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.

The Conclusion synthesizes and expands on the findings of preceding chapters by comparing the fates of two different non-human animal characters who pledge their word of honor: a bat in a twelfth-century fable by Marie de France and a grasshopper in a seventeenth-century fable by Jean de La Fontaine. It argues that that despite sharing the ostensibly similar narrative premise of a non-human animal who offers her foi in a fable, these texts highlight a change at the intersection between authorial speech and species identity that took place between the Middle Ages and early modernity. For Marie’s bat, the problem revolves around the inability of her society’s species lexicon to express or “contain” her nature. By the time La Fontaine’s grasshopper offers her pledge, the problem is precisely that the grasshopper has become pigeonholed into a Cartesian term – animal – that she cannot hope to transcend.

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.

This chapter explores two of the shorter and less successful series, based on novels, that were produced in the Thatcher era – The Day of the Triffids (1981) and The Tripods (1984–85) – and assesses how each of them is responding to the Thatcherite landscape, both artistically and in terms of the new economic restrictions: the tighter budgets with which to make television. The chapter shows that The Day of the Triffids provides a kind of template for characteristics that would become front and centre in the Thatcher era – self-interest, Machiavellian behaviour, cynicism – but also remains quite faithful to the source material. The Tripods presents more of an engagement with the neoliberal tropes of the Thatcher era, updating and inventing many of its characters and scenarios to reflect this new environment.

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.

Like Kristeva, Bhabha takes interpretation for granted but insists that the point of view of the oppressed/oppressor must be included in the interpretive perspective. Hybridity is his term for this state of mind, which for him assumes three forms: 1) hybridity as identity as portrayed in “The Butler” and Belle” 2) hybridity as power as seen in “Twelve Years a Slave” and “Django Unchained” 3) hybridity as blasphemy exemplified in “Breaking Bad” and “Sherlock”.