Future Measures in Atlantic Literatures (1868–1968) analyzes the links between temporality, sovereignty and form in Atlantic literatures during waning European empire, emergent new nation-states and rising U.S. hegemony. It argues that at the dawn of the twentieth century, Atlantic poetics employed new forms, media and concepts of time to imagine futures alternative to those of empire, neoempire or, in some instances, even nation. The dissertation focuses specifically on "concrete" writing technologies—a poetics of objects and "the real," but, surprisingly, also of the virtual. In six chapters, I connect this trend to the decline of British and Iberian empires, the rise of neocolonialism, and eventually globalization. Focusing on Cuban, Brazilian, and Anglophone literature, the dissertation opens with Cuban literature in the wake of anti-colonial campaigns of 1868, and closes with neo-concrete Brazilian art in 1968.

Future Measures is divided into two sections. The first treats literature from 1868–1898, the second literature from the 1920s–1960s. Examining how unrealized aspirations associated with emblematic 1890s struggles—the Spanish-Cuban-American War, 1895–1898; the Anglo-Boer War, 1899–1902, and the Brazilian civil conflict of Canudos 1893–1897—haunt later literature written amidst an era of heightened consumption, the dissertation argues that in both moments, media create temporalities different from that of nation-state, empire, or neo-colony in ways germane to cultural production in today's post-national, globalized present.