The story of American literature and empire is vast and complex, its boundaries as hard to draw and as continuously disputed as the historical borders of the US nation-state itself. Historians of US empire tend to periodize their field into three broad eras of imperial formation: (1) continental expansion under the aegis of Manifest Destiny in the nineteenth century; (2) the emergence of overseas empire with the Spanish-American War in 1898, when the US first acquired formal territories abroad; and (3) the rise to globalism after World War II, when US military policing in the interests of global capitalism created an empire of military bases around the world while rebranding US imperialism and neocolonialism as embodiments of democracy and freedom, in part through a series of “endless” wars spanning the Cold War through the post-9/11 War on Terror. But for literary scholars, this broad historical periodization of empire loses coherence in the face of literature’s persistent ability to reimagine history, to make counterfactual claims, to invent new worlds, to change the experience of time, and to speculate and counter-speculate about the grounds of reality. Furthermore, empire’s relationship with what we call “American literature” fluctuates once the central terms themselves are brought under scrutiny. The definitions of American and literature have always been tied up in the existence of US empire as well as other empires in the Americas.

The word “America” is itself the product of interimperial intellectual rivalry, of course, borne of the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci’s voyage and his subsequent understanding that Columbus, who had claimed to reach the East Indies for the Spanish Crown, was wrong. The term’s current use in designating the USA – as in the case of this volume – casts its own imperial shadow. As Latin Americans have always known, and as Jan Radway argued in her 1998 American Studies Association (ASA) address, the “American” adjective modifying the phrase “American literature” represents a linguistic annexation, claiming the name of an entire hemisphere for one country therein – and thereby ignoring Canada while reiterating a long history of US imperial relations to the southern half of the hemisphere.¹ As a volume exploring American literature and empire, this companion thus takes a necessarily skeptical stance toward its own major geographical referent. This skepticism means recognizing American as “a term of consolidation, homogenization, and unification,” as Kirsten Silva Gruesz has observed, that both records and obscures the imperial contexts that produced it and continue to sustain it.² To understand the full history of the term “American,” then, is to recognize its deep, strategically obscure, and often disavowed imperial contexts – differing contexts that in turn require differentially transatlantic, hemispheric, and global frameworks of analysis.

The concept of “literature,” too, bears close analysis for those interested in the connections between American literary history and empire. Empire went hand in hand with the invention of the printing press as new writing about the Americas justified violence, lured European participants and investors, and brought new knowledge commodities – drawn from new worlds and valued alongside more traditional sources of wealth – to European readers. If European-authored literature of the Americas served imperial interests, so too did early American writing by Euro-American creole elites across the hemisphere. As scholars such as Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti have shown, these Euro-Americans wrote in part to shore up settler claims both to land and to the right of domination over its original inhabitants as well as those enslaved to excavate its mines and harvest its plantations.³

Moreover, while literature has been understood since classical Western antiquity as a hallmark of civilization and a bearer of imperial values across conquered territories and peoples, the nature of alphabetic writing became ideological in a new way once Europe dubbed the American hemisphere as a New World it had purportedly discovered. Written literature was reconceived as a sign of humanity precisely as humanness was being invented in this “Age of Discovery” that inaugurated the conquest of Indigenous peoples and the seizing of African captives for the transatlantic slave trade. The “Age of Revolution” cemented the equation between writing and the human through written constitutions. Yet a written constitution did not guarantee the new nation of Haiti rights in the eyes of Europe or in the settler polities of the Americas, nor did they confer a place for the Haitian Revolution – which remained until the late twentieth century “unthinkable” in the West – in conventional scholarship on the Age of Revolutions.⁴

If literature and alphabetic writing have a storied place in imperial history, so too has translation served a “poetics of imperialism” across the centuries; Columbus’s kidnapping of Amerindians to serve as interpreters was the “primal crime in the New World … committed in the interest of language.”⁵ This interest of language has a long and continuing imperial history, as the chapters collected here make clear. By the aftermath of the Spanish-American War and the US occupation of the Philippines – and just as the field was being codified as a discipline – American literature emerged as “empire’s proxy,” in Meg Wesling’s helpful phrase, deeply intertwined with the process of colonial management abroad.⁶

