THE USABLE PAST began as I was writing a book on apocalyptic historicism in contemporary U.S. and Latin American fiction. As I worked on that project, I found that I was persistently drawn to investigate other attitudes toward history and literary tradition besides the apocalyptic, in part to test my hypotheses about American apocalypticism and in part, no doubt, to counterbalance the peculiar intensities of that mode. As I strayed from Armageddon, I repeatedly encountered a contrasting impulse to create precursors rather than cancel them. This other impulse involved a characteristic historical awareness – what I call an anxiety of origins – with respect to New World cultural histories and traditions. In my introduction I establish connections between this anxiety and the narrative energies that constitute usable histories and traditions. How these energies operate in selected works of U.S. and Latin American fiction is the subject of the chapters that follow.

My title is drawn from Van Wyck Brooks' essay, “On Creating a Usable Past,” and signals the ambivalence (often ironic) of history in a “new” world. “Usable” implies the active engagement of a user or users, through whose agency collective and personal histories are constituted. The term thus obviates the possibility of innocent history, but not the possibility of authentic history when it is actively imagined by its user(s).