In Waves of Decolonization, David Luis-Brown reveals how between the 1880s and the 1930s, writer-activists in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States developed narratives and theories of decolonization, of full freedom and equality in the shadow of empire. They did so decades before the decolonization of Africa and Asia in the mid-twentieth century. Analyzing the work of nationalist leaders, novelists, and social scientists, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Jose Marti, Claude McKay, Luis-Brown brings together an array of thinkers who linked local struggles against racial oppression and imperialism to similar struggles in other nations. With discourses and practices of hemispheric citizenship, writers in the Americas broadened conventional conceptions of rights to redress their loss under the expanding United States empire. In focusing on the transnational production of the national in the wake of U.S. imperialism, Luis-Brown emphasizes the need for expanding the linguistic and national boundaries of U.S. American culture and history.
Luis-Brown traces unfolding narratives of decolonization across a broad range of texts. He explores how Marti and Du Bois, known as the founders of Cuban and black nationalisms, came to develop anticolonial discourses that cut across racial and national divides. He illuminates how cross-fertilizations among the Harlem Renaissance, Mexican indigenismo, and Cuban negrismo in the 1920s contributed to broader efforts to keep pace with transformations unleashed by ongoing conflicts over imperialism, and he considers how those transformations were explored in novels by McKay of Jamaica, Jesus Masdeu of Cuba, and Miguel Angel Menendez of Mexico. Focusing on ethnography's uneven contributions to decolonization, he investigates how Manuel Gamio, a Mexican anthropologist, and Zora Neale Hurston each adapted metropolitan social science for use by writers from the racialized periphery.
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"From his perceptive reconsideration of the role of mestizaje in the writings of Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton and Helen Hunt Jackson, to his astute analysis of the redeployments of sentimentalism and primitivism by W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Nicholas Guillen, David Luis-Brown's careful research and thoughtful critiques demonstrate the necessity of thinking beyond the nation, of viewing race and empire from hemispheric and global perspectives. Waves of Decolonization is at one and the same time a radical revision of our hemisphere's literary history and proof of the possibility of a post-nationalist and post-imperial American studies."--George Lipsitz, author of Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music "With Waves of Decolonization, David Luis-Brown practices rather than prescribes a transnational American studies, going beyond the purely thematic level to engage with other languages, cultures, and literary histories. Luis-Brown presents a vast amount of literary material and many cross-cultural connections that will be unknown or little known to scholars in U.S. American studies, while he also contributes new understandings of familiar and canonical writers."--Anna Brickhouse, author of Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere "In Waves of Decolonization, David Luis-Brown weaves together an impressive array of texts and ideas within a framework central to understanding the history of the Americas in the early twentieth century. Luis-Brown links many voices of dissent in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States, tracing how they challenged the reigning imperialist and racist ideologies of the era and reasserted denied rights "on a hemispheric scale". Progressing chronologically, each of the book's four chapters highlights the work of a handful of writer-activists whose fiction or essays explore a distinct set of problems arising from a new U.S.-dominated modernity. In response, Luis-Brown argues, critics and intellectuals crafted a heterogeneous but coherent set of demands for what he calls "hemispheric citizenship"...Waves of Decolonization represents an important contribution to the scholarly literature on the twentieth-century Americas. Luis-Brown's argument about the formulation of a hemispheric citizenship is original and important, and will surely be debated and expanded in future work by other scholars writing about transnational politics in the Americas." - Lorrin Thomas , Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, H-Net
