This wide-ranging comparative study argues for a fundamental reassessment of the literary history of the nineteenth-century United States within the transamerican and multilingual contexts that ...shaped it. Drawing on an array of texts in English, French and Spanish by both canonical and neglected writers and activists, Anna Brickhouse investigates interactions between US, Latin American and Caribbean literatures. Her many examples and case studies include the Mexican genealogies of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the rewriting of Uncle Tom's Cabin by a Haitian dramatist, and a French Caribbean translation of the poetry of Phillis Wheatley. Brickhouse uncovers lines of literary influence and descent linking Philadelphia and Havana, Port-au-Prince and Boston, Paris and New Orleans. She argues for a new understanding of this most formative period of literary production in the United States as a 'transamerican renaissance', a rich era of literary border-crossing and transcontinental cultural exchange.
The Alchemy of Conquest Bauer, Ralph; Brickhouse, Anna; Gruesz, Kirsten Silva
2019, 2019-10-08
eBook
The Age of the Discovery of the Americas was concurrent with the Age of Discovery in science. In The Alchemy of Conquest, Ralph Bauer explores the historical relationship between the two, focusing on ...the connections between religion and science in the Spanish, English, and French literatures about the Americas during the early modern period.
As sailors, conquerors, travelers, and missionaries were exploring new worlds, and claiming ownership of them, early modern men of science redefined what it means to discover something. Bauer explores the role that the verbal, conceptual, and visual language of alchemy played in the literature of the discovery of the Americas and in the rise of an early modern paradigm of discovery in both science and international law. The book traces the intellectual and spiritual legacies of late medieval alchemists such as Roger Bacon, Arnald of Villanova, and Ramon Llull in the early modern literature of the conquest of America in texts written by authors such as Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, José de Acosta, Nicolás Monardes, Walter Raleigh, Thomas Harriot, Francis Bacon, and Alexander von Humboldt.
Elsewhere Catastrophe Brickhouse, Anna
American literary history,
02/2022, Letnik:
34, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Abstract
This essay explores the problem of what I call “elsewhere catastrophe”: a conviction that catastrophe always occurs outside the US nation, traditionally to the south and the east, or happens ...to racialized bodies that themselves constitute a kind of beyond. At the same time, American literary history reminds us that the vast knowledge traditions developed by those who faced and still face the structures of ongoing settler colonialism and slavery may provide the best available answers, the strongest critical traction, for facing this century. The project of American literary catastrophism derives in part from a body of theory that Caribbean intellectual history has been developing and refining since the first invasion of the archipelago—and the practice of American literary catastrophism must embrace the many traditions that tell stories, create verse, and generate knowledge about how to live in the midst of world-ending. Through brief readings of Tommy Orange, Herman Melville, and N. K. Jemisin, I propose American literary catastrophism as the project of assembling a broad literary tradition of the hemisphere required of our times.
The project of American literary catastrophism . . . is both historicist and deliberately presentist; it moves between both modes . . . attending to an ongoing catastrophe that always recedes, eventually, from dominant public view and memory.
Unsettling World Literature BRICKHOUSE, ANNA
PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America,
10/2016, Letnik:
131, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Simultaneous But Distant Events in Collision: In 1981, New York University (NYU) Celebrated the 150th Anniversary of its founding with a series of notable speakers and events; in rural Guatemala that ...year, the military began to carry out a policy of genocide against the Mayan Indians. In New York, the much-awaited English translation of Roland Barthes's treatise on photography,
La chambre claire
, appeared as
Camera Lucida;
in Nicaragua, the CIA-backed contras waged war on the Sandinista government, which had passed the Agrarian Reform Law to redistribute land to the
campesinos
who labored on it. In the United States, leading physicists announced advances “toward a unified theory”: “an integral work of art” made up of “threads in a tapestry,” a scientific weaving with the almost phantasmagorical ability to replace all “the confusion of the past” with “a simple and elegant theory” (Glashow 494-95). Abroad, magical realism officially became what Homi Bhabha would later call “the literary language of the emergent post-colonial world” (7). An example of the genre,
Midnight's Children
, by Salman Rushdie, won the Booker Prize. In the United States, magical realism came to stand, “as surely as Carmen Miranda's fruity cornucopias,” for a reified, homogeneous, and consumable “Latin America” (Molloy 374) and served as Latin America's new entrée into the exclusive party held by comparative literature. Gabriel García Márquez received the Nobel the following year.
