Introduction: From Modernism to Mayagüez—William Carlos Williams, Puerto Rico, and the Poetics of Displacement

Abstract

The introduction situates the work of William Carlos Williams within the multilingual, Caribbean, and hemispheric contexts that shaped his imagination, with particular attention to Mayagüez and Puerto Rico. Moving beyond traditional US-centered and monolingual interpretations, this issue argues that Williams’s poetics emerged through crossings of language, migration, coloniality, and cultural exchange. Puerto Rico functioned not as a peripheral influence but as a constitutive intellectual and affective geography, connecting Williams to broader Caribbean and Latin American traditions through family histories rooted in Mayagüez and the Dominican Republic. Emerging partly from collaborative research at Universidad de Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, this special issue proposes a hemispheric understanding of “América,” drawing on the visions of José Martí and contemporary Caribbean thought to reinterpret Williams’s modernism through diasporic, translingual, and decolonial frameworks.