This study of the years of Carpentier’s revolutionary commitment in Havana focuses on his activities and travels around the world, his contacts with Latin American writers, lectures and essays written during that time. Fornet argues that while these years did not yield much literary outcome, they did matter for Carpentier’s commitment to collective projects, such as the directorship of the Editorial Nacional and other important official functions. Fornet points to references, in some of Carpentier’s essays, to other writers and to earlier chronicles, such as an early review of the Soviet author Vsevolov Ivanov’s “Armored Train” from 1926, where Carpentier had noted that a revolution requires a new order of ideas, and that it mattered to stay with the revolution. The chapter suggests that Carpentier’s decision to return to Cuba was consistent with what he had written earlier. Among other multiple activities during that time, Carpentier’s interest in popular music are discussed, as well as the premieres of two of his ballet scenarios.

Allen Ginsberg visited China in 1984, first as part of an American delegation of writers and then as a private traveler. He visited many cities over a period of several months and spent time lecturing on American poetry. He found China oppressive and, in many ways, disappointing, and also he suffered many health problems owing to the pollution there; but nonetheless his time in China was a creatively fertile period for him, resulting in a number of important poems. This chapter details his travels around China, focusing on a sense of paranoia that plagued him because he was in a totalitarian state where he was constantly observed. It also looks at the poems that emerged from his trip, examining the various influences his inquiries into Chinese poetry had on his own work.

This chapter tackles relationships between Allen Ginsberg and the New York School poets as more than biographical. It considers how Ginsberg and the New York School poets reinterpreted qualities of heightened emotion and supple linguistic powers that are featured and valued in T. S. Eliot’s poetry and criticism. Ironically, this influence counters the impersonal poetic qualities for which Eliot’s influence is more commonly known and which helped to impersonalize much post-World War II poetry to which New York School, Beat, and Confessional Poetry mutinied. However, Ginsberg and the New York School poets led this vanguard earlier and to more effect than Robert Lowell and others described in or influenced by M. L. Rosenthal’s 1959 Nation article, “Poetry as Confession.” Like Eliot, Ginsberg and the New York School poets emphasize the role of the second person addressee, particularly in the works of Frank O’Hara and his “Personism.”

Chapter 5 examines the demise of urban collectivization after 1961. While the production side of urban communes had its problems, it remained economically profitable; it was communal welfare services (canteens, childcare, etc.) that were deemed to be wasteful and dysfunctional and were eventually disbanded, and this could not but have disastrous consequences for female labor and the project of female liberation. Many workers, newly subjected to the double disciplining of industrial labor and family chores, protested these closures, and archival sources convey their dismay and their vocal criticism, which highlighted the continued devaluation of female workers and of their labor, both in the home and in the factory.

The chapter provides an overview of the multifaceted cultural significance of Allen Ginsberg. While Ginsberg appeared in numerous works, performances, and actions from the late 1950s until his death in 1997 (and continues to enjoy an afterlife in popular and literary culture), in every case these appearances mean something. Hypersensitive Beatnik misfit, spokesman for the Summer of Love, conduit for Eastern mysticism, drug advocate, punk rocker, itinerant scholar, and gay-rights champion (to name only the most prominent of Ginsberg’s manifestations), Ginsberg’s lasting representation – that of the gifted and innovative poet – is the one that will linger.

For his 1920s ballet librettos, Alejo Carpentier drew inspiration from the groundbreaking spectacles that ensembles such as Les Ballets Russes produced in Europe during the avant-garde era, even though he had not witnessed those theatrical productions. Rather, he experienced them from afar – as a vicarious spectator – in the act of reading texts about them. Carpentier approached the ballet libretto as an eclectic and experimental literary genre in which to explore his wide-ranging intellectual interests: in various styles of avant-garde art, music and theatre (from Futurism to Jean Cocteau’s poetics of the commonplace), as well as in politics, Afro-Cuban culture and ethnography. Although he held no direct contact with the artists creating experimental ballets in Europe and elsewhere in Latin America, he saw them and himself as forming an international community – which illustrates the extent to which the transatlantic and hemispheric networks of the avant-garde operated as imagined communities.

