Henry Box Brown not only mailed himself in a box from Richmond in Philadelphia in 1849, but he also remediated this experience of embodiment later in competing slave narratives, on stage, in a panorama, and through his role as a magician and mesmerist. In these four “acts,” Brown uses the representation of his experiences of Black embodiment across various media both to support and—simultaneously—to undercut the mind-centered ontology that structured the system of chattel slavery’s reduction of Blackness to mindless matter. Rather than imagine ontological drift, as Bird does, or ontological betweenness, like Forrest, Brown uses different representations of Black embodiment to imagine existence as always already ontologically doubled, as something governed by the mind-centered paradigm that demeans the body, and by the body-centered paradigm that makes the material body’s expressive agency crucial for the fullest articulation of humanity. Brown suggests that consciousness emerges simultaneously from the mind and the body, and that by carefully curating these overlapping, and doubled, forms of consciousness, Black subjects can “mind the body” in order to imagine alternatives to white culture’s dehumanizing of Blackness.

The failure of the vice president—even more, the failure of the president pro tempore, who unlike the vice president is elected by the Senate—to become a party leader is a puzzle. Indeed, in the late 1830s and early 1840s, a full half-century after the first Congress, the president pro tempore, like the speaker, was routinely exercising the power to name the chairs and members of all standing committees; elections for president pro tempore were contested and closely watched; and no seniority rule existed. But, as we show in Chapter 2, the influence of the president pro tempore over the Senate’s affairs reached its zenith in the early 1840s. Although senators continued to refine the office’s responsibilities for maintaining order and enforcing rules, the position of the Senate’s presiding officer never fulfilled its early promise.

By the mid-twentieth century, for those on the political Left, America had spawned a purely competitive, morally and spiritually debased, money-oriented culture. Inspiring a diverse range of responses, this American culture of money was a central ideological target of 1960s-era activism, alongside interrelated concerns with industrialization, the nuclear threat, the Vietnam War and American interventionism abroad, racism, and environmental degradation. Some counterculture groups adopted explicitly anti-money doctrines and actively sought to build functioning communities outside of the money economy; for others, poverty was associated with spiritual plenitude, or was a secondary symptom of a desire to be free of all responsibilities and entanglements; still others critiqued capitalism’s role in structural oppression. This chapter explores the diversity of such responses, as illustrated in political and literary works of the period, and registers the extent to which countercultural criticism of the culture of money was not without its compromises, inconsistencies, and (apparent) hypocrisies.

The 1968 Democratic National Convention illuminated all of the flaws in the presidential nomination process to that time: The ineffectiveness of presidential primary elections; the failure of party bosses to follow democratic norms in state conventions that selected national convention delegates; and the continued exclusion of African-Americans from the southern parties’ nomination process. Hubert Humphrey won the party’s nomination, but the manner in which he did so left many Democrats convinced that their nomination process was fundamentally flawed. Before it closed, the 1968 convention demanded that the party’s national committee create a commission to examine the party’s nomination process, with an eye to opening it up to ordinary voters in the future. In so doing, the 1968 Democratic National Convention set the stage for a reform movement that would fundamentally transform the presidential nomination process in both parties.

In his intensely physical acting, the nineteenth-century actor, Edwin Forrest, crafted a working-class theatrical aesthetic that imagined our existence not as drifting, but as ontologically between, an ontological third term distinct from both the mind-centered and the body-centered ontological paradigms. By recovering the way Forrest staged his own muscular—and white—body in his interpretation of Shakespeare’s Othello (1826) and in Bird’s The Gladiator (1831), this chapter argues that Forrest used the experience of his labored at, and laboring, body to perform this ontological betweenness as an alternative to the antebellum market’s alienation and regulation of working-class bodies. In staging the agency of white, working-class bodies against Black inagentic bodies on stage, Forrest’s performance of ontological betweenness “minded the body” by offering his adoring working-class audiences less alienated—but racially complicated—ways to perform their own material embodiment in the early nineteenth century.

The Great Depression is uniquely poised for literary-critical reevaluation, following the reorienting new lenses of Economic Criticism and the New History of Capitalism. Thinking (more) materially has permitted literary scholars in particular to better apprehend the textured record of modern lives: one where production and consumption infuse interior landscapes and unsettle divisive ontologies; where objects and goods occupy central space in the cultural imaginary and affective ecologies; where the human, natural, and built worlds overlay in unruly, disruptive ways; and where the tyranny of the human subject collapses into a broader network of interconnection that imperils the hoary axioms of civilization itself. This chapter offers a reading of Richard Wright’s posthumously published novel The Man Who Lived Underground (written just after the Depression) in the context of US Southern, African American, and Native American perspectives on the destabilizing and dehumanizing consequences of economic collapse. These contrapuntal readings unveil an American modernity marked by profound, multivalent loss: where money fails to orient, so too does race, and the uncanny (and always, finally, imaginary) freedom from both measures is by turns exhilarating and insupportable.

