The concluding chapter starts by very briefly summarizing key patterns in the litigation over judicial selection and then returns to the de Tocqueville quote and the issue of American exceptionalism. To assess the exceptionalism question, the chapter includes a discussion of litigation over judicial selection outside the United States, finding that it occurs in very few countries and where it does occur, is generally very limited. One exception is the recent burst of litigation in international courts over judicial selection in Poland. Another possible exception is Israel where there has been litigation concerning several judicial selection issues. Overall, the chapter concludes that American exceptionalism in litigation over judicial selection does not lie in the existence of such litigation but in the frequency of that litigation.

By 1948, President Perón’s first economic program was yielding results and enjoying broad political and social support while strengthening an expanding state infrastructure. The consolidation of this nationalist and anti-liberal model had an impact on cultural production, particularly on an expanded literary field. Between 1948 and 1949 several works that became canonical were published, offering a diversity of perspectives on the debates that crisscrossed Argentine culture: the novels Adán Buenos Ayres (Leopoldo Marechal), El túnel (Ernesto Sábato), the essay Muerte y transfiguración de Martín Fierro (Ezequiel Martínez Estrada) and in the short-story collection El Aleph (Jorge Luis Borges). Differences arose not only out of divergent political positions but also, and perhaps more poignantly, out of the disparate conceptual frameworks around which intellectual debates took place: ideas of order and chaos, organization and entropy, community and disorder. Terms like “pueblo” and “popular” became essential and unavoidable to discuss fiction, literary language, the role of literature, and literary institutions that grouped writers.

“Black Ecological Insurgencies” charts the formation of an insurgent ecological tradition in the Tidewater of Virginia from slavery through the emergence of Jim Crow, underscoring the relationship between these formations and the re-grounding of Black subjectivity within the Black body in contrast to the latter’s abstraction and extraction in the service of expropriation and accumulation associated with plantation and post-emancipation transformations of the landscape. Engaging court documents, bills of sale, slave narratives, state records related to the consolidation of fisheries, as well as historical newspapers articles and related images, I excavate the dynamic relation between Black collective self-creation, fugitivity, resistance, land and aquacultural cultivation, and the rejoining of Black subjectivity and embodiment outside the premises of fungibility and disposability.

Rebecca Hall’s 2021 film adaptation of Nella Larsen’s famed Harlem Renaissance novel, Passing (1929), indexes the relevance of interracial passing today. We explore Hall’s film to explain the contemporary appeal of Larsen’s narrative. Larsen’s Passing licenses interpretive possibilities that transcend its immediate moment, even as it seeks to criticize specific historical realities of modern intersectional identity. Hall’s neo-passing narrative of 1920s Black femininity employs cinema to highlight the enduring immobility of the color line and the erotic and social risk of crossing it.

We assess Hall’s adaptation of the two-protagonist structure as it personalizes Larsen’s depiction of racial liminality; consider Hall’s use of cinematography to adapt Larsen’s rhetorical sleight of hand regarding US racial discourses; and discuss the homoerotics of passing in both works. We then contemplate Hall’s casting choices. The final section takes up the conclusion of the two works. Hall resolves some of Larsen’s famous ambiguity, but poignantly showcases the essential instability of the gendered, racialized body in US literature and culture across a century.

In the settler-enslaving context of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, where multiple discourse communities (politics, science, Christianity, and abolitionism) worked in tandem to signify Blackness as a distinct biological entity, Black writers crafted an alternative symbolic order that understood racialized Blackness as a socially constructed embodied experience. This chapter argues that, for thinkers like Phillis Wheatley Peters, Adam Carman, Maria Stewart, Rev. J. W. Loguen, and Harriet Jacobs, the Black body is a site of overdetermined experiences that – when studied – reveal the machinations of anti-Black sociopolitical processes. By focalizing three areas of critical interrogation – moral inversion, natural rights, and sentimentality – I show how these thinkers interrogated the West’s foundational mythologies of nation and selfhood.

The year 1926 is a milestone for Argentine literature as it marked the publication of three books which represented a radical innovation for narrative prose: the novels Don Segundo Sombra, by Ricardo Güiraldes, and El juguete rabioso (The Mad Toy) by Roberto Arlt; and Horacio Quiroga’s Los desterrados (The Exiles), a short-story collection. These three books can be seen as a reconfiguration of a literature that, since its origins, had space as its privileged protagonist. Güiraldes’ novel postulates an idealized image of the countryside that, in the third decade of the twentieth century, was consciously anachronistic and nostalgic. In Arlt’s novel, the modern city is a symbol of novelty and even of the future, and also a constant source of irresolvable conflicts. In turn, the stories from Los desterrados, which take place in the frontier territory of Misiones, updated the fictional possibilities of the border understood as a contact zone. The publication of these three books in 1926, then, implied a renewal of the spaces privileged by Argentine literature: the countryside, the city, and the border. In addition, they are testimony to how the 1920s marked a definitive change in the ways of being a writer.

This chapter analyzes the works of brother and sister Lucio Victorio Mansilla and Eduarda Mansilla, two fundamental figures in the cultural life of nineteenth-century Argentina, whose personal trajectories took them to Europe and the United States. Journalist, military man, and politician Lucio penned what can be considered the first ethnographic record of the Indigenous peoples of the Pampas; Eduardo was an accomplished novelist, travel writer, journalist, and musician who published in both Spanish and French. In this chapter the work of both siblings is read together. It takes into account the centrality of Lucio in the field of Argentinean literature and proposes that Eduarda illuminates different areas of the cultural intellectual life of nineteenth-century Argentina. Focus is on Una excursión a los indios ranqueles (1870) by Lucio V. Mansilla and two novels by Eduarda Mansilla – El médico de San Luis (1860) and Pablo ou la vie dans les pampas, published in French in 1869 and translated by Lucio – to reflect on the relationship between narration and the state, practices of everyday life, sociability, and family stories, as well as their circulation and consecration mechanisms.

Victoria and Silvina Ocampo are two writers of undeniable importance for the Argentine literary tradition. Even more when read through a feminist lens. Recognizing that there’s a lot of critical material written about them, this chapter proposes a different approach. Through the intersection between archive, fiction, and domestic spaces, it addresses the relationship between the sisters, their works, and their day-to-day environment. According to gender studies, houses, family relationships, and friendships (together with the forms of obedience, love, and conflict they imply) offer an opportunity to study the construction of a system of individual, sexual, and generational identities that will influence the Ocampos’ works as well as their ways of intervening in culture, interrupting and deviating traditions and standards, voices, and writings.