In Transamerican Sentimentalism, Maria Windell explores what happens when we rethink a long-standing critical assumption: that nineteenth-century sentimental literature centers on domestic and transatlantic bonds. Namely we discover that the “sentimental mode” circulates throughout the Americas, where it both “enable[es] and counter[s] settler colonial structures” (210). Windell grounds her work in Joanne Dobson's understanding of sentimentalism as a “written imaginative mode defined by a cluster of conventional subjects, themes, characterization modes, narrative and lyric patterns, tropes, tonal qualities, and linguistic patterns focussed around relational experience and the consequences of its rupture” (quoted at 9). This flexible definition proves useful as Windell deploys it in concert with a hemispheric framework to elucidate new and familiar sentimental tropes, as well as to theorize sentiment's role in representing black revolution. Reading work by authors primarily from the United States, Cuba, and Mexico, she persuasively demonstrates that the sentimental mode traveled – proving “mercurial and ephemeral” enough to reflect shifts in transamerican relations (2).

The opening two chapters of Transamerican Sentimentalism offer fresh understandings of the mode's most studied figures. Chapter 1 contrasts the coquette of Hannah Foster's The Coquette and Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, who faces censure and likely death, with this figure's greater freedom in Lenora Sansay's Secret History. By tracing this sentimental trope across genres, Windell observes how Sansay revises seduction novels and pervasive gothic portraits of the Haitian Revolution; she attributes its violence not to blackness, but to French colonialism. Yet Windell notes that Sansay draws on the “more lenient Caribbean social contexts” to “disrupt patriarchal, but not racial, economic, or other colonial power structures” (52, 28). Chapter 2 deploys comparative racialization to contrast the mulata, Moor, and mulatta in Mary Peabody Mann's novel Juanita, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Cirilo Villaverde's Cecilia Valdés o La Loma del Angel. Each figure represents a distinct form of otherness. However, Mann first represents her eponymous Juanita as a Moor (whose unstable otherness may reflect national, religious, or racial difference) only to transform her into the racialized tragic mulatta. This shift underscores how the character's tragic fate erases black Cuban characters from the story of Cuban independence to focus on a white New England heroine. The novel thus exemplifies the “US tendency to simplify Cuban structures of racialization” in efforts to construct an image of benevolent US imperialism (101).

Windell's third chapter locates a new trope – the sentimental diplomat – in fiction about Indian Removal and the Spanish American War, including John Rollin Ridge's The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don. The unofficial diplomat, often a woman, deploys “affective means to arbitrate crucial transnational or cross-cultural encounters, particularly in times of violence or tension” (105). Even when her negotiations are successful, these texts refuse to reconcile white US Americans to the peoples they have dispossessed. The chapter thus deepens our understanding of how borderlands literature investigates the appeal of sympathy, while critiquing its limits.

Chapters 4 and 5 break from Windell's earlier focus on tropes, while digging further into critiques of sentimentalism via the work of black writers. She argues that Harriet Jacobs and her brother John S. Jacobs “delineate the mode as … a black hemispheric imaginary” (10). When domestic sentimentalism fails them, both siblings consider hemispheric attachments. Windell analyzes a geography of sentimentalism to consider why a number of mid-century African American writers treated California as a space outside the nation, even as US expansion limited the transamerican bonds they imagine. The final chapter reads narratives that translate sentiment into a source of slave resistance. Writers including Victor Séjour, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Frederick Douglass, and Martin R. Delany “consolidate a practical and transamerican intraracial understanding capable of undergirding the fight against slavery” (173). Windell observes their distinct approaches, for instance, arguing that Douglass's The Heroic Slave hints at sentiment's ties to revolution, whereas Delany's Blake makes the link explicit. Yet together, their writing broadens our understanding of whose work is formative to sentimentalism and clarifies this mode's vexed links to revolution.

By tracing how sentimentalism circulated throughout the hemisphere, as writers reimagined the ties binding different parts of the Americas, Windell clearly answers the persistent calls for nuanced analyses of this mode's politics. Her description of sentimentalism as a “strategy” for exploring transamerican relations, which could perhaps feel slippery to readers first encountering the subject, proves compelling as this approach lets us move outside familiar national and transatlantic contexts. I happily anticipate seeing how scholars engage this book: whether by locating the sentimental diplomat in other fictions or taking a cue from Windell's coda on José Martí's fiction to analyze where else the sentimental mode surfaces outside US borders.