If literature has been empire’s proxy, it has also been an imaginative resource for contestation. Thus, while the myth of America has from Columbus’s first landfall overwritten and displaced Indigenous peoples, histories, and geographies, Indigenous critiques of empire have been forcefully advanced in writing across the centuries since European invasion. So too has a broadly conceived Black literary history critically engaged various forms of empire, including the extraction of human labor from Africa and the continued devaluation of Black lives throughout the African diaspora. Indigenous Studies and African American and African Diaspora Studies emerged as fields during the often conjoined Civil Rights and anti-imperial struggles of the 1960s, and together archive a deep and growing US intellectual history of empire as well as a specifically literary apprehension of its workings. The formation known as Asian American literature coincided with the emergence of ethnic studies departments in the 1960s in response to student protests against war in Vietnam, bringing to light the extraction of Asian labor in the making of US capitalism, from its eighteenth-century beginnings to its consolidation during the post–Civil War importation of Asian and South Asian indentured workers as substitutes for enslaved Black labor to the long series of incursions and US wars in Asia throughout the so-called American Century. This long history culminated in the creation of the “foreigner-within,” Lisa Lowe’s term for the Asian American subject perpetually misrecognized, regardless of birthplace, as an immigrant.⁷

The field of Latinx literature, too, might be productively understood as a countervailing force to “empire’s proxy” in the emergence of American literature as a disciplinary field in the early twentieth century. Since the rise of an epistolary-political culture of Spanish-American letters centered in Philadelphia in the late eighteenth century, Latino/a/x writers have negotiated the boundaries of multiple modern empires – Spanish, British, Portuguese, and French – while also appealing to the histories and cosmologies of the African diaspora as well as the vast Indigenous empires that preceded European invasion.⁸ But the US empire represents, for now, the final crucible of the “cruel modernity,” in Jean Franco’s phrase, out of which Latinx history emerges.⁹ US imperial relation to Latin America and the Caribbean begins with the annexation of nearly half of sovereign Mexico, the acquisition of Puerto Rico as a colonial territory, and the various occupations of and attempts to annex Cuba, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Panama – and, crucially, Haiti, the second modern republic in the Americas (after the US) to claim independence from imperial Europe and the only one to found its new state on the abolition of slavery and the stated principle of an equal noir or Black identity among its citizens.

The study of American literature’s relation to empire is vitally enriched by such recognitions of what Aníbal Quijano has called the “coloniality of power” – a framework for understanding how the legacies of European imperialism and the ongoing practices of colonialism in the Americas have structured not just an unequal social order and distribution of wealth but the very forms of domination that underlie knowledge and the production of scholarship.¹⁰ Drawing on this and related concepts, our volume aims to offer a more robust conception of American literature’s relation to empire by widening the temporal and geographical frame of analysis.

The chapters in the first part of the volume examine in various ways the European race for empire in the Americas starting in the late fifteenth century to help underscore that “empire” should not be understood as a single, coherent monolith but as a set of related, sometimes overlapping forms that shape what we call “American literature,” and that are particularly relevant to the history of “early America,” which was of course far broader than just the original thirteen English colonies. We thus aim to offer in Part I a nuanced understanding of the multiple forms and meanings of empire across the hemisphere. This wider context of the early Americas necessarily opens the later national US field featured in Part II to the postcolonial and decolonial scholarship of Latinx, Latin Americanist and Caribbeanist scholarship as well as to new ways of understanding the different periods and literary cultures of American empire.

Part III of this volume resonates with the insights of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, who have argued that US imperialism – like all prior nation-based imperialisms – is in many ways over. The US may have briefly inherited the mantle of European imperialism during the twentieth century, in their view, but imperialism per se has since yielded to what they term Empire, a “new global form of sovereignty” that exceeds nation-states and has no territorial center of power. Even in Hardt and Negri’s estimation, however, US imperial “interventions” – to use the sanitized language of the Pax Americana for military occupations and wars – continue to play a key role in what they define as Empire’s “mixed constitution.”¹¹ Their contextualization of empire in the neoliberal, postmodern, and globalist era since the late twentieth century has invited us to expand the earlier “New Americanist” focus on empire in the narrower context of aggressive nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US military expansionism and overseas empire. More generally, the widened and varied temporal, geographic, and theoretical frame of the entire volume has allowed for a collectively told story about empire and American letters that also points to some of the most exciting new directions in literary studies more broadly.

