Chapter 3 examines regional trade networks, drawing on archival records of import and export tax duties assessed in the ports of Veracruz, Havana, and Cartagena. Contrasting regional trade with transatlantic trade—which was larger than regional trade by volume and value and has thus occupied most scholarly attention—I show that ships moved between Veracruz and the Caribbean Islands and mainland littoral with greater frequency than they did between Veracruz and Europe. Shipping within the Mexican-Caribbean was also not entirely a byproduct of transatlantic trade, as we often imagine, but a distinct circuit following its own seasonal patterns. Focusing on seasonality and other “soft” factors, I argue that rather than seeing regional trade simply as a secondary consequence of transatlantic trade, we can see it as a primary means through which people in the Mexican-Caribbean world created material links to one another and participated in a common commercial system.

This essay examines the literary emergence radical abolitionism in the context of the national, hemispheric, and transatlantic circulation of print. It begins with an overview of the present state of literary scholarship on abolitionist writing and then goes on to analyze several interrelated historical-textual events occurring around 1830. They include the publication of David Walker’s Appeal, William Lloyd Garrison’s emergence as an abolitionist editor and spokesperson, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, and the Jamaican uprising of 1831–32.

Chapter 3 analyzes how, within a newly expanded marketplace for print, a combination of manuscript and printed letters helped shape the ways in which the Company of Scotland’s Darien venture (1695–1700) and its subsequent failure came to be understood in cultural memory. Letters in both manuscript and printed form helped establish the company. Letters also served to connect the company directors with the colonists in Darien, and, when published in pamphlet form, they provided information and propaganda about the new colony to the nation back home. After the collapse of the Darien settlement, letters also became the evidence used to shape the cultural memory of the disaster. The chapter traces how, over the course of the eighteenth century, the cultural memory of Darien was erased by the bigger controversies surrounding the implications of the Acts of Union (1707) for the Scottish nation. Lastly, it considers how the rediscovery and publication of the Darien papers by John Hill Burton in 1849 brought them back into focus as a site of cultural memory.

This chapter considers the impact of what Mark McGurl has called ‘the Program Era’ on recent Irish fiction. It tracks the emergence of a new kind of Irish novel moving back and forth across the Atlantic between Ireland and the United States. Taking Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic and Mary Costello’s Academy Street as examples, the chapter proposes that these works indicate the gravitational force of American cultural and economic supremacy in ‘the Program Era’ as the United States has drawn Irish writing into its orbit. However, even as the Irish Transatlantic novel attests to some convergences of Irish and American realities, the form also hints at an autumn or early winter of American global hegemony.

Scott’s lifelong passion for trees is the subject of this chapter. Trees in Scotland’s folklore and mythology, as individual living species, and collectively in the environments that once were the nation’s great forests, are shown to be of paramount importance to his literary and personal writing. Articles for the Quarterly Review and other periodicals, letters to correspondents, including poet Joanna Baillie, and his unpublished personal planting journal Sylva Abbotsfordiensis are explored for their record of Scott’s nationally acknowledged expertise in silviculture, his planting programmes at Abbotsford and his experiments with growing conditions. Using a deep-time framework and recent scientific discovery, the chapter looks back to the first tree species to colonize Scotland after the last great glaciation. Scott’s planting of native species and advocacy of their value to the nation is revealed as a form of environmental reconstitution. Tensions between the aesthetics of planting and agrarian economics are investigated.

Frederick Douglass was perhaps the most successful African American abolitionist to traverse the Atlantic and tour the British Isles. In town halls, churches, taverns, and private parlor rooms across the country he spoke to hundreds of thousands of people, sparking a wave of transatlantic abolition that had a deep impact on the British landscape. While he only traveled to Britain and Ireland three times, the friendships and networks he created, together with his transformative experiences there, shaped, supported and sustained his public antislavery work in the United States for the rest of his life.

This chapter argues that central to African American literature’s “pivot” at mid-century is its redefinition of antislavery’s activist networks “in an autonomous African American cultural and literary enterprise” that not only was shaped by transatlantic antislavery tactics and strategies, but transformed those old networks into new circuits of activism. William and Ellen Craft, Josiah Henson, and Henry Highland Garnet all undertook work that “memorialized and redefined the goals of old antislavery networks.” McCaskill considers not only Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom but also Ellen Craft’s private photograph album as establishing the wider frame in which these texts, and their imaginings of Black futures, could be taken up. Similarly, Henry Highland Garnet repurposed antislavery strategies and causes in his February 1865 sermon “Let the Monster Perish,” before the House of Representatives, by opening with his grandfather’s kidnapping from Africa and going on to sketch his own ability to forge a family with other abolitionists despite that natal disruption instituted by slavery. McCaskill argues that this and other published sermons attest to Garnet’s emergence from antislavery activism to contribute to “an emerging national literary tradition.”

This chapter analyzes Native performers’ visits to London in the nineteenth century, their mobility, and their self-conscious negotiations with the modern world. It emphasizes their resistance to the stereotypes through which impresarios, audiences, and commentators sought to circumscribe them. It considers the visits made by the Ojibwe who traveled with George Catlin in the 1840s, and the performers who appeared with Buffalo Bill later in the century, among others, discussing how they pushed back against the framing narratives of “savagery” and the “vanishing Indian.” It explores in detail the two London visits made by Pauline Johnson, her social and cultural interactions, and the apparent ease with which she navigated the slippage between her Mohawk heritage and London drawing rooms and theatres at Empire’s high point. Distinctive as Johnson was, she comes at the end the end of a long line of visitors who both exploited, and destabilized, familiar cultural stereotypes.

