Allen Ginsberg’s fastidiousness about retroactively dating three decades of his own photographs in the 1980s is a significant part of a historiographical project. Ginsberg strives to document his role in the creation of a movement that enables viewers to perceive self-portraits and individual portraits of other key Beat figures such as Kerouac as communal objects. Ginsberg’s inscriptions couple the author’s penchant for mythmaking with his interest in narrating events that are made significant through their incorporation into a composition that suggests a heightened meaning for each individual image. Collecting the ninety-one portraits in Allen Ginsberg: Photographs, placing them in a roughly chronological order, and providing information about each image through captions that feature the date of composition, the place in which the image was taken, and how each subject contributed to the Beat movement or to subsequent countercultural movements such as hippie and punk that Ginsberg regards as part of the Beat legacy, the poet displays his interest in what Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory regards as the creation of “collective memory.”

Ginsberg was famous for chronicling every facet of his life, and his last poems in the mid 1990s frequently reflect an intense self-consciousness about his final illnesses. While earlier in his career, the body was an important site for Ginsberg’s poetics of candor, confrontation, and erotic epiphanies, he remained equally adamant as his health faltered in ascertaining his physical deterioration in poems such as “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush” and “Sphincter.” Even during his final period, however, Ginsberg’s level of literary fame provided him access to figures in popular music that amplified his cultural prominence and enabled him to retain a sense of artistic relevance. Simultaneously with his meditations on death, Ginsberg’s culminating poems maintained his renowned sly humor about his social status as a writer whose expansive cultural reputation included the continuity of radical political critique. This chapter on his posthumous volume Death and Fame: Last Poems 1993–1997 (1999) explores Ginsberg’s attempts to reconcile the problematic contexts of fame’s durability while struggling to find succor, in both Buddhist and poetic terms, with his accelerating disability and terminal departure.

Alejo Carpentier combines history and literature to compose his novel El arpa y la sombra (The Harp and the Shadow). On the one hand, he uses historical facts to create a fictional story that reveals a human Christopher Columbus, far removed from stereotypes, myths and ideological designs. On the other hand, he draws on a vast wealth of literary works and authors from the Hispanic world to complement, through intertextualities and cultured references, the image he wishes to present of the Admiral. Relevant examples include quotations from Cervantes’ interlude Retablo de las maravillas (The Stage of Wonders) and Federico García Lorca’s poem “La casada infiel” (“The Unfaithful Wife”), as well as other more general texts such as Juan de Mandavila’s Libro de las maravillas del mundo (Book of the Wonders of the World) and various passages from the Bible. All of this is made possible, despite the anachronisms that appear in the text, thanks to the integration of the novel into the realm of freedoms of the postmodern historical novel.

This chapter argues that the influence of Carpentier on Cuban literature of his time and after is not clear, given that there was some animosity towards him. It cites as reasons the fact of Carpentier’s absence from Cuba in the 1970s. It also acknowledges that the teachers who taught the Novísimo generation of Cuban writers with whom the author identifies most closely all emphasized the mastery of Carpentier’s prose and admired what they called Carpentier’s carnivalization of language or baroque language. The chapter concludes that understanding how Carpentier’s lifelong journalism had served as a foundation of his literary writing was an important lesson for him and others, and he ends by calling Carpentier a classic.

The Epilogue traces the legacy of urban collectivization in the rest of the Mao era and its reinterpretation after 1978.

This essay details how the author’s vocation as a writer and reader was awakened by the admiration he felt in his youth for Alejo Carpentier’s literature. That same admiration led to discovering Carpentier’s alienation from the Cuban regime, his role as a censor and a censored individual, and his tendency to adapt what he wrote to fit the ideological demands of the moment. Even though the political environment ended up conditioning readings of Carpentier, the author of this essay describes how he learned to strike a balance between admiration and criticism, acknowledging Carpentier’s complexity as a literary figure.