Before turning to the individual chapters, however, we want to dwell briefly on the received story of empire and American literature that was once centered on the elite men in the North American colonies who wrote in celebration of their own role as imperial subjects of the English Crown. These early American writers understood themselves to be participating in a noble translatio imperii from ancient world empires, to classical Rome, to seventeenth-century Britain, to a monumental British imperial future in the American hemisphere: the “rising glory of this western world,” as Philip Freneau put it in an eighteenth-century poem of the same name, which prophesied “the day when Britain’s sons shall spread/Dominion to the north and south and west/Far from th’ Atlantic to Pacific shores.” The poet thus predicted a glorious future British empire on both American continents, of which “we too shall boast/Our Alexanders, Pompeys, heroes, kings/That in the womb of time yet dormant lye.”¹² With the coming of the American Revolution, such encomiums to British empire naturally fell out of literary favor, but the “poetics” of empire did not.

A major strand of early US literature augured what Thomas Jefferson famously called an “empire of liberty”: an American empire moving progressively away from British imperial guilt toward a putatively shining and innocent future.¹³ Popular public memory since then holds persistently to the myth of America as a nation fundamentally opposed to empire, a modern republic founded in a heroic act of anti-imperialism: wrenching itself free from the powerful British empire so it could one day, as President Woodrow Wilson put it upon entering World War I, make the world “safe for democracy” by taking on a European imperial foe once again.¹⁴ Even the most blatantly imperial exercises of US power have always been cast by the state as anti-imperial, as simply bringing light “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” as Mark Twain once put it satirically in an essay under this title.¹⁵

The genealogy of criticism attending to the relationship between empire and what was once called “classic American literature” is also worth revisiting, if in necessarily abbreviated form. In 1971, during the US-in-Vietnam years, Quentin Anderson published a landmark study founded on the idea that a specifically American version of Western individualism emerged in the national US imagination early in the nineteenth century and became a nexus of ideology that he termed the “imperial self.” For Anderson, Emerson was the prophet and greatest theological exponent of this imperial American self, which absolved itself of responsibilities to the social world and then devoured everything else (even God and Nature), relocating the universe and all cosmology within a great drama of internal consciousness. The emergence of this imperial self – which rapidly banished any “communally shared sense of goal, or indeed of being” – had profound and detrimental political and social effects, as Anderson saw it; writing at the height of the Vietnam War, and in the wake of a quarter century of decolonization movements in Asia and Africa that the US had actively undermined, Anderson surfaced the often disavowed inextricability between literary and cultural imagination, on the one hand, and geopolitics on the other. The prior generation of literary critics had been “culturally irresponsible” – not just for overlooking the evidence of these connections, but for developing a mode of scholarship that reinforced them and gave them cover by conjuring the mystique of the imperial imagination as the only true form of liberation possible from an inherently constraining social world. “Our dreams of empire” in the geopolitical world, he speculated, emerged with and through the imperial selves dreamed into being by American writers: Emerson, Whitman, Henry James.¹⁶

Anderson’s attempt to link the imperial self to the nation’s “dreams of empire” was mournful and oblique. But two decades later, Wai Chee Dimock’s Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism (1989) reprised Jefferson’s supposedly paradoxical phrase and showed that “empire” and “liberty” were not opposed terms at all but in fact “instrumentally conjoined,” with the former protecting the latter and the latter authorizing the former. Examining Melville’s corpus in the context of Jacksonian America, Dimock postulated an individualism not just in flight from the social but as a form of market-driven Lockean self-possession – a personification of the laboring self within market relations. If liberal self-possession buttressed the institution of slavery as a means of possessing and trading the labor of the enslaved, it also required Jacksonian imperialism in the form of continental expansion and Indigenous dispossession to “fashion a ‘destiny’ out of temporality” and thereby “impose a ‘manifest’ harmony on what might otherwise appear naked conflict.” An acute observer of the “controlling ‘logic of culture’” in his era, Melville developed what Dimock called a “controlling logic of form” that expressed “the sovereignty of both self and nation – both the freedom of the former and the domination of the latter – to bring forth a new sovereign, an authorial variety, a figure whose literary individualism is always imperially articulated.” Dimock thus showed that in the nineteenth-century US, “literature,” the “author,” “selfhood,” and the “individual” were all historically constituted by empire, and she did so at a time, the 1980s, when the absence of empire in US cultural studies was still pronounced.¹⁷ But as Toni Morrison put it in her 1989 essay, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” published the same year as Dimock’s Empire for Liberty, “invisible things are not necessarily ‘not-there’; a void may be empty but it is not a vacuum.”¹⁸ Within a few years, Amy Kaplan would teach the next generation of Americanists that the field of American Studies – “conceived on the banks of the Congo,” as she memorably put it – was birthed out of an enduring, seemingly unending denial of the US imperial past and present.¹⁹

