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This volume offers the most complete English translation to date of the prose and poetry of José María Heredia (b. Cuba, 1803; d. Mexico, 1839), focusing on Heredia's political exile in the United States from November 1823 to August 1825. Frederick Luciani's introduction offers a complete biographical sketch that discusses the complications of Heredia's life in exile, his conflicted political views, his significance as a travel writer and observer of life in the United States, and his reception by nineteenth-century North American writers and critics. The volume includes thoroughly annotated letters that Heredia wrote to family and friends in Cuba, describing his struggles and adventures living among other young expatriates in New York City—fellow conspirators in a failed plot to overthrow Spanish rule on the island. His travel letters, especially those that describe his trip to the Niagara frontier in 1824 along the Hudson River and the Erie Canal, offer discerning reflections on American landscapes, technological advances, political culture, and social customs. The volume also offers translations of the verse that Heredia composed during his New York exile, in which he gave impassioned voice to Cuba's struggle for independence from Spain, and which reflected the emerging Romantic sensibilities in Spanish-language poetry. With accurate, clear translations, this volume serves as an introduction to a figure who is enshrined in the canon of Latin American literature, but scarcely known to Anglophone readers.

Let's Hear Their Voices brings together works by ten distinguished and emerging Cuban American writers of the'second generation'—writers who were born between 1960 and the mid-1980s in the United States to Cuban parents or have a mixed ethnic background. Called'ABCs'(American-Born Cubans) or'AmeriCubans,'these writers experiment with different formal approaches and lace their work with Cuban Spanish to give voice to hybrid identities and cultural legacies within the contemporary multicultural United States. An introduction by Iraida H. López identifies key tropes in their poetry, prose, and drama, and provides an overview of Cuban American literature since the 1960s. With both original and previously published pieces by award-winning authors—including President Obama's Second Inaugural Poet, Richard Blanco—the volume makes a welcome contribution to the fields of Latinx and American literature, as well as critical discussions across disciplines about the intersections of latinidad with race, class, gender, and sexuality.

In Forms of Disappointment, Lanie Millar traces the legacies of anti-imperial solidarity in Cuban and Angolan novels and films after 1989. Cuba's intervention in Angola's post-independence civil war from 1976 to 1991 was its longest and most engaged internationalist project and left a profound mark on the culture of both nations. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Millar argues, Cuban and Angolan writers and filmmakers responded to this collective history and adapted to new postsocialist realities in analogous ways, developing what she characterizes as works of disappointment. Revamping and riffing on earlier texts and forms of revolutionary enthusiasm, works of disappointment lay bare the aesthetic and political fragmentation of the public sphere while continuing to register the promise of leftist political projects. Pushing past the binaries that tend to dominate histories of the Cold War and its aftermath, Millar gives priority to the perspectives of artists in the Global South, illuminating networks of anticolonial and racial solidarity and showing how their works not only reflect shared feelings of disappointment but also call for ethical gestures of empathy and reconciliation.

2008 CHOICE Outstanding Academic TitleProclaimed by James Fenimore Cooper to be'the author of America,'William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) was one of nineteenth-century America's foremost poets and public intellectuals. In this, the first major biography of Bryant in almost forty years, Gilbert H. Muller reintroduces a quintessential New Yorker who commanded the nation's literary, cultural, urban, and political life for more than half a century.A transplanted Yankee, Bryant arrived on the unpaved streets of Manhattan in the early 1820s and he would soon find himself at the locus of the many political and cultural transformations sweeping Manhattan and the nation. The bedrock of Bryant's cultural authority was his reputation as'America's first poet,'and he enthralled a nation and his peers—including Whitman, Poe, Longfellow, and Emerson—who praised the excellence of his verse. A literary celebrity for almost seventy years, Bryant served as the editor of the New-York Evening Post for five decades, and was a major force behind the establishment of Central Park, the National Academy of Design, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. Drawing on previously unavailable letters and nineteenth-century files of the New-York Evening Post, Muller creates a humanistic portrait of New York City's'first citizen,'establishes him as a first-rate poet, and makes a convincing case for Bryant's role in defining the idea of democratic culture in America.

In Cuba, internationally renowned artists, philosophers, and writers reflect on the idea of a nation displaced. Featuring contributions from Isabel Alvarez Borland, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, María Cristina García, William Navarrete, Eliana Rivero, Rafael Rojas, and Carlos Victoria, as well as many others, Cuba is a rich collection of essays, testimonials, and interviews that reveal the complex, often antagonistic cultural and political debates coexisting within the Cuban exile population. As a multivoiced text, Cuba formulates a deeper understanding of diasporic identity, and broadens the discussion of the manner in which Cuban cultural identity and nationhood have been constructed, negotiated, and transformed by physical and cultural displacement.

What would American literature look like in languages other than English, and what would Latin American literature look like if we understood the United States to be a Latin American country and took seriously the work by U.S. Latinos/as in Spanish? Debra A. Castillo explores these questions by highlighting the contributions of Latinos/as writing in Spanish and Spanglish. Beginning with the anonymously published 1826 novel Jicoténcal and ending with fiction published at the turn of the twenty-first century, the book details both the characters'and authors'struggles with how to define an American self. Writers from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Mexico are featured prominently, alongside a sampling of those writers from other Latin American heritages (Peru, Colombia, Chile). Castillo concludes by offering some thoughts on U.S. curricular practice.

This collection of essays offers alternative readings of historical and literary texts produced during Latin America's colonial period. By considering the political and ideological implications of the texts'interpretation yesterday and today, it attempts to'decolonize'the field of Latin American studies and promote an ethical, interdisciplinary practice that does not falsify or appropriate knowledge produced by both the colonial subjects of the past and the oppressed subjects of the present.Using recent developments in postcolonial theory, the contributors challenge traditional approaches to Hispanism. The colonial situation under which these texts were composed, with all its injustices and prejudices, still lingers, and most studies have consistently avoided the connection between this colonial legacy and the situation of disenfranchised groups today. Colonialism Past and Present challenges discursive strategies that celebrate only European cultural traits, dismiss non-European cultural legacies, and solidify constructions of national projects considered natural extensions of European civilization since independence from Spain.