Abstract
My dissertation argues that poetry is an overlooked arena in which imperialism and democracy intersect. The contradiction between democratic rights at home and imperial aggression in Latin America has vexed US poetry since at least 1846, when Walt Whitman, poet laureate of American democracy, encouraged the military to invade Mexico after its failed attempt to annex Texas. More than a century later, at the beginning of the Cold War, this legacy persisted: during the postwar boom that marked the United States’ rise as a global superpower, poets who travelled to and wrote about Latin America struggled to reconcile their democratic ideals with the realities of conquest, land theft, and military intervention. These poets incorporated Latin American history, Indigenous philosophies, and Afro-Latinx cultures into their work, both to demonstrate hemispheric solidarity and to distance themselves from the cruelty of their empire. Against this distance, Empire’s Foot contends that poetry, much like a colonial border, is a dynamic record of the imperial project. My project reconsiders the works of canonical and marginal US poets (Charles Olson, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Amiri Baraka, Walter Lowenfels, and Carolyn Forché) for whom Latin America was alternately a revolutionary aspiration, a world-historic tragedy, or a haven of pre-capitalist Indigenous culture. Empire’s Foot interrogates their divergent responses to US empire, unsettling the conventional notion that expressions of hemispheric solidarity necessarily serve the struggle for political emancipation. Drawing from hemispheric studies, Global South Marxisms, and Black & Indigenous scholarship, my readings reveal that even when it speaks against empire, US poetry often maintains and transmits the neocolonial violence typical of Cold War politics.