Commentary: The Transnational Turn and the Hemispheric Return

America’s interconnected and violent foundational histories are a common point of departure in the essays by John-Michael Rivera and Jesse Alemán that open this special issue of American Literary History on “Hemispheric American Literature.” Rivera’s “ ‘A Complete Though Bloody Victory’: Lorenzo de Zavala and the Transnational Paradoxes of Sovereignty” examines the formation and writings of Lorenzo de Zavala, a participant in the Mexican and, later, Texan struggles for independence. Zavala provisionally reconciled his seemingly conflicting patriotisms in the field of literary production, where he created a utopian vision of the US for Mexican readers. Rivera maintains that Zavala’s 1834 travel narrative, Viage de los Estados-Unidos del Norte América , is not an invitation to his compatriots to engage in mimicry but rather “an aesthetic representation that renders for Mexicans guidelines for becoming an autonomous national people who can emerge from the legacy of Spanish colonialism and racialization.” There is no independence, Zavala might argue, without interdependence. Alemán’s “The Other Country: Mexico, the United States, and the Specter of Conquest” illustrates this point with respect to north-to-south trajectories. Alemán identifies a “trans-American gothic” in the gory tableaux that so fascinated nineteenth-century chroniclers of colonial Mexican history. For Alemán, this aesthetic operates through the Freudian uncanny; it confronts an expansionist US in search of a usable past with unexpected, horrific self-portraits, refracted through images of the Spanish and Aztec empires. Through theoretical insights derived from psychoanalysis and poststructuralism, these two essays establish a strong connecting thread that runs throughout this issue. The logic of historical returns, psychic projection, and fragile self–other relations that trouble nineteenth-century narratives of US nation formation vis-à-vis that of Mexico also influence US literary engagements with other parts of the Western hemisphere.