The closely divided Senates between the late 1870s and early 1890s was a period of remarkable innovation in the Senate. In 1881, each party controlled the same number of seats, something that had never before occurred in Senate history. It was in that Senate, in 1882–83, that Republicans invented a wholly new institution, which they gave the name “steering committee.” Then, in 1892–93, the Republican steering committee was strengthened and redefined, making it the dominant institution of the dominant Senate party for the next two decades. Facing the prospect of losing their majority following the 1892 elections, Republican senators mobilized, first to try to influence the state legislatures picking new senators then to manage their place in the legislative process. Created by a competitive party suddenly in the minority, the committee came to eclipse the caucus itself once Republicans regained majority status in 1895. During these years, Republican leadership in the Senate was centered on a handful of men: Nelson Aldrich (R, R.I.), William Allison (R, Iowa), Orville Platt (R, Conn.), Eugene Hale (R, Maine), and John Spooner (R, Wisc.).

In the main, critics have regarded Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (also known as Plácido) as a tragic mulatto detached from enslaved black people yet unable to join the ranks of the white literary elite. This essay takes an innovative approach to Plácido by reading his poetry as transculturated colonial literature rather than a poor imitation of European aesthetics. Plácido produced poems situated at the crossroads between classical European deities and enigmatic African spiritual practices. I argue that Plácido transculturated Mars, the Roman god of war, with the Yoruba principles of the divine masculine most often attributed to the orisha Oggún. In Oggún philosophy, the divine masculine is the capacity to exploit the powers of devastation and dissension either to ensure the survival of a given polity or to remake it entirely. Plácido appropriated Aeolus, the Greek god of the wind, Jupiter, the supreme Roman god, and most prominently Mars, the Roman god of war to reimagine Cuban resistance as a just war between good and evil. Plácido’s portrayal of ancient deities divested of sacred authority enabled him to convey an alternative God concept without contravening censorship guidelines that forbade any criticism of Catholicism, the official religion of the empire.

This chapter reads Las edades de la rata (2019), a comic by Peruvian, Valencia-based Martín López Lam within a genealogy of the migrant subject. It proposes that Antonio Cornejo Polar’s ideas on migration as a phenomenon which goes back in time, both aesthetically and conceptually, are useful to think about how recent literature dealing with the contemporary migrant condition can be read as a continuation of long-lasting histories and traditions of displacement. The essay traces a connection between contemporary Latinx comics and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, which Cornejo Polar identifies as one of the first manifestations of this migrant aesthetic. The qilqas of Guaman Poma are thus read alongside a form of our times, the contemporary comic, a medium that is defined by its radical formal heterogeneity and multimodal construction. Ultimately, by reading López Lam’s comic within this framework, the chapter draws a relationship between the many dimensions of the migrant subject, including its Latinx iterations, and the larger processes of coloniality which have shaped the encounter of cultures in Latin America and its diasporas.

This chapter attends to contemporary Latinx adaptations of early modern English drama and theater to theorize how a hegemonic playwright such as Shakespeare can be adapted as Latinx theater Cuban-American playwright Carlos-Zenen Trujillo’s 2019 play, The Island in Winter or, La Isla en Invierno (an adaptation of The Winter’s Tale), serves as a case study of the multimodal process of transnational theatrical bilanguaging, or the experience of living between languages. I argue that the currency of adapting Shakespeare for Latinx today is in the possibility of moving from a historical memory that recolonizes Latinx to an active site of Latinx temporality as worldmaking. Trujillo’s The Island in Winter as a process of epistemic disobedience disenfranchises anti-Black racism from theatrical representations of Cuban culture by integrating African Indigenous rituals into one of Shakespeare’s stories. It is through this process that cultural narratives are redrawn and reenacted, while gaps in the Western canon are exposed.

Our main concern is to understand Senate party development. What are the problems that individual legislators encounter in the absence of leadership? How do they set out to solve problems of coordination and collective action? Our answer, and our central argument, focuses on three factors: party competition, factionalism, and entrepreneurs. In the Senate, where leadership and institutional organization rest in the two parties rather than in the presiding officer, members adopt innovative structures when parties are most closely balanced. With this book, we look at the rise of party organization and leadership in the Senate throughout its history—showing the origins of the Senate caucus in the 1840s, the Republican steering committee in the 1880s and early 1890s, and Senate floor leadership in 1890, and then analyzing the maturation and development of party leadership and organization in the twentiethth and twenty-first centuries. We focus on five main features of Senate leadership: party organization management, floor management, service as intermediary with the president, party spokespersonship, and coalition building.

