ABSTRACT

While inter-Americanism has resurfaced in the 2000s as a key idea, the majority of teaching posts, fellowships, and seminars designated as “Literature of the Americas,” “Transnational,” or “Hemispheric American Literature” are housed in English departments, where Anglophone literature holds precedence. Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine’s 2008 collection Hemispheric American Studies is a torchbearer for a resurgence of academic inter-Americanism. For American literature is comparative literature, de facto, once one recognizes the hemisphere as its ground, as the site and source of a multiplicity of languages, cultures, and modes of power. To engage the hemisphere without starting from the United States, American literature will have to be multinational, plurilingual, allowing for multiple points of entry between and among major and minor traditions. Reactivated as a comparative object of study, American literature can form a hemispheric macro-terrain within the grander scales encompassed by world literature.