This book belongs to a series called American Tropics: Towards a Literary Geography. Not a tightly defined geographical designation, American Tropics refers to a kind of extended Caribbean, including the south-eastern USA, the Atlantic littoral of Central America, the Caribbean islands, and north-eastern South America, with outposts even further afield. The development of the discipline of cultural geography has encouraged more sophisticated analyses of notions of space and place, which the series aims to bring to bear on its materials. The American Tropics conference held at Essex in July 200 ... More

This book belongs to a series called American Tropics: Towards a Literary Geography. Not a tightly defined geographical designation, American Tropics refers to a kind of extended Caribbean, including the south-eastern USA, the Atlantic littoral of Central America, the Caribbean islands, and north-eastern South America, with outposts even further afield. The development of the discipline of cultural geography has encouraged more sophisticated analyses of notions of space and place, which the series aims to bring to bear on its materials. The American Tropics conference held at Essex in July 2009 brought together nearly 100 scholars from all over the world. From the papers presented we selected twelve for development into essays which engage with the idea of literary geography central to this series and which represent—inasmuch as twelve essays can—the rich diversity of the writing produced within its geographical area. This volume therefore stands at an angle to the others in the series, offering a survey across the area, sampling twelve distinct places within it, from the outpost of New York in the north to Brazil in the south. It contains essays by Martha Jane Nadell, Maria del Pilar Blanco, Hsinya Huang, Gesa Mackenthun, Mimi Sheller, Susan Gillman, Alasdair Pettinger, Jak Peake, Russell McDougall, Neil L. Whitehead, Richard Price and Sally Price, and Nina Gerassi-Navarro.