The various Atlantic and European entanglements of the age of Latin American independence make it difficult to establish solely “Iberian” perspectives of the events culminating in the independences. Nevertheless, this essay proposes four distinct periods, mostly based on developments in Iberian politics, including the Peninsular War and its aftermath, when elites in Spain and Portugal advanced distinct views and solutions to the crises unfolding in the Americas. Certainly, the situation was not the same in Spain and Portugal. Still, the many cross-pollinations in Spanish and Portuguese politics in the first quarter of the nineteenth century permit the use of shared chronological benchmarks. Indeed, the years of the French occupation of the Iberian Peninsula between 1808 and 1814, and the distinct challenges that the events in this six-year period created, loomed large in subsequent debates about imperial preservation, sovereignty, rights, and relations within the Iberian Empires. Large-scale, multisited, unrest in Spanish America since 1810, prompted the proposal of political and military solutions to guarantee the integrity of the empire and of what some viewed as a trans-Atlantic “Spanish nation.” In Portugal, the debates revolved around the lasting consequences of the royal family’s relocation to Rio de Janeiro in 1808, and anxieties about the status of Portugal itself within the reconfigured empire.

Historiography has long relegated women’s roles in Latin American independence to stories of heroines who left home to support the movement only to return once battles were won. This chapter argues, by contrast, that shifting models of femininity and masculinity were central to a political transformation from colonies governed by paternal monarchs to republics that celebrated national fraternity among male citizens. Using intersectional analysis, it traces the multiple ways in which roles for both women and men of various social strata were in flux from the eighteenth century through independence. By the mid-nineteenth century, ideologies of separate spheres became dominant, allowing elite and middling women to extend their maternal influence into educational and charitable endeavors, but only by mobilizing as women. Poor women and women of color could neither live up to domestic ideals nor earn rights, like their male peers, through military service or as household heads. Rather than simply a colonial legacy of patriarchal domination, then, gender norms changed as women went from sharing with men differentiated ranks as colonial subjects to their exclusion from citizenship.

This chapter highlights translation as both formally and thematically at the very core of Kazuo Ishiguro’s writing – as its origin, strategy, and target. Its first part considers the ways in which the author’s engagement with the two cultures at the heart of his own experience helped shape a translational realism and a poetics of originary translatedness that are central to his style and that comment implicitly on their own constructedness as well as on our narrative and critical assumptions. The chapter then turns to a focus on Ishiguro’s self-consciously ‘translated’ narrative voices training us in navigating their liminalities, thus prompting reflection, on various levels, on the limits of knowing. Ultimately, the chapter argues that Ishiguro’s poetics of translation – or more precisely the liminalities of its subtly self-reflexive translational realism and voice – draws attention to itself as such, thereby extending the novels’ concerns to an ethics of reading that also models an ethics for reading world literature.

This chapter is devoted to Ishiguro’s archive and aims to suggest ways in which our understanding of the author’s work can be developed and enhanced by an examination of his drafts, notes, plans and other documents. It first offers a brief description of the scope and contents of Ishiguro’s papers, which the author carefully selected, organized, and prepared before their transfer to the Harry Ransom Center. It then discusses his conscientious methods of composition as revealed by the archives and as presented by Ishiguro himself in an explanatory piece entitled ‘How I Write’: months or years of planning precede the first formal drafts, which are extensively revised or sometimes discarded altogether. As a case study, the chapter examines some of the ‘precursors’ to The Remains of the Day in order to show how access to the archives and preliminary steps to a published text may illuminate the complex process of creation.

Ishiguro’s protagonists are notable for their resolution. It is precisely this quality that leads characters such as Ono in An Artist of the Floating World, Stevens in Remains of the Day, Christopher Banks in When We Were Orphans, and Kathy H in Never Let Me Go to make life-defining but ethically dubious decisions. In this sense, irresolution can be seen, paradoxically and not unproblematically, as a key Ishigurian virtue. Indeed, irresolution inheres in Ishiguro’s novels in terms of narrative form as well as ethics and theme: rather than offering epiphany, consolation, redemption, or any final hermeneutic closure or disclosure, the novels are insistent, resolute in their tendency towards thematic, ethical, and structural irresolution. At the same time, however, the desire for resolution is shown to be an understandable one, and to underlie the characters’ efforts to make meaning from the worlds and situations in which they find themselves.

Ishiguro’s fiction is pervasively concerned with questions of home and homelessness, and with the kinds of displacement, un-belonging, and cultural otherness that are characteristic of the immigrant condition and that can be traced to Ishiguro’s own experience of being relocated, at the age of five, from Nagasaki, Japan to England. There is an irony in how Ishiguro’s characters are often constantly on the move as their movement is juxtaposed against their internal stasis. Yet, the motif of travel helps reflect the ungrounded or displaced condition of the immigrant. This chapter focuses on two novels that directly and explicitly address the question of migration from one country (and one continent) to another – A Pale View of Hills concerns the trauma of moving from Japan to England; When We Were Orphans centres around an intercontinental move, from pre-communist Shanghai to pre-war Britain – in order to consider the importance of immigration and the condition of being nationally and ethnically ungrounded in Ishiguro’s work. The chapter will also consider Ishiguro’s latest novel, Klara and the Sun, to consider immigration alongside attendant issues of race and labour.