By the time this proposed volume comes to print, over three decades will have passed since the publication of that field-defining essay in Cultures of US Imperialism (1993), edited by Kaplan and Donald Pease, which inaugurated more than a generation’s worth of Americanist scholarship on the subject. As ASA president Matthew Frye Jacobson observed at the annual conference in 2013 – using his address as an occasion, in part, to honor the collection’s twentieth anniversary – the “cultural analyses of empire … have been the hallmark and the signal contribution of American studies scholarship in recent decades.”²⁰ This 2013 moment at the ASA also recalled Kaplan’s own 2003 presidential address, “Violent Belongings and the Question of Empire Today,” setting up a timeline of empire’s increasingly visible role in American literary and historical studies.²¹ Jacobson was issuing his own charge in this talk, asking the field to keep its eyes on the ball of empire – not to look away just when the so-called “decline of American empire” was being loudly announced in other disciplines. Countering the Hardt and Negri narrative of US imperialism’s decline and disappearance, Jacobson reminded listeners that the contemporary neoliberal regime – even on occasions where the US nation-state takes a backseat to the power of multinational corporations – is itself a form of empire in which the United States continues to play an outsized role. Jacobson took into explicit account Hardt and Negri’s insights regarding globalizing capital and the changed “ontology” of postmodern imperial domination. Yet he nevertheless called forcefully for a reinvigorated Americanist study of US imperialism, an interdisciplinary scholarship that would reflect both what the field has learned since the early 1990s and where it might be going. The present volume aims to answer that call, supplementing Jacobson’s contention that “empire is US history” – and Kaplan’s enduring analysis of empire as “a way of life” in the United States – with its own interdisciplinary and yet discipline-specific charge: a collective effort toward a renewed American literary studies as empire studies.²²

This volume fashions a provisional temporality out of the contradictions of the field. We hope to foreground both the conventional periodization of American empire – as an aberration occurring after the Spanish-American War, a flicker of imperialist occupations that quickly died down – and the revisionist chronologies of US imperialism that tell another story altogether and that often emanate from American literary history itself. This literary history has been shaped by the critical return to elided and forgotten imperial times and places through the recovery of key texts in key historical moments: for example, the Trinidadian critic C. L. R. James interpreting Melville’s Moby-Dick as a prophecy of Cold War America during his detention in Ellis Island as he fought deportation procedures in 1952; or the recovery of James’s 1938 history The Black Jacobins (and 1934 stage play of the same title) by the anthropologist David Scott during the early years of the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.²³ As these examples remind us, “empire” was the central term of postcolonial studies long before it was taken up by American literary studies, and any project on American literature and empire must recognize its intellectual debt to that groundbreaking tradition of postcolonial scholarship. The fit between the two fields has not always been an easy one given that the US is a settler colonial nation rather than a postcolonial one: that is, US national independence from imperial Britain did not end the original invasion of Native lands nor did it stop the colonial extraction of labor and life from enslaved Africans and their descendants. And all kinds of colonialism, as many scholars have shown, have their own neos: their own afterlives, their own forms of open-endedness, that invite reciprocal consideration.

Yet some of the most enduring Americanist scholarship of the last thirty years, especially in the 1990s – the decade following the centennial of the renamed Spanish-American-Cuban War – might be said to co-articulate, or to move in implicit dialogue with, postcolonial studies. Toni Morrison’s 1989 conception of “Africanism” in American literature, for example, brilliantly reprised Edward Said’s 1978 “Orientalism” to make the study of race central to American literary studies.²⁴ What Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak termed “feminist individualism in the age of imperialism” in 1985 finds an Americanist analogue in Amy Kaplan’s 1998 essay, “Manifest Domesticity,” which brought to light other foundational text-networks of US empire, including nineteenth-century women’s domestic and sensation fiction.²⁵ Both postcolonial studies and studies of US empire have long insisted that categories of gender and sexuality are central to the formation and maintenance of imperial power – and must therefore be central to the continuing analysis of empire and to ongoing efforts to decolonize scholarship and the production of knowledge.