During their transatlantic journeys to Britain throughout the nineteenth century, African Americans engaged in what I term “adaptive resistance,” a multifaceted interventionist strategy by which they challenged white supremacy and won support for abolition. Alongside my recovery of this mode of self-presentation in sources I have excavated from Victorian newspapers, I use an interdisciplinary methodology to (re)discover black performative strategies on the Victorian stage from the late 1830s to the mid-1890s. Performance was only one strand in the black activist arsenal, however. The successful employment of adaptive resistance relied on a triad of performance, abolitionist networks, and exploitation of print culture, and if an individual ensured an even balance between all three, it was likely their sojourn was successful.

In adopting this resistance strategy, black men and women forged a Black American protest tradition in Britain which was based on their literary, visual, and oratorical testimony. Black men and women sought to make their voices heard in a climate dominated by white supremacy; they refused to capitulate and educated thousands of people on slavery and its legacies through physically and mentally demanding tours organized across Britain.

Carmen made its debut in the Spanish Americas when the local networks of opera were at their apex, with a constant stream of singers from Europe and a desire for new repertoires outside the main staples of Italian opera. In this chapter, considering sources from across the region, we discuss four layers of Carmen’s reception in the Americas. First, the reception of the opera beyond the stage, in the form of vocal scores, arrangements for military bands and isolated numbers. Second, the perception of Carmen as a French opera, and the way it served as a vehicle for French opera companies in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Third, the idea of Carmen as Spanish, and how different countries considered that hispanicity as part of their own culture and theatrical expectations. Finally, we discuss how the habanera in Carmen was perceived as part of a larger contemporary debate on the transatlantic popularity of the habanera as a musical genre, its origins, ethnicity and its moral and musical character.

This chapter examines the many contexts influencing US responses to global slavery, including the British anti-slavery colonial model, attempts to forge the US imperial destiny in the Pacific and Africa, and a global labour market, which blurred the distinctions between free and forced movement of workers.

This book compares the rights and social inclusion of two racialized minority groups: Roma in Central and Southeast Europe (CSEE), and African Americans in the United States (U.S.), primarily in the American South. We couch those attempts loosely in the frameworks of Roma rights and civil rights, though we will focus mainly on Roma rights in post-Communist CSEE (from 1991 until the present) and civil rights during the U.S. Civil Rights movement (roughly 1954–1968).

This chapter explores some of the usages to which biography – and particularly literary biography – was put in the middle decades of the twentieth century. The analysis begins with Benedict Kiely’s Poor Scholar: A Study of the Works and Days of William Carleton (1947), and subsequently traces the many engagements that were made by Norman A. Jeffares, Richard Ellmann and others with the titanic figures of James Joyce and William Butler Yeats. It then discusses how the much less canonical ‘The Irish Writers Series’, published by Bucknell University, provided a much-utilised platform for students and critics of modern Irish writing, with biographies ranging in subject from James Clarence Mangan to Edna O’Brien. Reflecting on a number of biographies of Irish writers written in this period, it considers the impact of literary biography on the shaping of a twentieth-century narrative of modern Irish writing; in particular, its proximity to traditions of liberal humanism, and its attractiveness to an American academy. The chapter also discusses how, in the 1970s, increased levels of professionalisation and a growing sense of self-confidence in biographical writing coincided with a need for collective reflection and critical commentary.

In its synecdochic mapping of two rival poetry scenes run by the Chilean poets Juan Stein and Diego Soto in the two years between Salvador Allende’s election and Augusto Pinochet’s September 11, 1973 coup, and its story of the rise and fall over the next two decades of the enigmatic avant-garde poet Carlos Wieder, Bolaño’s 1996 Distant Star continues and deepens his investment in the novel as a form for exploring poetry and politics, history and literary history, by other means (“de otra manera”). Characterized by Marta Posadas, a medical student and aspiring Marxist critic who writes prose poems, as the poet who will “revolutionize Chilean poetry,” Wieder is the central figure of a novel of poetic apprenticeship at once national and transnational, aesthetic and political, focusing on the choices aspiring poets of Bolaño’s generation faced from their late teens through their early forties. In the transatlantic arc of the novel’s final three chapters, which takes the detective Abel Romero’s search for Wieder from Chile to Spain, Bolaño figures both the ambivalence of his attraction to detective fiction at the expense of a more exclusive orientation toward poetry, and the irresistible pull of his work in that direction.

The manuscript of collected verse and prose poems Bolaño began assembling in 1993 under the title “Fragmentos de la Universidad Desconocida,” published posthumously in 2007 as The Unknown University, marks a pivotal moment in his career. Bringing to a close his lifelong aspiration to gain recognition primarily as a poet, its three-part construction, with Antwerp at its center (recycled and retitled as People Going Away), signals a decisive transition and reorientation of Bolaño’s writing priorities over the course of his final decade. Positioning as “one of the wings / of the Unknown University!”–but only one–the verse poetry he had loved all his life but come to find as limiting as Poe, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud had found it to be a century-and-a-half earlier, The Unknown University sets the stage for one of the most productive decades any writer has known. Following quite logically on the farewell to poetry as verse that is The Unknown University, Bolaño published only three years later, in 1996, the breakthrough year of his career, the condensed, prose-poetic fiction of Nazi Literature of the Americas and the novel of poetic apprenticeship this is in fundamental respects both its companion text and its sequel, Distant Star.