While the conventional understanding within many Latin American historiographical traditions is that science went hand in hand with political liberation from the metropole, this chapter seeks to elucidate the ways in which the public sphere in both Spanish America and Brazil cultivated very different narratives and historiographies. In Spanish America, the republican public sphere aggressively set out to erase all connections between Spain, monarchy, and empire. Science became antithetical with the Spanish empire. The erase was deliberate and painstaking, a careful process of both forgetting and ignoring. By the time national historiographies emerged, the idea of revolution, republic patriotism, and science as casually connected became inextricably linked. In Brazil, there was a different process of forgetting. Science, empire, and monarchy never became disconnected and antithetical in the same fashion, dependent as science was on monarchical institutions that had arrived with the Portuguese royal family in 1808 Brazil. Yet the meaning of science did take a strange turn as science became, in print, the handmaiden of industry in a society that continued to witness a significant expansion of plantation slavery and the slave trade well into the nineteenth century.

Across his oeuvre, Ishiguro has imaginatively reworked a host of literary and artistic genres, from the debts to the gothic tradition in A Pale View of Hills to the science fiction thematics of Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun. At the same time, he has expressed ambivalence and even hostility towards the genres his novels draw on, prompting polemical responses from such influential writers of genre fiction as Ursula K. Le Guin, Neil Gaiman, and Margaret Atwood. This chapter sheds light on Ishiguro’s distinctively equivocal relation to genre fiction by examining how his four most recent novels self-consciously engage with and exploit the genres of detective, dystopian, fantasy, and science fiction.

This chapter argues that Ishiguro’s novels frame ethical issues through questions of agency. Hannah Arendt’s ideas about agency and action provide a way to understand this in detail: for Arendt, speech and action reveal ‘who’ the speaker is, and shows their involvement with the ‘web of human relationships’ and the ramifications of their actions; the representation of action is inextricable from style and form. Using these ideas, the chapter demonstrates that there are significant changes over Ishiguro’s work: the first three novels concern reflections on past actions; the second three explore different conditions of agency in both content and in style; the two most recent novels deal with the impact and risks of actions and reactions. This also illuminates two recognizable literary devices used by Ishiguro: the way his characters ‘project’ themselves onto others, and what he calls the ‘dream grammar’ in relation to some aspects of his prose and plotting.

The independence of Latin America was intrinsically connected to broader Atlantic processes and networks of the Atlantic World. Throughout the process that resulted in political autonomy and republicanism in most of Spanish America, strong networks of trade and nascent diplomatic relations with Great Britain and its Caribbean colonies, the Portuguese empire and later Brazil, Haiti, St. Thomas, Curaçao, and the United States allowed revolutionaries to resist, escape, return, persist, and ultimately prevail. Rather than seeing foreign countries as outside the scope of the confrontations, this chapter integrates this international sphere into a broader geography of conflict. The commercial negotiations and diplomatic confrontations with foreign powers in the Caribbean, in the Atlantic, and in the Pacific oceans were crucial to determining the outcome than the military confrontations throughout Spanish America. The chapter focuses on the commercial networks and formal and informal diplomatic relations at play during the independence period; thus, decentering the state as the focus of analysis and paying closer attention to merchants, seafarers, envoys, and other border-crossing denizens of the Atlantic.

When Never Let Me Go was published in 2005, Ishiguro indicated that he ‘remain[ed] fascinated by memory’, and that his next challenge was to examine the themes of national memory and forgetting. The Buried Giant, published in 2015, represents Ishiguro’s unique meditations on collective memory, understanding, and the complexities of forgetting. Utilizing a third-person narrative voice, Ishiguro orchestrates a post-Arthurian landscape of buried slaughter and collective amnesia, whilst engaging in a critical enquiry into the nature of shared memories in relationships. This chapter will begin by considering Ishiguro’s memory work in his earlier novels, before an investigation into the fallibility of memory and understanding precipitated by the enigmatic mist. This is followed by an exploration of the question of culpability and the complexities of collective memory. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the figure of the boatman, the island of forgetting, and the implications of an enforced forgetting.

Asked to account for the main influences on his life as a writer, Ishiguro has turned consistently to one idea in particular: that he believes himself to be ‘a songwriter at heart, even when ... writing novels’. His early years as an aspiring musician left an indelible mark, one that is evident across his work: in the musical variations of the stories in Nocturnes, the character of the pianist-protagonist of The Unconsoled, and the insistent motif of the titular pop song in Never Let Me Go, along with many other musical references, allusions, and effects. This chapter seeks to understand something of the quality of Ishiguro’s literary music. It focuses in particular on the fascinating ways in which the most powerfully perceptive and affecting musical moments in the writing are those in which music is simultaneously evoked and kept somehow at a distance.

This chapter challenges received wisdom that focuses solely on politics to understand the revolutionary nature of independence in Latin America. It revisits Latin America’s independence processes by investigating the multiple forms of coerced labor regimes and forced migrations that emerged throughout the continent after the breakdown of colonialism. The region is a crucial site for exploring how in the nineteenth century liberal legal discourses aimed at erasing categories of social difference continued to reproduce inequality based on multiple iterations of unfree labor. In addition to placing Brazil, Cuba, and the Spanish American mainland in the same frame, the chapter connects African, Chinese, and indigenous peoples’ histories. Seeking to shed new light on how independence impacted labor regimes, we engage with scholarship that argues for the employment of a transregional lens in the study of global labor regimes during the nineteenth century. A transregional approach to labor regimes reveals new dimensions to mechanisms of inequality and oppression that have long gripped the continent, while also connecting it to trends reshaping labor regimes on a global scale.