The Politics of Spanish American Modernismo, initially published in 1998, elucidates the professional and literary means by which Spanish American modernistas negotiated a cultural politics of rapprochement with Spain and Europe in order to differentiate their Americanness from that of the United States. Gerard Aching argues that these turn-of-the-century men of letters were in fact responsible for the burgeoning role that intellectuals and writers had (and continue to have) in defining pan-Hispanicism. Aching's arguments contribute to debates about modernity and the colonial/postcolonial condition in nineteenth-century Hispanic literatures. The interdisciplinary approach will appeal to scholars in literature, cultural studies, Latin American studies and history.
By exploring the complexities of enslavement in the autobiography of Cuban slave-poet Juan Francisco Manzano (1797–1854), Gerard Aching complicates the universally recognized assumption that a slave's
