446 EURAMERICA was still very different from our contemporary homonationalism; for one thing, it was not really “a collusion between homosexuality and American nationalism that is generated both by national rhetorics of patriotic inclusion and by gay and queer subjects themselves” (Puar, 2007: 39, emphasis added)—surely the American nation could not possibly be aware of the full package of what it has thus endorsed in Whitman until much later. Yet this retrospective critique still foregrounds certain important tendencies embedded in Whitman’s oeuvre as well as in its domestic/international contexts, though their full significance has become clear to us only recently. However, historically speaking, what runs parallel to this contemporary retrospective critique is the caveat that none of these aspects of Whitman’s found problematic today were particularly offensive by his contemporaneous standards; on the contrary, most of them were actually viewed as outrageously progressive at the time. At least that was how the world in general and most racial minorities within the US took him to be until not so long ago. For the former, it should be noted that the international cult of Whitman amongst men of letters around the globe probably has been the most prevalent and zealous for any writer ever, as can be conveniently testified to by Gay Wilson Allen and Ed Folsom’s (1995) comprehensive volume Walt Whitman and the World. To explain this curious phenomenon, they observantly suggest that “Whitman’s influence has been most dramatically apparent in countries that are in the midst of democratic revolutions and deep social change” (4), i.e. their enthusiasms for Whitman have clearly served the purpose of taking inspirations and supports from the US democracy as propagated by and embodied in the poet himself. While some may object that it is because the world still needed some time to understand what really lies behind t/his American ideology and its worldwide spread, the case of Latin America, the earliest target of the US imperialist agenda and also one of its most outspoken objectors, is particularly intriguing. For why is it that we find the
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