Early American Literature

The Philadelphia imprints of Mathew Carey and his sons provide familiar points of entry for the study of print culture in the early United States. Yet how might one approach that study if their names were first encountered in the archive as Matio Carey, Matías Carey & Hijos, or M. Carey & Hijos, the way they appear on several title pages in the 1810s and 1820s? While this is a seemingly minor detail, the Carey house was not the only imprint in the city publishing Spanish-language books at this time, and to see their names in translation invites a reorientation to the field of American literature from within, in the sense that Philadelphia—the center of early US printing—may be understood as inside of, rather than in respect to, the Spanish Americas. This hemispheric shift is just one of the many reoriented points of entry, or productive archival and disciplinary "dislocations," that Rodrigo Lazo frames in his most recent book.

With Letters from Filadelfia: Early Latino Literature and the Trans-American Elite, winner of the 2021 Early American Literature Book Prize, Lazo makes another important contribution to the field he has shaped as a scholar as well as an editor with Jesse Alemán of The Latino Nineteenth Century (New York UP, 2016) and with Kirsten Silva Gruesz of a 2018 special issue of Early American Literature (vol. 53, no. 3) on the Spanish Americas. There Lazo and Gruesz argue that "the hemispheric turn that began more than two decades ago has not significantly altered an epistemology of scholarship that separates Anglo from Latin America. An early Americas scholarship that is truly attentive to languages, cultures, and geographies outside of nation-based disciplinary formations is therefore an ongoing necessity" ("Introduction" 641). As the brief Carey example begins to suggest, by resituating the US city of Philadelphia as Filadelfia, a hemispheric site for the transamerican circulation of republican discourse by Spanish American intellectuals, Lazo bridges this epistemological divide in a strikingly original way. Though the book foregrounds spatial and linguistic matters, forcefully reminding us in the latter case that Spanish has [End Page 785] always belonged in the United States, there is also a temporal dimension to its intervention. As Lazo points out, "Filadelfia precedes the type of North-South tensions that will become codified in retroactive readings of the Monroe Doctrine, in the emergence of an idea of Latin America as distinct from Anglo-America" (6), and I would add that the "Filadelfia letters," the writings that ground the study, were all published between the 1790s and the 1830s. It's no coincidence that these are the same dates used to periodize the early American republic, and the book therefore offers a constant critique of how monolithically the Anglo political perspective and the English language have dominated that imaginary.

Lazo creatively embeds the book's interest in the movement of languages and literatures across territorial borders and disciplinary fields in the definitions of his keywords. As an English term in play with both the Spanish cartas and letras, the "letters" of the book's title refer to epistolary communication itself, as well as the hemispheric lettered context—think Angel Rama's The Lettered City (Duke UP, 1996)—that produces anticolonial discourse and its interlocutors. The term thus encapsulates not only the kinds of printed materials under consideration but also an epistolary mode of address that emphasizes the circulation of printed materials among an exclusive, homosocial group of revolutionary-minded intimates. While all the works considered in the study participate in this mode, titles like Cartas americanas, politicas y morales (American Letters on Politics and Morals, 1823), by the Venezuelan Manuel Lorenzo de Vidaurre, best illustrate it. Indeed, Lazo underlines "epistolary affect" (13) as crucial to the persuasive project of moving readers in Latin America from anticolonial thought to action. Similarly, while the nuance with which Lazo situates his study in respect to the debates and disciplinary concerns of Latino...