This dissertation examines interactions and circuits of exchange between Anglophone and Hispanophone literary cultures in the wake of the Mexican-American War, particularly those involving African-American, Indigenous, Latin American, and proto Latina/o-American communities. My dissertation grapples with the breadth of multilingual Americas, examining the stakes of U.S. territorial expansion and empire through a range of translations, adaptations, and literary borrowings that enabled the transit and transmutation of texts in the mid-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. I focus on works by a range of writers, poets, activists, politicians, and translators, including Carlos Morla Vicuña, John Rollin Ridge, Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés, José Martí, Helen Hunt Jackson, Martin Delany, and Willa Cather. I draw upon letters, periodicals, novels, and poems that circulated in the Americas, arguing that choices and practices of translation were in dialogue with shifting frameworks of race and ethnicity in these different contexts. My analysis of these textual forms depicts some of the distinct ways that authors employed translation as a mode of political activism. Ultimately, this dissertation examines the relation between translation and national belonging in these different contexts, unveiling the varied forms by which transgressive translation strategies were harnessed as forms of anti-imperialist work even as they often initiated or replicated neocolonial and imperialist practices.

At the end of Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon (1977), Milkman travels to the fictional town of Shalimar, convinced that he is about to reclaim his family's lost inheritance. When he arrives, however, he is sorely disappointed. Instead of the “bags of gold” he was promised, he finds only “Nothing. Nothing at all.” Milkman’s recovery-that-is-not-one encapsulates the simple yet fraught question at the center of this dissertation: How to plot the inheritance not of positive but negative property? Deploying a palimpsestic reading practice, I bring together novels and films, from the twentieth century to the present, that each cohere around this central dilemma: Can the hegemonic form of the British realist novel—the inheritance plot—be rewritten to depict, instead, forms of intergenerational dispossession? In 1973 Raymond Williams surveyed novelistic production in Britain in the nineteenth century concluding that almost ninety percent constitute an “inheritance plot.” This is, according to Williams, any plot in which narrative closure is secured with the intergenerational transfer of property, thereby sedimenting the underlying assumption of a definite relation between economic entitlement and biological property. If, however, nineteenth-century realism naturalized the transmission of wealth, right, and title, “The Inheritance Plot” examines how it has since been refused and mis-used to represent, instead, the inheritance of loss, exile, dispossession, debt, statelessness, and racial trauma. The question, then, that drives my project hinges on a set of productive contradictions: Can the very form that underwrote economic exclusion and juridical alienation be repurposed to trace what Denise Ferriera da Silva calls the oxymoron of “negative accumulation”? Over four chapters, I bring together the fiction of George Schuyler, Willa Cather, Alan Hollinghurst, Helen Oyeyemi, Jordan Peele, Ephraim Asili, Raquel Salas Rivera, and Giannina Braschi, among others, to offer a literary history of the disinherited. Subsequently, I show how each text imaginatively repurposes and rewrites an “inheritance plot” in the attempt to make sense of the intergenerational violence of chattel slavery, empire, and colonialism, while simultaneously exposing the violent fictions that underwrite genealogical regimes of ownership. In tandem, through drawing on Black and Indigenous feminisms, alongside social reproduction and queer theory, I argue that the negativation of the “inheritance plot” has ethical and political significance. In my reading, the inheritance of nothing is—paradoxically—a narrative non-event with a dual function. For instance, Milkman’s inheritance-that-is-not-one serves is both a diagnosis of historical trauma, and it is the sign of a radical reimagination of the world that doesn’t yet lie in succession.