Abstract
This essay addresses the undertheorized three-decade engagement of US Puerto Rican poet Víctor Hernández Cruz with North Africa. In his poems on Egypt, the author argues that Cruz’s particular brand of south–south engagement is excluded from cosmopolitan theory—one that tends to privilege either a Latin American elite or US American mobility. Yet Cruz’s nostalgia for Egyptian antiquity goes as far as to unsettle major conceptions of modernity, especially in his book of poems Beneath the Spanish (2017). By privileging North African epistemologies, Cruz’s poetry challenges the internalization of whiteness for a Latinx population. But part of the issues that arise with this valorization is that Cruz’s poetry draws from a Cold war-era nostalgia of internationalist (or “Nasserist”) rhetoric, and other forms of Egyptian neoliberal nationalisms that complicate Cruz’s particular brand of cosmopolitanism. Despite these complications, Cruz’s transatlantic engagement is distinct in its Global South formulations and expands notions of what it means to be a cosmopolitan in the twenty-first century.
