The phrase dos hemisferios (“two hemispheres”) captured the breathtaking ambition of two leading Spanish-language newspapers in Paris, El Eco de Ambos Mundos (1852-55) and its successor, El Eco Hispano-Americano (1854-72), to use the technology of the newspaper to bridge the vast distances separating Spanish-speakers in the Atlantic world through intellectual exchange and assertions of a coherent linguistic and cultural identity. What the papers variously characterized as “Spaniards,” the “raza latina” (the “Latin race”) or the Hispano-American people, today we term Latinidad—discourses on the culture and identity of Latin Americans and Latina/o/x people. Examining two-year runs of the Eco papers alongside the Cuban exile paper El Mulato (1854) in New York City, I show how these newspapers constructed implicit and explicit discourses of Latinidad linking the dos hemisferios, at times reinforcing racial capitalism and Spanish colonialism and at times criticizing their forms of exploitation and oppression, thereby expanding the bounds of Latinness. Very briefly, theories and histories of racial capitalism argue that racial differentiation is central to the processes of violent accumulation of capital and exploitation that are central to capitalism (Jenkins and Leroy, Melamed, C. Robinson, Singh).

David Luis-Brown is an associate professor in the Cultural Studies and English Departments at Claremont Graduate University. His research specializations include hemispheric Americas studies, Latino/a/x studies, black diaspora studies, and American literature and culture in general. He is the author of Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico and the United States (Duke University Press, 2008). Luis-Brown is working on two books: a critical edition and translation of Andrés Avelino de Orihuela’s Cuban 1854 antislavery novel, El Sol de Jesús del Monte, under submission at a university press; and Blazing at Midnight: Slave Rebellion and Social Identity in Cuban and U.S. Culture. One of the chief aims of Blazing at Midnight is to assess techniques of social categorization in predisciplinary social science, travel narratives, novels, periodicals, and visual culture.

The Spanish-language newspapers El Eco de Ambos Mundos and El Eco Hispano-Americano of Paris engaged in an unprecedented, transnational collaboration among Latin Americans, exile and migrant hispanoamericanos and Spaniards in constructing a Hispano-American identity or Latinidad in opposition to U.S. imperialism from 1852 to 1855, well before the Chilean Francisco Bilbao and the Colombian José María Torres Caicedo coined the term América Latina in the summer of 1856 in Paris. There were two politically discordant sets of writing threading through these two newspapers. First, writers championed the “Latin race” as an important contributor to the alleged progress of capitalism, as in editorials by the Spaniard José Florez and in a series of articles by the pioneering Spanish Humboldtian natural historian and sociologist Ramón de la Sagra. In a second, dissenting note in the newspapers, a critical take on both U.S. imperialism and Spain’s intertwined legacies of colonialism, racial hierarchies and slavery emerged.

The topic of this talk is the contradiction between Latinidad’s opposition to U.S. imperialism in the newspapers’ coverage of Latin American news versus their oftentimes uncritical stance towards Spanish colonialism and Latin American settler colonialism. The newspapers’ coverage of Latin American news addressed U.S. imperial expansionism, U.S. and European filibusterism and the strong-arm politics of dictators and Spanish colonial governments as well as constitutional conventions and wars against Indigenous peoples.

This talk is an excerpt from a monograph in progress tentatively titled “Dos Hemisferios: Racial Capitalism, Revolution and the Problem of Latinidad in Hispano-American Newspapers in Paris and New York City, 1852-1856.” This book examines how three Spanish-language newspapers built on their contributors’ experience of the revolutionary energies, insights and missteps of two revolutions, the anticolonial and antislavery Ladder Rebellion in Cuba (1843-44) and the republican European insurgencies of 1848 to think through the possibilities and limitations of Latinidad in relation to racial capitalism and empire in writings focusing on culture, economic activities and everyday life.

David Luis-Brown is an associate professor in the Cultural Studies and English Departments at Claremont Graduate University. His research specializations include hemispheric Americas studies, Latino/a/x studies, black diaspora studies, and American literature and culture in general. He is the author of Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico and the United States (Duke University Press, 2008). Luis-Brown is working on two books: a critical edition and translation of Andrés Avelino de Orihuela’s Cuban 1854 antislavery novel, El Sol de Jesús del Monte, under submission at a university press; and Blazing at Midnight: Slave Rebellion and Social Identity in Cuban and U.S. Culture. One of the chief aims of Blazing at Midnight is to assess techniques of social categorization in predisciplinary social science, travel narratives, novels, periodicals, and visual culture.

Cherokee writer and scholar Daniel Heath Justice tells us that to live otherwise, we must first imagine otherwise (156). Taking Justice’s claim seriously, this presentation considers how Andrea L. Rogers’ (Cherokee) short story “An Old-Fashioned Girl,” from her collection Man Made Monsters, (re)imagines Cherokee removal through fantasy and horror genre conventions. In this way, Rogers’ story functions as a work of Indigenous futurism(s) that contributes to the renewal, recovery, and extension of Indigenous peoples’ voices and traditions (Dillon 1–2).

In this talk Professor Benton-Cohen examines the global impact of the Phelps-Dodge family and copper mining empire over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. The history of the extended Phelps-Dodge family and their giant copper-mining corporation reveals a social, environmental, and labor history of global capitalism and philanthropy. PD (as it was known by its employees in its many company towns) was one of the US’s most important copper mining companies, until the largest mining merger in history, with the gold-mining company Freeport McMoRan in 2006. The extended Dodge family’s wealth and influence connect places and people seemingly worlds apart—the US-Mexico “copper borderlands”; the elite institutions of the Ivy League and New York; and US influence in the Middle East. Yet little is known of these connections, thanks to the alienation of labor and wealth, and the understated manner of the Dodges. In this talk, Benton-Cohen will discuss in particular the company’s influence on Arizona and how it used its “quiet money” to spread its influence.

As settler countries contend with the complexity of Indigenous sovereignty and land-back movements, reconciliation, and the fallout from colonial schools, the relevance of Indigenous resurgence is rising on a global scale. This presentation considers how contemporary Indigenous novels from seemingly disparate Indigenous nations in North America, Oceania, and South Asia represent resurgence: the everyday practices that seek to regenerate and re-establish Indigenous nations (Simpson 2017). Accordingly, this research asks: what do literary representations of resurgence reveal about how diverse Indigenous contexts are (re)imagining Indigenous worlds? What might be gained by a comparative approach grounded in the understanding that distant contexts and peoples are connected and responsible to one another?