Reconsidering nineteenth-century Cuban history from the perspective of African-identified people requires that we read Cuban history as tragedy. While there were several important socio-political transitions during Cuba’s long nineteenth century, including slave emancipation in 1886, de-Africanization, or the processes by which colonialists and their successors endeavored to corral, contain, control, co-opt, and eliminate African influences in Cuba persisted well into the twentieth century. Even though these repressive efforts were never fully successful, centering traditional forms of resistance alone leads us to ignore alternative paths/ideas/options that surfaced in response to White supremacy. Simply put, these alternatives garner less attention because they do not fit our narrative constructs and are hard for us to “think.” Centering de-Africanization as process offers a helpful corrective to progressivist and romantic narratives. This essay situates one historical case study in a differently conceived nineteenth-century Cuba to explore forms of resistance that were effectively silenced at the time of their enunciation. In exploring the methodological approaches to understanding this specific case, the essay contributes to a rising trend in Latin American and Latinx studies that centers the importance of Afro-diasporic peoples’ roles in shaping the histories of Latin America and of Latinx experiences in the United States.

José Rizal spearheaded an anticolonial literary movement that aimed to deepen the understanding of Filipinos’ emerging identity through critical engagement with colonial archives. Through his writings in Spanish, the Filipino anticolonial leader gathers and constructs his people’s prehistory in order to promote and comprehend the identity-political transformation his writings describe and prescribe, the consolidation of a “Filipino” identity different from the term’s previous definition of “Spaniards born in the Philippines.” Through analysis of his annotations to Antonio Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas and his novel Noli me tangere, I argue that Rizal serves as a useful prototype for Colonial Latinx studies, as both model and cautionary tale. I eventually conclude that Rizal’s literary and historiographical contributions must be understood as on the one hand, a register of colonial maladies – frustrations with powerful Spanish friars and inept and naïve colonized peoples alike – and on the other hand, a rehearsal space for future liberties, including the freedom to define one’s own identity in dialogue with and against colonial expectations and discourses.

This chapter examines the work of three contemporary US poets – Daniel Borzutzky, Rosa Alcalá, and Wendy W. Walters – who explore how capitalist processes help to construct and “translate” race and gender into partitioned conditions of subjectivation and what Iris Marion Young, after Jean-Paul Sartre, calls serial collective identities. All three authors help us to reimagine the political economy of race in terms of bounded yet globally interconnected material contexts of action rather than as relations between collective subjects with fixed group attributes. These poets instead represent race as a social form of constraint and possibility powerfully conditioned by a capitalist logic of accumulation, spatial containment, and an international division of labor simultaneously dividing and connecting populations across great distances and differences.

How has American “money art” responded to new developments in financialized capitalism? Why do bills and coins continue to feature prominently in American art, given the turn toward cashless transactions? This chapter first contextualizes these questions, by considering prominent historical themes in American money art. Then, it focuses on how works from the past three decades by Dread Scott, Martha Rosler, and Pope.L explore the relationship between money and everyday performance. These works position coins and bills as objects that continue to organize people’s actions, behaviors, and beliefs, even though their roles in society are changing. Within financialized capitalism, people’s embodied habits of handling money reveal a tacit faith in currency as a trusted store of value – even as crisis-ridden financial systems upend commonsense faith in money. Scott, Rosler, and Pope.L, among other artists, inaugurate an approach to money art that I term “performing currency”: choreographing action around coins and bills as a way to contemplate how rapidly changing financial conditions clash with long-standing embodied habits of handling money.

This chapter explores the medically-trained writer, Robert Montgomery Bird, and his fraught experience of the way the competing ontological paradigms that inflected Edgar Huntly also conditioned early nineteenth-century medical discourse. Bird uses his picaresque novel, Sheppard Lee (1836), to interrogate what was called “regular” medical discourse and its mind-centered ontology, and to imagine instead the ontological possibilities that result from the body-centered ontology of metempsychosis. For Bird, metempsychosis involves our consciousness migrating from one body to another, and being defined by its different embodiment. In representing the lived experience of both white and Black embodiment, Bird uses metempsychosis to interrogate “regular” medicine’s mind-centered ontological paradigm, even as he puts pressure on “irregular” medicine as well. As I argue, Bird understands conscious existence as ontological drift, as I call it, a far less clear, but far more capacious ontology than either regular or irregular medical discourses entertain. By “minding the body” in this way, Bird uses his novel’s interrogation of the mind-body relationship to imagine a less repressive, but not unproblematic, form of racialized conscious existence in the antebellum period.