Race has been a dominant theme in studies of US black art and politics in the 1910s and 1920s. This chapter shifts focus to imperial concerns during a period marked by US occupations in Haiti, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic, as well as the acquisition of the Danish Virgin Islands. It explores how the era’s print culture both revealed and obscured the expansion of a US Empire or Greater United States in the Caribbean. US governance in places like Haiti did not go unchallenged in leftist and race-conscious periodicals such as The Nation, The Crisis, and The Crusader. While non-fiction provoked anti-imperial analyses, fiction did not prompt the same responses. Assessing reviews and commentary of fiction, including Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven, Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem and Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death, this chapter examines why anti-imperial reading proved so elusive in this context.

Scholars often view America’s ill-fated military intervention in Vietnam as emblematic of the broader triumph of Southeast Asian nationalism over western colonialism. However, this chapter shows that the persistence of Western imperialism in Southeast Asia is more characteristic of the region’s history when the Cold War intersected with decolonization. Anglo-American neo-colonial designs for preserving their influence largely dovetailed with the goals of conservative, Southeast Asian nationalists seeking either US or British assistance to suppress homegrown left-wing movements inspired and sponsored by Moscow or, above all, Beijing. Indeed, Britain, America, and their Southeast Asian partners shared an anti-communist worldview undergirded by similar fears that the millions-strong Chinese diaspora in the region would serve China’s expansionist agenda. Despite Washington’s failures in Vietnam, the melding of British and US neo-colonialism with Southeast Asian nationalism would usher the region from European-dominated formal colonialism into informal US Empire by the late 1960s.

Latinx children’s and young adult literature offers Latinx children opportunities to step into another world and also see themselves represented in what they read. By giving Latinx child readers, in particular, worlds unlike and like their own, authors like Lilliam Rivera, Edwidge Danticat, and Marcia Argueta Mickelson also challenge dominant national narratives about Latinx experiences in the United States. In the stories these writers tell, young protagonists are confronted by various symptoms of US imperialism, such as racism, xenophobia, and homophobia. The protagonists’ journey often includes learning more about the oppressions that plague them and their communities and finding ways to dismantle said oppressions. Recognizing the role that the United States had in the forced (im)migration of many people of Latin American descent allows for a narrative shift away from the “immigration story” to a story of US imperialism and its consequences. Examining race and empire in Latinx children’s literature creates possibilities for alternative ways of knowing and existing where Latinx children can step in and out of worlds unlike and like their own.