Aims and objectives

The literary history of the Americas has usually been written backwards, with a teleological sense of what the boundaries of a particular nation would look like, even when dealing with literature produced when those boundaries were different or non-existent.  This project takes a new approach in an attempt to grapple with what a truly comparative literary history might look like.

1.  We aim to test the regional designation of the ‘American Tropics’, an extended Caribbean which includes the southern USA, the Caribbean littoral of Central America, and northern South America.  European colonial powers fought intensively here against indigenous populations and against each other for control of land and resources.  The vast majority of African slaves were shipped here, endowing the region’s eastern rimlands with a cultural inheritance all the nations involved are still trying to comprehend.  The imaginative space of the American Tropics offers a differently-centred literary history from those conventionally produced as US, Caribbean, or Latin American literature.

2.  The project focusses on a number of key places which have been nodal points for the production of writing, taking these as case studies: Oriente (Cuba), New Orleans, the Haiti-Dominican Republic border, and the Putumayo..  (Two further places will be added by PhD students.)  Each place is a zone of encounter, bringing together sets of writing in different languages and styles, from different literary and cultural backgrounds, all of which have in common that attention to the same place. The project therefore approaches literary history via literary geography.