Reading British colonial writers as the sole founders of American culture lends our history a false sense of teleology, as though we were always going to end up here. One of the greatest strengths of Coronado's book is its ability to remind us of other paths we might have taken; other worlds different 'we's' might have made... A World Not to Come boldly challenges the dominance of the westward expansion narrative... At once a gripping history, a dizzying synthesis of Enlightenment philosophical currents, and a breathtaking feat of original archival research, his book merits reading by anyone interested in American literature, Latina/o studies, economic history, or Western philosophy. A World Not to Come demands that we recalibrate our sense of what 'American' literary history looks like. -- John Alba Cutler * Los Angeles Review of Books *
A World Not to Come constitutes an extraordinary contribution to distinct and interconnected lines of scholarly debates engaged with Latin American and trans-hemispheric history. -- Beatriz Gonzalez-Stephan * Society for U.S. Intellectual History blog *
A World Not to Come is a magnificent first book. Raul Coronado makes the case that the meeting of Anglos and Mexicans in the Southwest occasioned not only political and military conflict but also epistemological struggle between two different systems of thought. Latinos in the U.S. attempted forge what in hindsight can be seen as a modern social imaginary. The differences between these conflicting visions of an American imaginary are still very much with us and help define the nature of the present interactions between Anglos and Latinos within the boundaries of the U.S. and outside of them. This is a compelling thesis about the need for a 'transnational' view of the Americas and the recognition that an undifferentiated history of 'Latino' writings cannot easily be extracted from the historical record. Coronado's argument on both counts should advance significantly our understanding of the relationship between the Anglo and Latin Americas in the nineteenth century. -- Ramon Saldivar, Stanford University
In this brilliantly conceived book, Raul Coronado turns over the forgotten record of a Texas rebellion, and from it spins an absorbing counter-history of a distinctively Latino tradition of political thought. A World Not to Come will stand as a major contribution to the emergent multilingual portrait of print culture in the U.S., and to the comparative intellectual and literary history of the Americas in general. -- Kirsten Silva Gruesz, University of California, Santa Cruz
Coronado's A World Not to Come is already a standard, well on its way to becoming a classic. The comprehensiveness of the research is extraordinary: an extraordinary job, extraordinarily well done. -- Rolena Adorno, Yale University
Coronado's book offers a fascinating alternative history of modernity, one rooted in the forgotten archives of Texas. Well-timed to intervene in contemporary debates on rights theory and sovereignty, Coronado tells the story of how Spanish-American intellectuals of the early nineteenth century took the work of now-forgotten Catholic Reformation thinkers to produce a model of rights based on collective well-being and 'public happiness.' The Anglo-American Protestant history of rights suppressed a rich and complex Spanish version, and Coronado finds in these conservative thinkers a revolutionary potential that I believe found fruition in liberation theology in the Americas. -- Carrie Tirado Bramen, University at Buffalo, State University of New York
In a work of great originality and breathtaking erudition, Raul Coronado writes a compelling history of an alternative West, a history spanning continents, oceans, centuries, and genres. The story told in A World Not to Come is the story of modernity itself, inflected through an immense and virtually unstudied archive of Latino writing that the author reads as a fragmented narrative of becoming. This is cultural history of the highest order. -- Anna Brickhouse, University of Virginia
This is a book about Tejanos and the printing press in the Age of Revolutions. Between 1810 and 1848, Tejanos witnessed momentous sociopolitical, cultural changes and responded by articulating their own peculiar narratives of modernity through the printing press-narratives that both Mexican and U.S. historiographies have erased. Coronado brings these forgotten narratives, poised between utopia and disillusionment, deftly back to life. This is a moving meditation on the making of the first 'Latino' public sphere. -- Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, The University of Texas at Austin
