The introduction to The Coup Trap in Latin America outlines this book’s objectives, methods, and key conclusions. My theory, in a nutshell, suggests that the structure of political competition – its formal and informal rules – determines whether a political system sinks into or escapes from the Coup Trap. The introduction discusses the book’s two-pronged multi-method research design, which pioneers the use of statistical predictions to explain when military coups do and do not occur – and uses analytic narratives to assess their plausibility. The introduction also previews the implications of this book’s findings for theories of dictatorship and democracy, for the study of the military coup and instability more generally, and for explanations of regime development in modern Latin America.

This chapter explores the many ways Mexico became central in Ginsberg’s poetic evolution. Inspired by the example of his mentor, William S. Burroughs, Ginsberg visited several archaeological sites in Mexico such as Palenque, which inspired one of his most successful early poems, “Siesta in Xbalba.” Ginsberg traveled widely throughout the country and continued the mystical quest which began with his experience of “cosmic consciousness” in Harlem in 1948 as he read the poetry of William Blake. In poems such as “Paterson,” Ginsberg wrote that he “would rather go mad, gone down the dark road to Mexico, heroin dripping/in my veins,/eyes and ears full of marijuana, /eating the god Peyote…” than endure his life in America. Ginsberg read widely in the history of culture of Mexico, and his poems as well as his journals reveal the profound effect Mexico would have on his life and work.

Overshadowed by other international journeys, Ginsberg’s six months traveling alone through South America in 1960 have been relatively neglected by biographers and critics. However, recent editions and new research enable a better understanding of the literary and political significance of his geographic and drug trips in the region. The long-delayed publication of his South American Journals in 2019 reveals how prescient Ginsberg was to see the visionary value of ayahuasca (aka yagé), the indigenous psychedelic, set against the policing of reality by a materialistic world. His journals also show the full extent of his spiritual crisis in South America and his difficulties in finding a poetic form to express his experiences. Although The Yage Letters has been neglected by Ginsberg scholars, the complex backstory of the book of South American trips he coauthored with William S. Burroughs reveals a much greater role in its creation.

The collectivization of one profession, hairstyling, is the focus of this chapter. Barbershops, with bathhouses and photographers, were considered an essential service for city residents and were therefore part of those benefits that had to be provided under the commune umbrella. Yet during the Great Leap not only did hairstyling fashions and a correspondent hierarchy of hairdressers persisted, but they were recognized and actively fostered by local and state authorities. The case of hairdressers and barbers in Great Leap Beijing thus shows not only the attentiveness some cadres paid to the minute aspects of the quotidian but also the resilience of subtle (and not so subtle) social differences in the midst of what was supposed to be one of the “egalitarian” moments in the Maoist era.

Allen Ginsberg read, reread, and approached the work of Walt Whitman throughout his life. How should we understand the overtly acknowledged relationship between these two poets? This chapter suggests that at the same time as one can trace the references Ginsberg makes to Whitman in his poems, compare and contrast the focus of each, or consider the parallels between the poetics of the two, we can also understand (the sometimes unsavory) Whitman in the (sometimes unsavory) Ginsberg canon as a screen onto which Ginsberg projected his ideas of his own literary ethos and significance.

This chapter deals with Allen Ginsberg's enormous personal archive. It includes the history of how the archive was created, what the contents of the archive are, and how it came to be located in the Special Collections Department of Stanford University's library. It details some of the many uses of the archive today and in the future.

Carpentier worked in radio broadcasting for more than twenty years, during the golden age of radio in the 1930s through the 1950s. He was a pioneer in thinking about the wireless reproduction of sound and music and worked collaboratively with many noted musicians and writers of his time. This chapter charts Carpentier’s poetics of sound as he formulated it in his articles on radio and radio scripts. It also studies two soundscapes that would appear in Carpentier’s posthumous memoir Recuento de moradas, and in his novel Concierto barroco. The chapter concludes by saying that the intermedial mingling, in his fiction of visual and soundscapes lent to Carpentier’s realist aesthetics a unique quality of verisimilitude.

This chapter examines Allen Ginsberg’s life-long relationship to education through an exploration of his formative years in both high school and at Columbia University in New York, his founding of the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, with Anne Waldman as well as his work teaching at Brooklyn College, and finally the legacy of his writing as it continues to be taught. Ginsberg always had a scholarly disposition, and thus it comes as little surprise that he was an award-winning student in high school. This success continued into his Columbia years, though his education expanded outside the classroom to include a “Beat” underworld that introduced him to illicit substances and clandestine texts. While he left the university to pursue poetry, he reentered it later in life to teach, with Buddhism being a key component of his pedagogy, especially at Naropa. While not everyone was a fan of Ginsberg’s pedagogy, most found his heartfelt attempt to share his own thoughts, feelings, and ideas on his own favorite poets in the classroom to have been enlightening. This chapter concludes with a discussion of the problems and potential Ginsberg still holds as his controversial work enters the classroom today.

I begin this chapter by reviewing the foundational settler idea that race and civilization were intimately linked, and that whites stood in loco parentis to childlike Africans. I further explore the emotions that were concomitant with civilization and paternalism. First, settlers had to turn away those Africans who claimed “civilized” status – Christian, western-educated, dressed in European clothes. They did this humiliation. Second, I take seriously settler rhetoric of the “white man’s (and woman’s) burden.” By offering gifts – “civilization” taught through work, or medical care through very intimate bodily contact – settlers further asserted a hierarchal relationship, the internal logic of which would not allow Africans to equalize. Paternalism would become one of the defining features of settler thinking: it was both a duty to civilize Africans, and emotionally and psychologically pleasurable to do so.

This chapter investigates how settlers defined civilization in large part through gender norms, and how regulating sexual morality appeared crucial to upholding prestige. Whites marked African savagery through gender: white men and women believed that what separated them from Africans was women’s domesticity and men’s defense of their womenfolk’s honor and bodies. Despite Kenya settlers’ reputation for rampant adultery, many settlers proclaimed the need for discretion: if whites could not adhere to sexual morality, how could Africans be convinced of white superiority? More worrying was inter-racial sex. Inter-racial sex was fearful because it could suggest emotional intimacy and, thus, an inversion of the racial order. Worse still, by whites’ logic once a single white woman had fallen, the prestige of all white woman was endangered. Once white women showed themselves to be uncivilized, to be as mortal – and as immoral – as the colonized, the prestige of all white women was shown to be a sham. This led directly to black peril.