American Mediterraneans begins with what might seem the deceptively simple question “of why, in the Americas, so many bodies of water and land are so frequently compared to the European Mediterranean, both classical and modern” (p. xi). Susan Gillman immediately shows that engaging with this question requires a method of “speculative comparativism” that the term “American Mediterranean itself produces” (p. 15). The work of nineteenth-century Prussian scientist Alexander von Humboldt, who named the Caribbean Méditerranée de l’Amérique, serves as the starting point from which Gillman traces networks of texts that move across the scales of “space, time, and language,” doing “cultural work…that is always fundamentally, if not openly, racial” (p. xi). Reading across a “loose archive of works,” Gillman makes a compelling—indeed, necessary—case for the link between her subject and methodology, as she elaborates the inherently oceanic concept of her title using the transnational, hemispheric, and translation studies approaches...

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