Traditionally a distinction is made between the geographies of territorial vs. commercial expansion, with 1898 as the dividing line. Before and after we have the singular hemisphere of an additive imaginary. And so while moving away from the artificial aloneness of the nation, hemispheric studies is organized most comfortably by the geographies of U.S. Empire. Indebted to transnational regionalisms like Matthew Guterl's American Mediterranean , this project takes a quite literal approach to the problem spaces of questions with extranational extension, meaning questions that exceed the national and that are intrinsically comparative. These questions include the black nation within the nation, the long project of U.S. Reconstruction, the Cuban Question, and the space of the Caribbean in Harlem-based internationalisms of the 1920s. Just as certain geographies become allies to a national cause, so do these questions detour outside their immediate spheres of concern. Rather than following the parabola of the epic, in working within the frame of the problem space, this project maps a series of small hemispheres. The texts assembled here range in time period from just before the civil war to the mid-twentieth century, and while few are explicitly hemispheric in scope, each makes the national body an inter-American geography. Here I ask slightly different questions of familiar works (Does reading Martin Delany's Blake as a black filibuster reframe the plot of black revolution?) and bring timely attention to unconsidered figures (James J. O'Kelly) and works lauded but left alone (Eric Walrond's Tropic Death). Arguably the first celebrity war correspondent in Cuba, we find in O'Kelly's reportage and its Spanish translations a surprising precursor of the later 'Correspondents' War,' and trace articulations of Cuban independence through a set of extranational circuits. The geography foundational to the problem spaces explored here is the plantation zone, region of plantocrat solidarities and patriotisms of convenience, anatopic nationalisms, moveable locations, and for Fernando Ortiz, the geographical accident. For its own work of comparison, this project first looks to the kind of contemporaneity that emerges out of temporal disjunction, with the plantation zone as the meeting place of national histories that don't line up.