This chapter begins by examining America's civic crisis and the failure of civics in K-16, with remedies proposed including the national-consensus approach of the Educating for American Democracy 2021 study and the renewal efforts in higher education, including public university reforms that establish departments of Civic Thought and Leadership. It then turns to three sections: (a) Franklin’s warning and Lincoln’s: America’s crisis and our civics failure; (b) Rediscovering America’s reflective, discursive patriotism; and (c) American Hopefulness and Exemplars Sustaining the Republic (introducing Washington, Douglass, Lincoln, Stanton, Anthony, and King)

The introduction discusses the ways in which Alejo Carpentier has been seen by critics over time. Showing that much has been said about the writer’s style and vision for a Latin America that is connected to the world, this chapter also discusses critiques of the writer’s unfailing support for the Cuban Revolution and a controversy surrounding his official biography. It further presents readers with the history of Carpentier’s editorial successes and the recent renaissance of interest in his work, and it showcases resources for further Carpentier research. It ends by briefly introducing the six-part division of the book and each of its contributions.

This chapter charts Alejo Carpentier’s connection with Mexico, from his momentous first visit in 1926, when he traveled to Mexico City as editor of Carteles, to his later friendships with major Mexican intellectuals, and including his publishing choices in the early and late phases of his career, (EDIAPSA; Fondo de Cultura Económica; Siglo Veintiuno). It focuses particularly on Carpentier’s friendship with Diego Rivera and his circle, as well as on his depictions of Mexicans living in 1920s Havana. This chapter describes Carpentier as part of a transnational community of intellectuals bonding over shared ideas on avant-garde art and politics. It argues that Mexican literary, visual and musical culture and the Mexican Revolution impacted Carpentier’s life deeply and shaped his vision of Latin America.

This essay explores Alejo Carpentier’s engagement with Afro-Cuban culture in his literary works, analyzing how he incorporates African languages and cultural elements. It examines Carpentier’s perspective on African art and religion, revealing his interpretations and potential misunderstandings of Afro-Cuban traditions. The analysis includes discussions of his poems, essays and novels, focusing on his use of language, imagery and cultural references. Ultimately, the essay contextualizes Carpentier’s work within the broader discourse of Afro-Cuban identity and cultural representation.

Until quite recently, little was known about Alejo Carpentier’s private life and family background, apart from the facts that he chose to reveal, several of which later turned out to be false. This chapter explores a hidden level of Carpentier’s literary work, characterized by repeated and cryptic references to family traumas involving Alejo’s father, Georges Carpentier. Especially significant are the circumstances surrounding Georges’s choice to abandon his wife and son during a difficult period; events which the author never referred to publicly, but which we can now start to discern with the help of previously unpublished documents. The details of this trauma and the way the author turned it into a part of his fictional universe represent an important key if we wish to understand the emotional and psychological undercurrents fueling the author’s creative writing process.

This chapter explores the importance of Ginsberg’s sexuality in the context of his life and work. Aware of his nonnormative sexual desires from an early age, Ginsberg’s lifelong quest for self-understanding was necessarily shaped and informed by poetic explorations into his sexuality, his relationship with which was sometimes fraught. His work bears the imprint of his enduring preoccupation with the variable experiences of queer minds and bodies (often his own) in both straight and queer spaces. The chapter examines selected canonical poems including “A Supermarket in California,” “My Sad Self,” “Howl,” “City Midnight Junk Strains,” and “The Green Automobile,” in order to highlight their generative provocations in the context of a period of prevailing queer invisibility and to emphasize Ginsberg’s legacy as a queer poet in the twenty-first century. The chapter also examines the relationship between Ginsberg’s status as a queer pioneer and some of the more troubling aspects of his in some areas limited and limiting visions and modes of sexuality.

This chapter describes the initial phase of the urban commune campaign, in the second half of 1958, and it investigates both Party official rhetoric and archival sources from the early communes in Beijing to show how early models of collectivization were presented as “prescriptive descriptions” to be followed, but also how contradictions between the different goals of this mass movement surfaced almost immediately and framed the praxis of activists and workers at the street level.

