Abstract
The inter-war years were haunted by the curious premonition that the ‘end of history’ was at hand. This paper aims at exploring the literary and aesthetic reactions of Caribbean and African-American writers to the crisis of the European historical subject. Through a close and critical examination of Zora Neale Hurston's and Alejo Carpentier's writings, and of the latter appropriation of the pessimistic historical narrative of conservative thinker Oswald Spengler and his theses in The Decline of the West, I will attempt to demonstrate that their work exhibits the tension between the Zeitgeist of an imagined historical European decline and the birth of a New World historical subjectivity. Zora Neale Hurston and Alejo Carpentier posit Africa and the Americas respectively as a vital antidote to the moribund and static modernity of Europe.
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