This chapter conciliates two different demands. On the one hand, it presents Martín Fierro as the apex of the gauchesca genre, as an intervention in political and cultural conflicts regarding the consolidation of the nation-state, the conservative order, rural capitalism, and the relationship between urban elites and rural populations, taking into consideration the two very different contexts in which both parts of the poem were written and initially read. On the other, it presents what seems to be the most impactful and widespread legacy of the poem: how, through the trope of the gaucho outlaw, the poem establishes a mode of conceiving the relationship between lettered elite and subaltern bodies and voices, when articulated to diverse (even contrasting) cultural/political projects. This articulation entails a constant redefinition of what “subaltern” may mean but always seems to assume unique uses of gaucho bodies and voices. One example would be the notion of the gaucho sociolect as the true national language and not a frontier sociolect, something unique to Latin America. How this came to be, and why, and with what consequences, are guiding questions.

In what is now known as Argentina, the year 1837 marked the birth of a modern, historically grounded understanding of literature and culture. It also marked the emergence of a generation (later known as the Generation of 1837) with far-reaching influence on the life of the country – including its first constitution, the public education system, and the drive to write national literary histories. Since then the preoccupation with what makes Argentina and its literature unique, and its present unlike its past, has not ceased to be a central trait of national culture. This chapter argues for the relevance of interpreting 1837 writers – in particular, Esteban Echeverría, Domingo F. Sarmiento, and Juan B. Alberdi – as our contemporaries, in the sense that we are still enmeshed in the modern project that, we think, they inaugurated. This is the case despite, or precisely because of the fact that their Eurocentric and exclusionary views have been increasingly evident in the public sphere. Showing that they were the first Argentine intellectuals for whom texts were understood and mainly valorized because of their location, author, and moment of production, this chapter offers clues into their foundational status.

After the publication of Eduardo Gutiérrez’s Juan Moreira (1879), its successful theatricaladaptation, and the numerous narratives about rebellious gauchos that followed, the set ofpractices and discourses that create a sense of belonging around the figure of the gaucho hascome to be known under the umbrella term of criollismo. Although recent research has shownthat criollismo did not disappear in the early twentieth century but converted to other nonliterary media, no approach considers the relationship between criollismo and cinema in thelong term and on a global level. In doing just this, this chapter focuses on the crossingbetween criollismo and cinema by looking at the images of the nation that gaucho-themed filmsbring into play. It explores how a repertoire of themes, characters, arguments, and landscapesdisseminated by criollista literature was adapted to film, projected globally in Hollywood movies, and then reappropriated by the local culture. Finally, it argues that this feedbackbetween criollista literature and film was fruitful until the late 1970s, when – after reaching a high level of violence – the political uses of criollismo became less massive and more sporadic.

Chapter 8 covered cases specific to nonelective systems, including the Missouri Plan, other appointment (mostly gubernatorial) systems, and legislative elections. The Missouri Plan cases mostly concerned the membership and processes of nominating commissions. Appointment cases concern issues such as requirements for legislative (usually state senate) confirmation and recess appointments. The legislative election cases generally dealt with technical issues (e.g., whether the vote in the legislature could be a voice vote or required ballots).

This chapter looks at the ways sf visions of the future published in the decades following World War II both challenge the dominant ideology of American exceptionalism – the notion that the United States is a single homogenous nation uniquely exempt from history – and the Program Era division between literary and genre fiction. Both Program Era realism and sf develop representations of the present. However, sf’s mirror is a distorting anamorphic one, presenting imaginary futures that help its readers cognize the contradictions, conflicts, and struggles that are always at work in any historical situation, and which naturalizing formulations such as American exceptionalism occlude. The chapter traces shifting practices of representing the future, beginning with 1950s dystopias, postapocalypses, and alternate histories through the radical visions of the New Wave and the new practices of postmodern cyberpunk and critical dystopia up to the recent wave of literary sf and climate change fiction.