The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and Empire explores and responds to these and other critical interventions, and particularly those of the intervening decades since Cultures of US Imperialism and Kaplan’s subsequent monograph The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture (2002). In telling the story of American literature and empire across its fourteen chapters, this volume also highlights the potential liberatory role of literature in making visible and creating alternative spaces for what Native literary scholars have called “survivance” in the face of “empire’s detritus,” the “ruins and ruination” of its long catastrophe, in Ann Laura Stoler’s words.²⁶ If the volume makes an argument for American literary studies as empire studies, a field that examines literature’s relation to past, present, and ongoing forms of empire, it also reflects on literature’s potential role in the non-inevitability of this unfolding of history. Moving beyond the literary capacity for exposure – the ability to help us see and discern – many of these chapters elaborate the dynamics of literature’s vital place in imagining alternative futures, unfinished pasts, and the creation of what have been called the “otherwise worlds” made possible by collective critical work in this vein.²⁷

Part I of this volume, “Reimagining ‘Early American’ Literature,” approaches its subject from the perspective of empire studies. Here, “early American” is not Anglo-American or North American, and the Haitian Revolution rather than the American Revolution is the key event in the story of empire and American literature fleshed out by these essays. The volume begins with Ralph Bauer’s “Reimagining the Early Americas: Empire and the Hemisphere,” which presents a detailed contextualization of empire in the early Americas. Modern European empire in the American hemisphere was distinct from Europe’s prior imperial formations, whether the medieval Holy Roman Empire or the Ancient Roman one, with what Bauer calls its “singular fusion of religious, political, and economic objectives.” To read the literary history of the early Americas produced by Europeans beginning in the late fifteenth century is to glimpse modernity’s emergence, from the origins of modern totalitarianism to the US form of “neo-colonial hegemony over the hemisphere that is still with us today.” This early literary history was always by definition concerned with some aspect of empire – its legitimacy, its future, and its potential enemies – even as European imperialism in the Americas also took on multiple and distinct forms in different periods as well as across the national boundaries (Spanish, Portuguese, French, British, Dutch) of the hemisphere. Bauer’s chapter introduces readers to the key texts and writers of empire in the early Americas, showing how they reflected and helped to produce varied imperial ideologies and ontologies, beginning with those underpinning the name “America” itself.

The resistance of enslaved Amerindians and later Africans and their descendants was a constant across the hemisphere from the outset of empire. The Haitian Revolution of 1804 marks a flashpoint in this history because it culminated in the first nation of the Americas to enshrine the abolition of slavery in the new constitution, the first Black republic in the modern world, and the first successful overthrow of European empire led by the enslaved. Chapter 2, Monique Allewaert’s “Against Imperial Nature: Hérard-Dumesle and the Making of Haitian Eloquence,” turns to the early nineteenth-century Haitian poet, politician, and naturalist Charles Hérard-Dumesle to consider his challenge to a particular Western genre that had long served the interests of European empire: natural history. Taking up this genre himself in his Voyage dans le Nord de Haïti (1824), Hérard-Dumesle sought to remake natural history by explicitly naming its deadly racializing project: its desire “to prove the inferiority of a great portion of the human race.” To work within and against this imperial genre required Hérard-Dumesle to invent a new kind of revolutionary eloquence, forged in a generic mixture of the descriptive discourse of natural history with poetry, politics, and the other-than-human forces of Amerindian and Afro-diasporic naturalisms. The resulting work, as Allewaert argues, both witnessed and created “nature” as a potentially planetary anti-imperial force.

The final essay in Part I turns to the North American land now known as the United States to introduce a long Native American literary and cultural history that runs from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries. In “Empire, Apocalypse, and Native American Literature, from Samson Occom to the Contemporary Moment,” Stephanie Fitzgerald and Hilary E. Wyss emphasize the repetitions, echoes, and circularities of imperial history across centuries, and show how, from the earliest accounts through to the most recent speculative fiction, Indigenous intellectuals have characterized the arrival and ongoing settler colonial iteration of empire as an apocalypse. With its close attention to the links between empire and ecological devastation, the chapter illuminates the critiques of and alternatives to imperial thought that Native American literature and culture always offer, opening transformative, participatory, and “world rebuilding” possibilities for diverse audiences.

