s encounter with theory, cross-national statistical models, and case studies. A prediction-centered multi-method approach demonstrates how case studies fill in the causal gaps of cross-national statistical models to explain the rise and fall of the Coup Trap. And the conclusions identify the mechanisms that kept most political systems submerged in chronic instability – and allowed half a dozen to consolidate stable democratic or authoritarian political orders.

Alejo Carpentier’s biographical self-fashioning, particularly his fabricated Cuban birth, is explored through his early journalism and correspondence with his mother. The chapter argues that Carpentier’s “performative self,” evident in his fashion writing under a female pseudonym, demonstrates a fluidity of identity and a deliberate crossing of borders. This performative aspect is further illuminated by his Oedipal relationship with his mother, as revealed in his letters, where he assumes the role of a husband-substitute after his father’s abandonment. The analysis challenges interpretations that attribute Carpentier’s self-invention to trauma, instead highlighting a consistent “chameleon-like sense of self” that permeated his work and public persona, ultimately contributing to his success and the construction of Latin American literary identity.

Allen Ginsberg’s Judaism is a fraught subject. Although he was brought up in a family that felt itself unquestionably Jewish, his parents did not practice Judaism as a religion. The family felt keenly the brunt of antisemitism and were deeply traumatized by the Holocaust. Both “Howl” and “Kaddish” bear its unmistakable impact. Unlike his father and many others he knew, Ginsberg did not, though, become a booster for the state of Israel. In fact, he came to revile the concepts of nationhood and religious exclusivity, opting instead for an ethos of compassion and fellow feeling. His universalism linked him with secular Jewish pioneers such as Baruch Spinoza, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Sigmund Freud, and Leon Trotsky, all of whom have been characterized as “non-Jewish Jews.” Ultimately, his Jewishness appears most strongly in his practice of “lovingkindness” and in his role as prophet against capitalist greed and militaristic warmongering, which allies him with the prophets of the Hebrew Bible.

The publication of Allen Ginsberg in Context marks a dramatic shift in Ginsberg Studies (and Beat Studies), clearing important new ground for scholarship on the poet. This volume offers a crucial reminder of the need for continued study of Ginsberg’s full body of work and widest range of influences. The case for Ginsberg’s importance has not always been as clear. Ginsberg’s considerable popular readership has not translated often enough into serious attention from scholars. Allen Ginsberg in Context signals to the larger critical community that Ginsberg’s life and work are essential to the study of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry, culture, and political activism. This book starts the necessary conversation as to why Ginsberg’s poetry can still matter. Ginsberg’s body of work might find its big-bang moment in the 1956 publication of “Howl” and the poem’s subsequent triumph against obscenity charges the following year, but his work in its totality can be seen as a primer for how to live and speak freely in a world that increasingly is bent upon state surveillance and restrictions upon movement and expression.

This chapter posits that domesticity played a central role in Ginsberg’s life and work. Although images of mobility recur in his work, reflections on his childhood home and his adult apartment life recur as well. The first section of the chapter interprets Ginsberg’s needs for both travel and a homelife as a nexus rather than a binary opposition. The second section provides an account of his discordant childhood home, a midlife pivot in his sense of the domestic, and the varying circumstances of his apartment existence in the East Village of Manhattan. The final section analyzes the role that home, neighborhood, and his “Jewish-enough” identity played in his poems, including “Manhattan May Day Midnight,” “Fourth Floor, Dawn, Up All Night Writing Letters,” and “My Kitchen in New York.” In Ginsberg's later poems, home is an arena of presentness and a harbor of writing.

This chapter follows Tocqueville in arguing that civic culture must support formal learning in schools and colleges, by providing a social spirit of reflective patriotism. A particular challenge given America’s civic fracture of angry polarization, but also widespread apathy, is to motivate citizens to care about America, citizenship education, and a discursive patriotism; thus, civics now should emphasize stories of American hope and achievement, forging an e pluribus unum out of our pluralism. It then develops the sections: (a) E Pluribus Unum and Civic Hope: Jazz, Constitutionalism, Religious Liberty – with subsections on (i) American Story and Song, Especially Jazz – featuring the Ray Charles version of American the Beautiful, Justice O’Connor and Wynton Marsalis in conversation, and jazz pioneers such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Benny Goodman, (ii) The Declaration and Constitution as Achievements of Harmony, and (iii) Religious Liberty and Pluralism as American Harmony, featuring George Washington, Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Haiti was a remarkably constant presence in Carpentier’s life and its imprint on his narrative fiction and essays has been profound, far-reaching, and indelible. Carpentier’s fascination with Haiti begins with his first novel, ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó! (1933), culminates in The Kingdom of This World (1949) and resurfaces within the transatlantic context of the French Revolution in yet another major work, Explosion in the Cathedral (1962). While traces of Haiti appear in myriad formal and conceptual manifestations throughout Carpentier’s oeuvre, in this essay I suggest that the notion of the Plantationocene, forged by Donna Haraway and Donna Tsing, carries significant critical potential for refocusing Carpentier’s links with Haiti in a manner that is both transdisciplinary and cross-historical.

Reflective civics is a duty and delight for free people, especially Americans, given our founding principles viewing citizenship as not only a right but also a duty and a matter of sacred honor. American schooling K-16, and civic culture, can redress our recent deficits of civic health and of individual mental and spiritual health by emphasizing the higher meaning provided throughout the study of, and civil discussion about, citizenship and self-government in both civil society and public affairs. Then sections on (a) Civic Friendship and Replenishing America’s Civic Capital – including renewal of civil society and voluntary associations; (b) A Sputnik Moment for Academia: Restoring a Higher Civics – emphasizing the need for professors and higher education leaders to provide guidance and a good example on renewing civics, and supporting its renewal in K-12 schooling and civic culture; and (c) Lincoln’s Higher Call – that a renewed civics across K-16 and American culture should emphasize the consensus-forging figure of Lincoln, his magnanimity and statesmanship in the Second Inaugural in particular, calling for “malice toward none” and “charity for all.”

In 1920, the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso accepted a lucrative contract to sing at ten opera performances in Cuba, most of them in Havana’s recently built theater across from the Parque Central. When Caruso arrived in the island, he found a tense political climate: sugar prices had plummeted in the international market, and unemployment and economic crises had led protesting workers to the streets. During his final performance of Verdi’s Aida, a bomb exploded in the theater, sending the audience and musicians into a panic. After the explosion, Caruso’s reaction became the subject of much literary speculation. This chapter explores the accounts of Caruso and the bomb given by Carpentier, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and Mayra Montero, and contrasts them to Caruso’s own version of the events.