En Homenaje a Latinx Studies Brickhouse, Anna
English language notes,
10/2018, Letnik:
56, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This short essay was written in the days after white supremacists and neo-Nazis invaded the campus of the University of Virginia and downtown Charlottesville, many of them heavily armed and dressed ...for combat. After offering a brief reflection on how Latino/a/x studies shaped her scholarly trajectory as someone not trained in this field as a graduate student, the author asks how the field can help reimagine this particular political moment. The essay reads Junot Díaz’s
forward in time—as an anticipatory history illuminating the last US presidential election.
En Homenaje a Latinx Studies Brickhouse, Anna
English language notes,
10/2018, Letnik:
56, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Abstract
This short essay was written in the days after white supremacists and neo-Nazis invaded the campus of the University of Virginia and downtown Charlottesville, many of them heavily armed and ...dressed for combat. After offering a brief reflection on how Latino/a/x studies shaped her scholarly trajectory as someone not trained in this field as a graduate student, the author asks how the field can help reimagine this particular political moment. The essay reads Junot Díaz’s Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao forward in time—as an anticipatory history illuminating the last US presidential election.
The Black Legend of Texas BRICKHOUSE, ANNA
PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America,
05/2016, Letnik:
131, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Among The Many Significant Contributions of Raúl Coronado's
A World Not to Come: A History Of Latino Writing and Print Culture
is its vivid account of a lost Latino public sphere, a little-known ...milieu of hispanophone intellectual culture dating back to the early nineteenth century and formed in the historical interstices of Spanish American colonies, emergent Latin American nations, and the early imperial interests of the United States. In this respect, the book builds on the foundational work of Kirsten Silva Gruesz's
Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing,
which gave definitive shape to the field of early Latino studies by addressing what were then (and in some ways still are) the “methodological problems of proposing to locate the ‘origins’ of Latino writing in the nineteenth century.” Gruesz unfolded a vast panorama of forgotten Spanish-language print culture throughout the United States, from Philadelphia and New York to New Orleans and California, in which letters, stories, essays, and above all poetry bequeathed what she showed convincingly were “important, even crucial, ways of understanding the world” that had been largely lost to history (x). Coronado's book carries forward this project of recovery, exploring a particular scene of early Latino writing centered in Texas during its last revolutionary decades as one of the Interior Provinces of New Spain, its abrupt transition to an independent republic, and its eventual annexation by the United States. As a “history of textuality” rather than a study of literary culture per se (28), the book tells the story of the first printing presses in Texas but also evinces the importance of manuscript circulation as well as private and sometimes unfinished texts.
A World Not to Come
concerns both print culture and origins but refuses to fetishize either, attending to the past not to “the degree that it is a measure of the future,” as Rosaura Sánchez once put it, but for the very opposite reason: because it portended a future that was never realized (qtd. in Gruesz,
Ambassadors
xi).
Hemispheric American Studies Levander, Caroline F; Levine, Robert S
2007, 20071004, 2008, 2007-10-04, 20080101
eBook
This landmark collection brings together a range of exciting new comparative work in the burgeoning field of hemispheric studies. Scholars working in the fields of Latin American studies, Asian ...American studies, American studies, American literature, African Diaspora studies, and comparative literature address the urgent question of how scholars might reframe disciplinary boundaries within the broad area of what is generally called American studies. The essays take as their starting points such questions as: What happens to American literary, political, historical, and cultural studies if we recognize the interdependency of nation-state developments throughout all the Americas? What happens if we recognize the nation as historically evolving and contingent rather than already formed? Finally, what happens if the "fixed" borders of a nation are recognized not only as historically produced political constructs but also as component parts of a deeper, more multilayered series of national and indigenous histories?With essays that examine stamps, cartoons, novels, film, art, music, travel documents, and governmental publications, Hemispheric American Studies seeks to excavate the complex cultural history of texts and discourses across the ever-changing and stratified geopolitical and cultural fields that collectively comprise the American hemisphere. This collection promises to chart new directions in American literary and cultural studies.