Part II, “Imperial Nation,” explores a selection of canonical nineteenth-century US authors, including James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville, to grasp their diverse meditations on the intertwinement of national and imperial history. But the story emerging around this overwhelmingly white and all male group of authors is an unexpectedly diverse and original one. Gesa Mackenthun’s chapter, “Conquest and Compost: James Fenimore Cooper and the Literature of Ecological Empire,” further develops the connections between empire and ecological devastation registered by Fitzgerald and Wyss. Working at the intersection of the environmental humanities and the critical field of settler colonial studies, Mackenthun identifies “ecological-agrarian imperialism” as a mode of empire rooted in “the intersections between soil depletion, food scarcity, biodiversity reduction, and colonial capitalism” – one that is assuming “a global, life-threatening dimension” today. Cooper’s novels offer a rich analytical lens onto the nineteenth-century culture of ecological-agrarian imperialism and its dark, ecocidal impulses while also introducing a utopian ecological strain taken up by later US writers, from Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Dean Howells, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Ursula Le Guin, Ernest Callenbach, Octavia Butler, and Kim Stanley Robinson.

Rafael Walker’s “Manifestly Queer Domesticity: Empire and Nineteenth-Century Queer Fiction” revisits Amy Kaplan’s famous formulation “manifest domesticity,” itself a reworking of the nineteenth-century imperial concept of the nation’s so-called “manifest destiny” to expand its territory westward and southward until reigning over the full hemisphere. Kaplan’s analysis of nineteenth-century literature and popular culture showed how the cult of true womanhood and its seemingly private sphere of domesticity were inseparable from the political and military culture of empire. Updating this analysis, Walker’s essay recovers an archive of nineteenth-century queer fiction – from Whitman’s little-known short story of 1841, “The Child’s Champion,” to works by Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and Sarah Orne Jewett – to show that many writers “used the affordances of this apparently heterosexual imperial paradigm to carve out space for lives and desires otherwise considered deviant or unspeakable.” In their improvisations with imperial-domestic discourse, Walker argues, these writers “exceed the ideological standpoints that most cultural historians of empire recognize” while also writing queer lives into the literary record.

While Walker’s chapter brings attention to a Whitman text long overlooked by critics, Emilio Irigoyen turns our eye toward Melville and the role critics themselves have played in the long story of US empire. Irigoyen’s “Herman, or the Ambiguities: Melville, US Imperialism, and the Participant Critic” plays on the titular ambiguities of Melville’s autofictional novel Pierre, arguing that equivocation is central to the author’s relation to empire. For this reason, the critical tradition on Melville has produced both imperial and anti-imperial versions of the author, depending on the changing politics of scholarly discourse in the US. Irigoyen – contributing to this volume from Montevideo, Uruguay – is well positioned to illuminate both Melville’s complex engagement with US imperialism and the equally complicated story about the potential myopia of a US-centric critical tradition. Melville was not just an author-commentator on multiple empires (Spanish, French, British, US), Irigoyen reminds us, but a direct participant in US intervention in the Americas. This biographical-historical truth must be taken into consideration when grasping the rhetorical and ideological ambiguities of his most explicit commentary on US empire. Turning in conclusion to José Martí’s landmark anti-imperial essay “Nuestra América,” this chapter argues for Melville’s place in a continental American critical tradition – a tradition that can help us to better see ourselves not only as readers and critics but, like Melville, as participants in a long imperial history.

