The Promises and Perils of U.S. African American Hemispherism

About This Research

This essay has been informed by the awareness of the United States nation’s domination in Latin America and beyond. It aims to propose a model exemplifying how to include U.S. African American life and thought in the new hemispheric American studies that arises out of U.S. African American literary texts themselves. Martin Delany’s Blake (1859-1862) and Gayl Jones’s Mosquito (1999) are examined in an effort to explain how these writers’ engagements with Latin America in their works is there to claim subjectivity, as well as call for action to be taken against those benefitting from the “unequal relations” created by the hemisphere’s most powerful entities.

Link: http://alh.oxfordjournals.org/content/18/3/579.extract