Immediately after the Cuban Revolution, Havana fostered an important transnational intellectual and cultural scene. Later, Castro would strictly impose his vision of Cuban culture on the populace and the United States would bar its citizens from traveling to the island, but for these few fleeting years the Cuban capital was steeped in many liberal and revolutionary ideologies and influences. Some of the most prominent figures in the Beat Movement, including Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Amiri Baraka, were attracted to the new Cuba as a place where people would be racially equal, sexually free, and politically enfranchised. What they experienced had resounding and lasting literary effects both on their work and on the many writers and artists they encountered and fostered. Todd Tietchen clearly documents the multiple ways in which the Beats engaged with the scene in Havana. He also demonstrates that even in these early years the Beat movement expounded a diverse but identifiable politics.

The Poetry of the Americas offers a lively and detailed history of relations among poets in the US and Latin America, spanning three decades from the Good Neighbor diplomacy of World War II through the Cold War cultural policies of the late 1960s. Connecting works by Martín Adán, Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Jorge Luis Borges, Julia de Burgos, Ernesto Cardenal, Jorge Carrera Andrade, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, José Lezama Lima, Pablo Neruda, Charles Olson, Octavio Paz, Heberto Padilla, Wallace Stevens, Derek Walcott, William Carlos Williams, and many others, Feinsod reveals how poets of many nations imagined a "poetry of the Americas" that linked multiple cultures, even as it reflected the inequities of the inter-American political system. This account offers a rich contextual study of the state-sponsored institutions and the countercultural networks that sustained this poetry, from Nelson Rockefeller's Office of the Coordinator for Inter-American Affairs to the mid-1960s avant-garde scene in Mexico City. This innovative literary-historical project enables new readings of such canonical poems as Stevens's "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" and Neruda's "The Heights of Macchu Picchu," but it positions these alongside lesser known poetry, translations, anthologies, literary journals and private correspondences culled from library archives across the Americas. The Poetry of the Americas thus broadens the horizons of reception and mutual influence--and of formal, historical, and political possibility--through which we encounter midcentury American poetry, recasting traditional categories of "U.S." or "Latin American" literature within a truly hemispheric vision.

The Beat Generation was a group of writers who rejected cultural standards, experimented with drugs, and celebrated sexual liberation. Starting in the 1950s with works such as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, and William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, the Beat Generation defined an experimental zeitgeist that endures to today. Yet left out of this picture are the Beat women, who produced a large body of writing from the 1950s through the 1970s and beyond. In Women Writers of the Beat Era, Mary Paniccia Carden gives voice to these female writers and demonstrates how their work redefines our understanding of "Beat." The first single-authored study on female writers of this generation, the book offers vital analysis of autobiographical works by Diane di Prima, ruth weiss, Hettie Jones, Joanne Kyger, and others, introducing the reader to new voices that interact with and reconfigure the better-known narratives of the male Beat writers. In doing so, Carden demonstrates the significant role women played in this influential and dynamic literary movement.

The present volume connects three academic fields that share central concerns but remain surprisingly isolated from each other: world literature studies, postcolonial studies, and translation studies. It approaches translation not as a vague metaphor but as a distinct and socially embedded practice that connects literatures. In similar vein, it interrogates the smoothness of many versions of “global” theory by insisting on the specificity of place and the resistance to translatibility among languages, oeuvres and genres. The topics covered in the chapters include the formation of world literature as a progamme of study, the French concept of littérature-monde, the rise of English in nineteenth-century Sweden, the translation of Arabic literature in Europe, and the transnationalism of the avant-garde. Through such case studies, and by drawing on the theoretical frameworks of Édouard Glissant, Pierre Bourdieu and David Damrosch, among others, the international group of contributors add substantially to the theoretical and methodological consolidation of world literature as a field of research.