During his month-long visit to Cuba in 1965, Allen Ginsberg’s ideals of expressive freedom, sexual openness, and poetic individualism came into direct conflict with the increasingly repressive Castroist regime. Invited by the state organization Casa de las Américas to judge a poetry competition, Ginsberg quickly drew scrutiny from the regime for his outspoken views on homosexuality, drug use, and freedom of expression. His subsequent surveillance by the state’s vice squad, arrest, and deportation underscored the Cuban government’s intolerance for nonconformist expression, especially as it pertained to sexuality and dissent. Ginsberg’s experiences, recorded in his Cuban diaries, letters, and poems, reveal a central paradox of revolutionary politics: While seeking liberation, regimes might deploy repressive mechanisms of censorship and control. Ginsberg’s confrontation with Cold War ideologies – both US and Cuban – solidified his vision of a humanist poetics aimed at disrupting authoritarian systems and expanding consciousness through individuals’ radical self-expression.

This chapter argues that it is in the enlightened self-interest of higher education to renew a top-priority place for citizenship education both to restore core academic missions and to redress the deficit of public confidence that recent academic trends have yielded. It then develops four sections: (a) Renewing the Academy’s Core Mission through Civic Education – including the public university reform movement establishing new colleges, departments, and centers of civics, also renewal efforts in private universities and across higher education, with an emphasis on restoring intellectual diversity and lively discourse in academia through renewal of American civics; (b) A Higher Civics: Civic Thought and Leadership – on the rise of a new academic field in the past decade, including a summary of a course on American civic thought, institutions, and political debate recently developed at Arizona State University; and (c) Leadership Education and the American Balance of Theory and Prudence, emphasizing the importance of study of statesmanship, statecraft, and leadership to prepare public servants for our constitutional democratic republic; and (d) America Civics and Renewed Pluralism in Campus Discourse.

Carpentier was an expert on architecture: his father was a French architect and as a student the future novelist attended the University of Havana’s School of Architecture. Though he wrote extensively about Cuban architecture – most notably in The City of Columns – he barely discussed the Modern movement which was so influential in Havana’s building boom during the 1950s. This blind spot is puzzling, especially when we consider that the novelist lived in Paris, read L’esprit nouveau, and was familiar with the writings of Le Corbusier. This chapter explores why Carpentier deliberately avoided writing about the modern architecture that transformed the Vedado district of Havana in the decade before the Cuban Revolution by examining the built environments that appear in The City of Columns and The Chase.

Allen Ginsberg’s entrance into Columbia University in 1943, through to his graduation in 1948, constitute a key phase in his evolution as poet and inerasable presence in the Beat Movement. The classes he takes there with key teachers such as Lionel Trilling become essential even as he develops familiarity with the Manhattan of Greenwich Village, East Harlem, the galleries, jazz, café culture, and the darker reaches of Times Square and 42nd Street. While at Columbia he experiences his celebrated Blake vision and meets Lucien Carr, Herbert Huncke, David Kammerer, Henri Cru, and, essentially, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. Briefly expelled from Columbia, with a brief stint in the maritime service which takes him to West Africa, he returns to the university and embarks even more fully on the career which will lead to “Howl” and his standing as Beat legendary name.

The seven decades of Allen Ginsberg’s life and poetic work coincided with major changes in societies’ approaches to the mentally ill. Mid century, near rock-bottom in this difficult evolution, Allen burst onto the scene with “Howl” and then “Kaddish”. Allen’s shocking and monumental works said we need to face mental illness and madness, stop seeing them as apart from ourselves, find spiritual meaning, take risks, and make major changes to humanize our approaches. With the approval of Allen and later his estate, I could conduct new research to bring us closer to Allen and Naomi’s lifelong involvement with madness and mental illness and why it matters in relation to his poetry. The result was Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness (2023). Allen’s radical acceptance of madness as a basic and potentially beneficial human capacity was far ahead of his time in inviting readers to change how we understand and engage with madness and mental illness.

