Ambassadors of Culture The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing / Kirsten Silva Gruesz.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gruesz, Kirsten Silva, 1964-

Series:

Translation/transnation

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--19th century--History and criticism.

Hispanic American literature (Spanish)--History and criticism.

International relations.

Hispanic American literature (Spanish).

American literature.

Latin America--Relations--United States.

United States--Relations--Latin America.

United States.

Latin America.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 2002.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

This polished literary history argues forcefully that Latinos are not newcomers in the United States by documenting a vast network of Spanish-language cultural activity in the nineteenth century. Juxtaposing poems and essays by both powerful and peripheral writers, Kirsten Silva Gruesz proposes a major revision of the nineteenth-century U.S. canon and its historical contexts. Drawing on previously unpublished archival materials and building on an innovative interpretation of poetry's cultural role, Ambassadors of Culture brings together scattered writings from the borderlands of California and the Southwest as well as the cosmopolitan exile centers of New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco. It reads these productions in light of broader patterns of relations between the U.S. and Latin America, moving from the fraternal rhetoric of the Monroe Doctrine through the expansionist crisis of 1848 to the proto-imperialist 1880s. It shows how ''ambassadors of culture'' such as Whitman, Longfellow, and Bryant propagated ideas about Latin America and Latinos through their translations, travel writings, and poems. In addition to these well-known figures and their counterparts in the work of nation-building in Cuba, Mexico, and Central and South America, this book also introduces unremembered women writers and local poets writing in both Spanish and English. In telling the almost forgotten early history of travels and translations between U.S. and Latin American writers, Gruesz shows that Anglo and Latino traditions in the New World were, from the beginning, deeply intertwined and mutually necessary.

Contents:

"Alone with the terrible hurricane" : the occluded history of transamerican literature ; Geografia nueva : an alternate history of the American world system ; Citizen, ambassador : stations of literary representation ; The transamerican archive : poetry as daily practice ; Vernacular authorship, or the imitator's agency

The chain of American circumstance : from Niagara to Cuba to Panama ; Meditations on Niagara : transnational pilgrims and the American sublime ; The Cuban star over New York : Heredia's translated nationhood ; Republics in chains : from Bryant's prairies to the Mexican meseta ; Vistas del infierno : the racial dilemma of María del Occidente

Tasks of the translator : imitative literature, the Catholic South, and the invasion of Mexico ; "A mist of lurid light" : translation practice in the Americas ; Ecos de Mexico : Whittier, Longfellow, and the case against expansion ; Converting Evangeline to Evangelina ; In the vernacular : translation on the border

The mouth of a new empire : New Orleans in the transamerican print trade ; New Orleans, capital of the (other) nineteenth century ; The fertile crescent : Whitman's immersion in the "Spanish element" ; Reading La patria : Hispanophone print culture and the annexation question ; Songs of exile : the Laúd poets and Quintero's pearls

The deep roots of our America : two new worlds, and their resistors ; Diplomatic license : Pombo in New York ; Staging gender on the California borderlands ; Brave mundo nuevo : the marketing of transnational Spanish culture ; Most faithful Fidel : Guillermo Prieto's reconstruction travelogue

Coda : The future's past : Latino ghosts in the U.S. canon.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [255]-278) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780691050973

069105097X

OCLC:

1223026745