How New York intellectuals interpreted and wrote about Castro's revolution in the 1960s New York in the 1960s was a hotbed for progressive causes of every stripe, including women's liberation, civil rights, opposition to the Vietnam War—and the Cuban Revolution. Fighting over Fidel brings this turbulent cultural moment to life by telling the story of the New York intellectuals who championed and opposed Castro’s revolution. Setting his narrative against the backdrop of the ideological confrontation of the Cold War and the breakdown of relations between Washington and Havana, Rafael Rojas examines the lives and writings of such figures as Waldo Frank, Carleton Beals, C. Wright Mills, Allen Ginsberg, Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Eldridge Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael, and Jose Yglesias. He describes how Castro’s Cuba was hotly debated in publications such as the New York Times, Village Voice, Monthly Review, and Dissent, and how Cuban socialism became a rallying cry for groups such as the Beats, the Black Panthers, and the Hispanic Left. Fighting over Fidel shows how intellectuals in New York interpreted and wrote about the Cuban experience, and how the Left’s enthusiastic embrace of Castro’s revolution ended in bitter disappointment by the close of the explosive decade of the 1960s.

In C. Wright Mills and the Cuban Revolution, A. Javier Trevino reconsiders the opinions, perspectives, and insights of the Cubans that Mills interviewed during his visit to the island in 1960. On returning to the United States, the esteemed and controversial sociologist wrote a small paperback on much of what he had heard and seen, which he published as Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba. Those interviews--now transcribed and translated--are interwoven here with extensive annotations to explain and contextualize their content. Readers will be able to "hear" Mills as an expert interviewer and ascertain how he used what he learned from his informants. Trevino also recounts the experiences of four central figures whose lives became inextricably intertwined during that fateful summer of 1960: C. Wright Mills, Fidel Castro, Juan Arcocha, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The singular event that compelled their biographies to intersect at a decisive moment in the history of Cold War geopolitics--with its attendant animosities and intrigues--was the Cuban Revolution.

An examination of how the postwar United States twisted its ideal of “the free flow of information” into a one-sided export of values and a tool with global consequences. When the dust settled after World War II, the United States stood as the world’s unquestionably pre-eminent military and economic power. In the decades that followed, the country exerted its dominant force in less visible but equally powerful ways, too, spreading its trade protocols, its media, and—perhaps most importantly—its alleged values. In A Righteous Smokescreen, Sam Lebovic homes in on one of the most prominent, yet ethereal, of those professed values: the free flow of information. This trope was seen as capturing what was most liberal about America’s self-declared leadership of the free world. But as Lebovic makes clear, even though diplomats and public figures trumpeted the importance of widespread cultural exchange, these transmissions flowed in only one direction: outward from the United States. Though other countries did try to promote their own cultural visions, Lebovic shows that the US moved to marginalize or block those visions outright, highlighting the shallowness of American commitments to multilateral institutions, the depth of its unstated devotion to cultural and economic supremacy, and its surprising hostility to importing foreign cultures. His book uncovers the unexpectedly profound global consequences buried in such ostensibly mundane matters as visa and passport policy, international educational funding, and land purchases for embassies. Even more crucially, A Righteous Smokescreen does nothing less than reveal that globalization was not the inevitable consequence of cultural convergence or the natural outcome of putatively free flows of information—it was always political to its core.

The Cold War was an era of surprising connections between American and Czech literary cultures. Major writers met behind the Iron Curtain, while others smuggled, translated, and adapted works from the other side. Brian K. Goodman explores the artistic and political consequences, arguing that the movement of literature inspired new forms of dissent.

A Cultural History of Underdevelopment explores the changing place of Latin America in U.S. culture from the mid-nineteenth century to the recent U.S.-Cuba détente. In doing so, it uncovers the complex ways in which Americans have imagined the global geography of poverty and progress, as the hemispheric imperialism of the nineteenth century yielded to the Cold War discourse of "underdevelopment." John Patrick Leary examines representations of uneven development in Latin America across a variety of genres and media, from canonical fiction and poetry to cinema, photography, journalism, popular song, travel narratives, and development theory. For the United States, Latin America has figured variously as good neighbor and insurgent threat, as its possible future and a remnant of its past. By illuminating the conventional ways in which Americans have imagined their place in the hemisphere, the author shows how the popular image of the United States as a modern, exceptional nation has been produced by a century of encounters that travelers, writers, radicals, filmmakers, and others have had with Latin America. Drawing on authors such as James Weldon Johnson, Willa Cather, and Ernest Hemingway, Leary argues that Latin America has figured in U.S. culture not just as an exotic "other" but as the familiar reflection of the United States’ own regional, racial, class, and political inequalities.