When we say "America," whose America do we mean? In US English the word has narrowed to name a single nation, eclipsing the continent it once designated. This seminar takes that narrowing as its provocation and asks what comparative literature becomes when "America" is restored to its continental breadth — Anglophone and Latin, Indigenous and Afro-descendant, Caribbean, Brazilian, and diasporic.

The gesture of reclaiming the name is old and plural: from José Martí's nuestra América (1891) through the critique of coloniality, but equally alive in Glissant's Relation, in the Brazilian antropofagia and entre-lugar, in hemispheric American studies, and in the minoritized — Black, Chicanx/Latinx, Indigenous — writing that forms an internal periphery within the North itself. We treat these as a conversation across traditions, none of which holds the continent's meaning alone.

"America" is never an innocent name: as Mignolo argues, the invention of the Americas was constitutive of the modern capitalist world-system, not incidental to it. We take this as premise, not blind spot, and seek to reclaim the Americas within that system in another register — not as raw material but as a producer of forms, knowledges, and literatures. Against comparison that routes the continent through the metropolitan North, we read the Americas as a dense field of South–South, South–North, and South-within-North relations in their own right, asking what comparison becomes when practiced from the Americas rather than about them.

We welcome theoretically informed papers grounded in specific texts, archives, or cases (but not limited to):

• Genealogies of "America": the politics of a name — from Martí to hemispheric American studies; the capture of the name by the US and the stakes of contesting it.
• The expanded American archive and transamerican print cultures: recovered circulations, translations, receptions; the continent's presses as an active archive, not a passive recipient.
• Internal peripheries: minoritized and border Americas — Black, Chicanx/Latinx, Indigenous, immigrant, and diasporic writing; the Black Atlantic rerouted through the Americas; the borderland as linguistic and political condition.
• Originary peoples, cosmopolitics, and the more-than-human: Indigenous literatures as constitutive of American literature; non-anthropocentric imaginaries across North and South.
• Comparative methods and languages in relation: transculturation, antropofagia, entre-lugar, creolization, and Relation as methods; translation, code-switching, and translanguaging as decolonial practice.

Papers may be presented in English, Portuguese, or Spanish. We treat receptive multilingualism as the seminar's method: one need be at ease in only one of the three, but is encouraged to follow all. Through translanguaging, organizers and participants will mediate among the languages, so that discussion itself enacts the ethics of alterity the seminar studies.