The final chapter in Part II, Rodrigo Lazo’s “Cultures of US Torture,” bolsters the hemispheric argument advanced in Irigoyen’s essay. Like the final chapter by Fitzgerald and Wyss in Part I, this chapter also performs a double critical movement between two distinct historical-imperial moments by exploring the presence of torture in US popular culture of the nineteenth century and our own post-9/11 era. Torture supposedly disappeared from public view in late eighteenth-century Europe, introducing a new liberal moment. Today torture as public spectacle has again become central to contemporary popular culture in the spectacularized images of post-9/11 film, television, and video games. How do we interpret this reemergence of torture as public spectacle in its current mediated popular forms? To answer this question, Lazo juxtaposes two texts with explicit depictions of torture from very different moments in the history of US empire: the film Zero Dark Thirty (2012), about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, and a sensational dime novel, A Thrilling and Exciting Account of the Sufferings and Horrible Tortures Inflicted on Mortimer Bowers and Miss Sophia Delaplain … (1851), set during the age of US filibustering expeditions to gain political control of Cuba in the 1840s. The comparison yields what Lazo calls “torturetainment” as a heretofore unidentified genre of US literary imperialism – a genre that turns to torture as entertainment while disavowing this function in part by appealing to political urgency. If the nineteenth-century novel marks the practice of torture as colonial and Cuban – inimical to US liberal values – Zero Dark Thirty implies that torture is necessary to defending those values in the “war on terror.” Amy Kaplan observed in 2004 that public self-definition of the US had come to embrace rather than deny the term “empire.” In this historical moment, Lazo shows that “torturetainment” must be understood as central to that dramatic and ongoing redefinition while also showing how torture itself, as a defining element of the Black Legend of Spanish colonization, was always part of US self-imagining. In this sense, Lazo’s chapter thus also takes up a thread in Bauer’s commentary on the comparative literary production of imperial ideology in the early Americas.

Part III, “Ongoing Empire and Speculative Worlds,” brings the volume into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The first three chapters in this section take up Black anti-imperial literary traditions, beginning with Alex Lubin’s “The Du Bois Genealogy: Three Worlds and Three Writers on Black Anti-Imperialism.” Reading across the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, his wife Shirley Graham Du Bois, and his stepson David Graham Du Bois, the chapter introduces readers to Pan-Africanism, its literary front, and its crucial analysis of what W. E. B. Du Bois called the “anarchy of empire”: the self-perpetuating circuit of US imperial expansion abroad and domestic anti-Blackness at home. Lubin’s analysis of this Du Bois genealogy offers a global overview of empire across the twentieth century: from the interwar years and W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1928 anti-imperial novel, Dark Princess, to Shirley Graham Du Bois’s journalistic essays and biographies confronting empire at the height of the Cold War, to David Graham Du Bois’s novel, And Bid Him Sing, responding to the Afro-Asian movement in Cairo, Egypt as well as his work as an editor for the Black Panther Party newspaper in the US. The Du Bois genealogy, Lubin argues, invites a planetary approach to the story of empire and US literature.

Nadia Nurhussein’s “Black Transnationalism as Anti-Imperialist Empire” takes an equally expansive and more speculative view of the anarchy of empire, focusing on the little-known figure of Harry Foster Dean, who wrote a forgotten memoir about the failed founding of a Black empire in Africa. The chapter offers a brief comparative history of sea-captain Dean, whose ship “The Pedro Gorino” also inspired the title of his memoir about his dream of establishing an improbable, transnational Black empire in the maritime nation of Liberia. Nurhussein’s chapter explores both the commercial ambitions of Dean to establish a shipping line, adapting Garvey’s Caribbean Black Star Line to a California-Liberia route, and his pedagogical project of promoting an interdisciplinary nautical science at a college in Alameda, California. Lubin’s planetary approach to Black empire thus becomes Nurhussein’s oceanic history of Dean’s alternative – restorative and reparative – Afrocentric empire that never was. The long geographical reach of this comparative history, from Liberia to California, reflects the rich body of scholarship on oceans in Black studies as well as the absence of Dean from that work. In embracing Dean, this chapter weaves together a literary lost past and possible Africanist future in a speculative line of thinking that recalls Lazo’s double critical movement between two distinct historical-imperial moments.