Chapter 7 examines how a handful of incumbents managed to establish long-lasting dictatorships in the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Panama, and Venezuela, the four other political systems with modal levels of instability (Chapter 6 examines the five other such systems). This chapter also explains why, of the nine modal cases, only the Venezuelan political system managed to leave the Coup Trap by building a constitutional democracy. It is the ability to continue organizing coup coalitions, I argue, that ends democratic experiments; it takes time for a large enough coalition of interests to impose civilian solutions on acute political conflicts, that is, to punish and therefore prevent defection from its ranks.

This essay reflects on the challenges and intentions behind translating Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World. He examines the delicate balance between fidelity to the original and fluency in English, striving to preserve Carpentier’s baroque style and powerful themes of colonialism, slavery and racism. The chapter delves into the cultural and historical layers of the novel, especially its foundation in lo real maravilloso – a Latin American lens where the marvelous and real coexist. Through personal insight, the author portrays translation as both an impossible and an essential act that revitalizes meaning for contemporary readers.

Drawing extensively on his years in Paris both before and after his enforced flight from Havana in 1928, Carpentier’s early music criticism up to 1939 not only sought to stimulate debate among the Cuban vanguardia and raise awareness of repertoire then still largely unknown in Havana but also represents a narrative for his own aesthetic advocacies in his quest to establish a unique sense of Cubanidad. Far from mere journalism, Carpentier’s music criticism constitutes a workshop of ideas that nourished his literary trajectory, while also proposing European modernism as a potent model for establishing a distinctively Latin American identity. This essay explores these ideas, demonstrating how Carpentier aimed to counter the entrenched conservativism of contemporary concert life in Havana, at the same time shedding valuable light on the activities of the Parisian avant-garde and his unique position as both creative participant and critical observer.

This chapter explores underlying links between Carpentier’s life and works. It points out that because of his asthma, the boy did not receive a systematic education but read a lot. The phases of his longer apprenticeship can be divided in two, his years in Cuba, and then the years spent in Paris. While Carpentier distanced himself from socialist realism at the time, he committed himself to the defense of the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War. There is no doubt that as the youngest member of the Minorista generation of Cuban intellectuals, Carpentier worked consistently towards artistic, social, linguistic and political transformation.

The Educating for American Democracy report (2021) proposes a national- consensus approach to civics and history education for K-12 public schools, emphasizing civic knowledge and civic virtues as the priority, and the necessary foundations for constructive and responsible civic participation. It then has three sections: (a) Tocqueville, Common Schools, and the Invention of American Civics – including discussion of Horace Mann, and Henry Randall Waite and the American Institute of Civics; (b) Educating for American Democracy: Civic Knowledge and Civic Virtues – summarizing the seven Themes of the report and its Roadmap of curricular guidance (ranging from Civic Participation and We the People to A New Constitution and A People in the World); and (c) American Exemplars of Reflective Patriotism and Civic Honesty – with subsections on Abolitionism and the Constitutional Confidence of Douglass and Lincoln; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and American Justice for Women; and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Persistent Hope in American Justice.

Allen Ginsberg taught Shelley’s notion of the poet as legislator and the Romantic ideologeme that art could save the world, and conceived of the poet as shaman. He heard his father recite Romantic verse daily for years before he learned to read. This informed his championing of poetry’s “aural renaissance,” in which he played a role. Ginsberg’s early exposure to the first blues recordings made him a lifelong aficionado who taught blues as poetry. Immersion with Kerouac and friends in the New York jazz scene of the 1940s–1950s informed his and Kerouac’s writing, as they adapted jazz – which they equated to “Black speech” – in their writing. The Beats’ synthesis of post-Whitmanic American poetics with the rhythms and inflections of African-American vernacular speech took that argot to the masses, and influenced the 1960s generation of rockers, in particular the two musical phenomena that would carry the Beat/Romantic vision into global mass culture: Bob Dylan and the Beatles.