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.

This chapter discusses the ITV television series Sapphire & Steel (1979–82) and its relationship to the early years of the Thatcher government. This series was produced by ITV and concerns two mysterious extraterrestrial travellers called Sapphire and Steel, operatives of an unseen higher power, whose origins are an almost complete mystery. Their job is to repair ruptures in time, where malevolent forces have entered the universe. Futility is also a strong theme in this series, which ends on a similar note to Blake’s 7: the protagonists are confined to an eternal prison. The characters in Sapphire & Steel are more ‘conservative’ than the characters in Blake’s 7, yet I argue the series is just as strongly anti-Thatcher in its claims about the illusion of individualism and independence. In the final episode, Sapphire and Steel, independent operators, are betrayed by their superiors and confined to an eternal prison in space. The chapter posits that an analogue can be found in Thatcher’s many claims about independence, and her simultaneous attempts to silence those with contrary political opinions.

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.

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.

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.

Through a close analysis of the diction used by medieval translators of the biblical narrative in which Adam names the non-human animals, this introduction presents the book’s scope and argument. The first human seems to have had no difficulty giving the other animals their names, his success implicitly communicating his dominance as a rational, speaking creature; exegetes like Augustine pressed this point, citing the naming narrative as evidence for humanity’s status as the only rational animal. However, the medieval translators who rendered the naming scene in words of their own seemed notably less confident than Adam, their texts differing from one another in ways that suggest the discovery of uncertainty and confusion, rather than intuitive transparency, where speech and species intersect. The difficulty reflects fundamental features of the medieval lexicon employed to articulate the relationship between speech, reason, and species identity: Crucial terms such as animal and beste were ambiguous and inconsistent in meaning, leaving the precise place of the rational-discursive faculty in a state of suspense.

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.