The chapter offers a contextualization of Ginsberg’s interest and models in French, identifying the key influential figures whose overt (for Rimbaud) or more subtle (for Perse) influences as role and poetic models are traceable in Ginsberg’s early Columbia year journals and the search for his own voice and poetic form. French intertexts in Ginsberg’s early journals then contextualize the emergence of Rimbaud and Perse as role models for both lifestyle and poetics, while intertextual echoes provide some hypotheses as to these poets’ influence. As Ginsberg carefully recorded his life as a poet, lectured, or signaled his influences, method, and technique, peritexts are useful lenses to observe both the construction of Ginsberg’s claimed, asserted, or archived French poetry influences. This chapter will address the reshaping, interpreting, and molding of this material into a language and graft of his own, a personal cosmology, of epic dimension, that would imprint most of his long poems.

Some people are taught that Allen Ginsberg’s most famous poem “Howl” was written spontaneously in a form inspired by Walt Whitman, was read in its entirety for the first time at a well-documented performance at the 6 Gallery, and that Ginsberg was brought to trial because of the ideas in his poem relating to homosexuality. This essay argues that “Howl” was heavily crafted after being simultaneously influenced by the form of Christopher Smart’s “Jubilate Agno” and the language of Jack Kerouac’s mind-thought prose, that probably only a draft of Part I of “Howl” was first read at the 6 Gallery, and that Lawrence Ferlinghetti was tried in court for publishing specific “filthy” words – some represented by dots – in Howl and Other Poems. What we can learn about all the discrepancies and myths is that Beat Studies scholars need to be open to questioning what we have previously accepted as facts.

This chapter examines a rarely discussed novel published by the Cuban writer in 1933. It focuses on his representation of black ñáñigos or abakuás, a brotherhood created by enslaved people in the early nineteenth century in Cuba, and which has survived to this day. It analyzes the novel within the context of anthropological and criminological paradigms that characterized the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It argues that Carpentier deliberately eroticizes Afro-Cubans, especially their religious practitioners, to emphasize their perceived sexual freedom in the face of Western/North American/bourgeois modernization. To support this view, the article relies on insights gleaned from Carpentier’s letters to his mother, his reception of Michel Leiris and Georges Bataille’s ideas on non-Western societies and a little-known chronicle that he published in France.

Over the course of his career, Ginsberg became known as much for his political activism as for his poetry. In fact, Ginsberg didn’t necessarily see a strong distinction between his poetry and his political activism, and this chapter traces how his political consciousness emerged in the early 1960s at the same time he was developing new kinds of poetics to articulate this political consciousness. During the 1960s, Ginsberg became a central figure in the growing and increasingly visible counterculture. The war in Vietnam was a major catalyst for his embrace of countercultural political activism, and as the 1960s unfolded, he came to see language, the corruption of language, and its bad faith use by politicians and others in power as symptom of a callous, violent American culture that seemed to revel in oppression, self-repression, and in escalating the war. He turned to poetry as a counter to this “black magic language,” notably in poems such as “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” and this chapter shows how Ginsberg saw his socially and politically engaged poems of the era as doing the crucially important work of raising or changing consciousness about the war and a host of other social and political issues.

By early 1959, faced with the famine taking hold of the countryside, the CCP leadership reined in the more radical aspects of the Great Leap. Yet, despite that, urban collectivization continued. This chapter explores urban experiments in Beijing between 1959 and 1960, when, in a moment of political uncertainty, workers, activists, and cadres in various neighborhoods strove to define the confines of what was possible. In particular, they tried to figure out what the promised transformation from “housewives” to (female) “workers” meant, both practically and politically, and what kind of activities should be considered under the category of “productive labor.” This search is set in a wider context by showing how it echoes the debates and discussions in Marxist feminism and social reproduction theory.

This chapter studies the history of translations of Alejo Carpentier’s novels into German. As Reisinger shows, novels by Carpentier were translated starting in the 1950s, but it took several translators and several changes of publishers to make Carpentier’s novels successful in German translation. In establishing Carpentier in the 1970s as one of the great Latin American writers, a crucial role was played by literary scout Michi Strausfeld and publishing house Suhrkamp. Relations between East and West Germany were relatively fluid, but Carpentier’s greatest success was in the West.