During his literary apprenticeship in the 1920s and 1930s, Carpentier established contact with an impressively wide circle of composers with whom he shared both friendship and artistic kinship. Consequently, he engaged in a series of musical collaborations both in Havana and Paris actively promoting a new musical modernism that sought to revitalize creative expression with reinterpretations of the primitive that owed much to Carpentier’s admiration of the Russian works of Stravinsky; a powerful model for the assertion of his own Cubanidad. Investigating the breadth of Carpentier’s musical interactions, including his programming for the Conciertos de Música neuva, this essay considers the mutual cross-fertilization of ideas that resulted in some of the most innovative works of the period, from his ballets with Amadeo Roldán and projected puppet opera with Alejandro García Caturla to his projects with Marius-François Gaillard, Darius Milhaud and Edgard Varèse, the possible unnamed protagonist in Los pasos perdidos.

This essay reassesses Alejo Carpentier’s concept of lo real maravilloso americano [the American marvelous real] by comparing it to analogous notions developed earlier in the works of his Cuban fellow José Lezama Lima, showing how both authors respond to the widespread circulation of French surrealism in the Caribbean between the 1930s and 1940s. In doing so, I deconstruct Carpentier’s claims that his concept of the marvelous real was developed in response to the sense of awe he experienced during his visit to Haiti in 1943, instead viewing it as part of a broader endeavor simultaneously undertaken by several Caribbean writers and intellectuals, particularly in the Francophone islands, who reappropriated surrealist ideas in the context of their own critique of Western thought and an effort to reclaim the islands’ African heritage as part of their struggle for political and cultural autonomy.

Chapter 2 provides a political theory of the origins and dynamics of the coup trap. It does not infer the behavior of pro- and anti-forces from their economic interests or their social position but instead argues that structural features of political systems – their competitiveness, how often presidents fall to military coups, and the length of their electoral cycle – explain why instability persists. At its core, the theory argues that the monopolization of power incites the opposition to form coalitions with dissident officers (the “coup coalition”) to oust governments weakened by the recent overthrow of presidents. These structural properties also explain why some coalitions of officers and politicians manage to navigate out of the coup trap, either by forging an autocratic or democratic political order.

Chapter 4 presents and interprets the core results of the prediction-centered multi-method The Coup Trap in Latin America pioneers. It converts the statistical coefficients in Chapter 3 into probability estimates of successful military coups for every country-year, which accurately predict almost 80 percent of the years with such golpes in the region. This chapter reveals that almost 98 percent of its negative predictions – that the armed forces will stay in their barracks – are accurate. Only 2 percent of its negative predictions are false (type 2 errors), which this chapter identifies and begins to analyze. This chapter also begins to explore inaccurate positive predictions of successful golpes (or type 1 errors), showing that the model warns that conditions can be propitious for the unconstitutional seizure of power for years at a time. This chapter uses a key independent variable – T, or time since the last coup – to place political systems in one of three groups, each of which subsequent chapters examine. Chapter 4 is the pivot between the quantitative and qualitative chapters of The Coup Trap in Latin America.

A substantial portion of Alejo Carpentier’s writings, nonfictional and fictional, can be classified as Neobaroque, making their author one of the key representatives of this transhistorical, transnational, cross-cultural and interartistic contemporary movement. This chapter focuses on images and expressions of deformed chronology that abound in Carpentier’s fiction, and which are associated with the Baroque, an aesthetics of excess and transgression that sets established forms into variation. It argues that what can be classified as baroque futurisms – eccentric because it deforms linear chronology – is the gist of Carpentier’s concept of the New World Baroque. The chapter briefly outlines Carpentier’s Baroque theory before exploring instances of baroque futurism in representative works of Carpentier’s fiction.

This chapter deals with the narrative treatment of time in Alejo Carpentier’s “Historia de lunas,” “Oficio de tinieblas,” “Viaje a la semilla,” “Semejante a la noche” and El acoso. These fictions were marked by an epochal climate in which a sense of civilizational crisis prevailed, as can be seen in the proposals of Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee or Mircea Eliade, thinkers who left their mark on Carpentier’s historical thinking. The analyses of these narratives focus on the way in which their author deploys competing temporalities, a feature that shows how the historical dimension of his narrative was not limited to the recreation of past scenarios. Furthermore, in these works it is possible to trace a theory of historical becoming, a reflection on the teleology of its processes and the meaning of its occurrence.