This chapter substantiates ethnographically the claim that the Cuban revolution has a cosmogonic character. With reference to revolutionary discourse, and not least the pronouncements of protagonists such as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, the chapter’s purpose is to get the conceptual measure of the idea that the revolution’s raison d’etre was to mark a break with the past in order to build a new and better world for Cuba and its people. This includes detailing the manners in which the revolutionary project was pursued in an array of areas, from the role of self-sacrificial violence and the hyperactivity of legal reform in the first years of the revolution, to the sweeping scope of land-reform and the hubristic attempt, in the end of the 1960s, literally to transform nature into culture by rendering the whole of the Cuban rural territory arable. Importantly, each of these historiographic discussions is oriented with reference to the analytical coordinates established by the problem of cosmogony. The upshot is an explicitly morphological conceptualization of the revolutionary project organized around the twin shapes of totality and containment , as well as the caterpillar-like shape of its forward-moving thrusts, configured as an interplay between potential change (meta-change) and its ever-partial realizations. Operating together, these three formal elements (totality, containment and motion) mark out the coordinates for what I call the ‘transcendental’ character of the revolution’s project – its concerted effort to become not just a feature of people’s lives, but their underlying condition of possibility.

This chapter reads The Golden Bowl and The Waste Land as semaphores for the felt weakening of twentieth-century British and European ascendancy. James’s exquisitely managed novel and Eliot’s encyclopedic poem are not just documents of disintegration, but new totalizations on new architectonic principles. In their respective treatments of shattering, salvage and re-composition, they point to new world orders still only partially emerging into view during the decades immediately after World War I. American wealth and the transfer of art from Europe to America is The Golden Bowl’s subject; The Waste Land is concerned with the collapse of European culture and coherence. However, as James became 'the master' of the English novel and Eliot 'the Pope of Russell Square' American attempts to manage what Europe could no longer do became as evident in cultural as in political fields. After World War II, the United States would proudly reclaim these émigré writers and establish new 'Great Books' and “World Literature' courses to reflect its ambitions as the Cold War era’s major superpower.

This chapter traces the contours of Derek Walcott’s career from regional Caribbean author to English-based publishing success to relocation to the United States in the American university system. Shortly after the publication of Omeros in 1990, Walcott became the Caribbean region’s first writer of colour to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, an award associated with a wider recognition of a new Caribbean literary 'province' that had emerged in similar ways to the Irish and American 'provinces' of the early twentieth century. Omeros is an ambitious epic work that attempts to totalize both Walcott’s and the Caribbean region’s mixed indigenous, European, African and American heritages. But, like other earlier modernist epics, Omeros combines an exultant sense of literary accomplishment with anxieties of failure. As promises of new postcolonial beginnings for the Caribbean slide into visions of climate catastrophe, and as Walcott finds himself an émigré in an imperial and racist America, the poem oscillates between its affirmative and apocalyptic impulses.