Is modernism the most apt term for the literary efflorescence that took place in the first decades of the twentieth century across a range of regional and cultural contexts? What are the advantages and disadvantages of considering the heterogeneous collective of the Americas together? This essay spotlights significant Latinx writers, texts, and exchanges seldom included in conversations about American modernism, as it discusses the development of Latinx literature and Spanish-language literatures within the geographical bounds of what is now the US. Doing so reveals the crucial contributions of Latinx poets and the role of translation in fueling literary innovation.

This chapter frames the OSPAAAL within the longer historical arc of the interwar League Against Imperialism (LAI). It argues that the OSPAAAL recovered five major ideological tendencies of the LAI’s understudied Americas-based section, the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas (La liga anti-imperialista de las Américas, LADLA), created in Mexico City in 1925. Despite the similarities of the political projects of these organizations, they exhibited a major difference in that the LADLA, in its early years, demonstrated less commitment to Black struggles in the Americas and was more focused on organizing with Indigenous communities. Through fashioning itself as a non-race-based global movement that prioritized Black struggles, the OSPAAAL aimed to correct this limitation of its predecessor. However, although the OSPAAAL focused on Black struggles from its inception, it did so largely with respect to African Americans in the United States and South Africa, repeating the tendency of its predecessor to elide the problems of anti-Black racism in Latin America.

Mary Pat Brady’s chapter poses an alternative approach to hemispheric fiction by reading not according the scales of concentric geometries of space (local, regional, national, transnational), but instead reconceptualizing what she terms “pluriversal novels of the 21st century.” She argues for attending to the complexly mixed temporalities, perspectives, and languages of novels that reject the dualism of monoworlds (center/periphery) for the unpredictability of stories anchored in multiple space-times. While this is not an exclusively 21st-century phenomenon, she shows that pluriveral fiction has flourished recently, as works by Linda Hogan, Jennine Capó Crucet, Julia Alvarez, Gabby Rivera, Karen Tei Yamashita, Ana-Maurine Lara, and Evelina Zuni Lucero demonstrate.