The chapter argues that, with the publication of Los siete locos (The Seven Madmen) in 1929, Roberto Arlt produced the first major Argentine novel whose ideological topics, ways of representation, systems of characters, and spatial inventions, far from finding their place among the national literary traditions, establish a dialogue with the great novels of metropolitan modernity of the time: James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer (1925), and Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1928). The modern city, the cosmopolitan city of urban mixture and modernization, is the grand stage for the aesthetic, ideological, cultural, and social conflict in Arlt’s literature. In this sense, as a writer, journalist, and playwright, Arlt is the one who best expresses the disruption of an order and the instability implied by the impact of modernization on Argentine culture in the early twentieth century.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the term “literature” was used broadly to describe any printed text. By the turn of the century, its meaning had narrowed to refer specifically to aesthetic verbal objects with distinctive features of authorship and form. This change was brought on by rapid transformations in print culture. Literature created its readership mainly through periodicals: newspapers, leaflets, pamphlets, illustrated weeklies, magazines of mass and high culture. Periodicals were not only the medium for all literary genres but were also key in the professionalization of writers and the making of national literatures. They were a powerful tool to shape the literary imagination of a growing and increasingly more diversified reading public. Through the publication of serialized novels, essays, and reviews, periodicals such as La Nación, Sud-América, and Caras y Caretas were essential to the process of literary autonomy in Argentina. In this chapter the history of this process is outlined and those cases in which developments in print culture framed some of the most significant works of Argentine literature are discussed.

This chapter reorients readings of Harriet Jacobs’s and Harriet Wilson’s (semi)autobiographies as narratives of disability. I underscore the inextricable links between girlhood, labor, and disability began in their self-authored texts, alongside Jean Fagan Yellin’s publication of The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers and other documents which detail the life of Harriet Wilson. I argue that these life writings demonstrate each woman’s post-captivity labors as a challenge to nineteenth-century extractive economies of bondage. Studying the (semi)autobiographies, public and private correspondence, journal entries, and newspaper advertisements related to Harriet Jacobs and Harriet Wilson not only makes legible their disabled lives, but also provides a complex understanding of the interrelation between labor, disability, capacity, and resistance.

This chapter meditates on how Black erotic bodies manifest in a white supremacist world. It contends that said bodies congeal through an amalgamation of fungible gender and material/discursive dispossession. These inheritances afford Black people the opportunity to conjure fugitive freedom practices, such as multiplicity, which enable Black people to harness erotic power in the pursuit of self-determined notions of pleasure and intimacy with themselves and within Black communities. To buttress my argument, I draw on the work of Akwaeke Emezi – namely, their debut novel Freshwater and an essay about their gender transition surgeries – and Audre Lorde’s classic essay, “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” to illustrate how multiplicity is a freedom practiced undergirded by erotic power such that practitioners need not minimize or eliminate contradictory or complex aspects of themselves in order to access pleasure and intimacy along personal and interpersonal registers.

This chapter focuses on the Black body in the narrative genre of passing literature, which combines issues of embodiment with those of visuality. It begins by arguing that, whereas recent literary culture habituates us to immediacy, access, and confession, the passing plot operates on different terms. At a moment when many artists and critics are arguing for the importance of opacity to relational frameworks, the passing plot comes into focus as a special testing ground for viewing racialized embodiment and ethical sociality in fresh ways. The chapter goes on to argue that just as the passing plot proves a rich container for considering the ethics of relation, dramatic literature offers a particularly productive platform for considering passing literature today. My case study for these claims is Branden Jacob-Jenkins’s play An Octoroon (2014). A metatheatrical riff on a prominent nineteenth-century melodrama called The Octoroon (1859), the play avoids conveying some intimate truth about racial embodiment – the secret ostensibly kept by the passing figure – in order to offer new opportunities for Jacobs-Jenkins’s audience to become aware of their embodied participation in acts of racialization.

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.