Jak Peake’s chapter, “Elusive ‘Sun-Bright Hardness’: The Caribbean Horizons of Black Renaissance Fiction in an Age of Rising US Empire,” explores how and why the Caribbean became a problem space of self-contradiction in 1920s Black literature, political writing, and literary criticism. Why, Peake asks, was a writer such as W. E. B. Du Bois able to write cogently about US empire in his nonfiction essays yet unable to transport this knowledge to his critical appraisals of Harlem Renaissance literature that engaged Caribbean horizons? The problem was by no means Du Bois’s alone. Peake charts how disagreements about the relationship between art, politics, and propaganda – a term associated with Du Bois’s famous pronouncement on the role of propaganda in Black art – dominated the coverage in magazine book reviews of Black Renaissance fiction in the late 1910s and 1920s in ways that continually occluded empire. The rise of US empire coincided with a rising vogue for blackness, as Peake observes, and yet the illusory logo map of the United States that dominated then and still prevails today created conceptual problems for readers and critics in apprehending the geography of US empire and understanding how it related to some of the most vital new modernist fiction and its oblique Caribbean historical and political register. Introducing readers to four key literary fictions from the period – Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven, Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem, and Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death – along with the rich cultural conversation surrounding each, Peake shows what happens in even the best literary reviewing when our conceptual maps hide what has been there all along.

Meg Wesling’s chapter, “What We Know We Don’t Know,” picks up in some ways where Rafael Walker’s leaves off by taking up a particular strand of queer fiction, running from the early twentieth century through the contemporary moment, that raises new questions about the role of literature in the imperial work of establishing racial and sexual normativity. Through her readings of three novels – Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956), and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) – Wesling introduces some of the key insights of recent scholarship on sexuality and its always racialized relation to empire. At the same time, the chapter invites us to consider the unpredictability of literature in the hands of its discrepant readers – and what this can teach us about how all desire emerges in relation to the political and social world, including the world of ongoing empire.

Jeehyun Lim addresses another unpredictable cluster of empire literature, three Korean-American works that engage with the rise of militarized modernity during the second half of the twentieth century, when the US consolidated its reach as a global superpower. Focusing on the legacies of the Korean War and its lasting effects on sociopolitical relations in postwar South Korea, these writers write in English for a primarily English-speaking audience, positioning their work right on the borders of Korean and American literatures. Lim explores what she calls “pacific entanglements” or the web of relations and ongoing back-and-forth flows between South Korea and the US that register both US imperialism and the ambiguous, changing status of South Korea transitioning from protectorate, to occupied country, to ally, and finally sub-empire. Tuning into the Americanness of militarized modernity in these three immigrant texts reveals an under-studied dimension of the cultures of US imperialism as it took shape in and through Cold War Asia.

Catherine S. Ramírez turns to the figure and story of the child migrant that marked the simultaneous global emergence of migrant “crises” from the Darién Gap to the Mediterranean Sea, from Ukraine to Gaza in the late 2010s. The essay works with Javier Zamora’s 2022 memoir Solito, written primarily in English, part of a twenty-first-century boom in life writing by once-undocumented immigrants as well as of the burgeoning scholarship on the “necropolitics of migration” at the Mexico-US border. A detailed close reading of the memoir’s descriptions of the body and language of its Salvadoran child narrator-protagonist demonstrates the spatial-physical, linguistic, and temporal dimensions of his personal story that are identified with what Ramírez calls “undocutime” and the bioprecarity this state produces. The chapter concludes with a meditation on the politics of border militarization and the specific role as well as the value of youth in the contemporary coloniality of migration in the Americas.

Finally, María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo’s chapter on contemporary speculative fiction as anti-colonial theory assembles a deep storehouse of Latinx and Indigenous authors and directors of science fiction, neo-gothic, time-travel adventure and dystopic/utopic genres. Defining speculative fiction expansively (and the term ‘American’ hemispherically), her sources include Mexican, Central American, US and Canadian literature and film, and adduce the complex legacies and ongoing practices of colonialism, neocolonialism, dispossession, and extractivism as well as reparative visions of future worlds yet to come. These speculative forms provide alternative Indigenous theories of liberation for the land itself, known by Indigenous and decolonial nomenclatures, from “Abya Yala” or “living land,” to “Turtle Island.” As Saldaña argues here, the relation between Indigenous and Latinx history is itself constituted by multiple, sequential, and overlapping imperial projects and racial regimes. At the same time, Saldaña explores the range of speculative genres in this expanded archive – ghost, neogothic, sci-fi, fantasy, and the weird – as corrective forms that put racial reasoning in its place as the fantastical product of seemingly rational Enlightenment thinking, both cause and effect of colonialism. Her chapter bolsters this volume’s collective vision regarding the capacity of literature to reimagine the past while helping to make and sustain the possible worlds of the present and future.