Traditional histories of Black letters in Latin America have delimited their geographic scope to the Caribbean while also omitting intertwined Afro-Indigenous discourses. Inspired by the legacy of Amefrican thinker Lélia Gonzalez, Améfrica in Letters highlights the Black poets, songwriters, novelists, essayists, and bloggers who have created a counter-multiculturalist literary history on the Latin American mainland. To capture a sense of the variety of their contributions, this bo...

In her debut collection of poetry, Paulette Ramsay addresses the 'unsanctioned' layers of experience that are often hidden behind social codes and the cloak of respectability. Her layered and subtle wit runs like a thread through poems that cover a diverse range of subject matters - childhood memories, politics, religion, women's concerns, life, death and love. Ramsay's ironic, often hilarious visions illuminate the everyday from a multitude of fresh perspectives guaranteed to entertain an...

In The Borders of Dominicanidad Lorgia García-Peña explores the ways official narratives and histories have been projected onto racialized Dominican bodies as a means of sustaining the nation's borders. García-Peña constructs a genealogy of dominicanidad that highlights how Afro-Dominicans, ethnic Haitians, and Dominicans living abroad have contested these dominant narratives and their violent, silencing, and exclusionary effects. Centering the role of U.S. imperialism in drawing ...

A Contested Caribbean Indigeneity is an in-depth analysis of the debates surrounding Taíno/Boricua activism in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean diaspora in New York City. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research, media analysis, and historical documents, the book explores the varied experiences and motivations of Taíno/Boricua activists as well as the alternative fonts of authority they draw on to claim what is commonly thought to be an extinct ethnic category. It explores the histo...

Latin America is characterized by a uniquely rich history of cultural and racial mixtures known collectively as mestizaje. These mixtures reflect the influences of indigenous peoples from Latin America, Europeans, and Africans, and spawn a fascinating and often volatile blend of cultural practices and products. Yet no scholarly study to date has provided an articulate context for fully appreciating and exploring the profound effects of distinct local invocations of syncretism and ...

In Acoustic Colonialism, Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante examines the role of sound in Chilean and Mapuche cultural production over the last two centuries. Cárcamo-Huechante theorizes sound as a territory of racial, patriarchal, and colonial hegemony as well as of Mapuche struggle, agency, and response to what he calls "acoustic colonialism." From the mid-nineteenth century to the present, Chilean literature, radio, and other media have exerted a historic role in disseminating distorted...

The essential political and theoretical work of one of Latin America’s most important contemporary theorists.Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar is one of the foremost Latin American political thinkers. From armed Indigenous struggle in the Bolivian altiplano to the contemporary wave of feminist uprisings, Raquel Gutiérrez's life and work have spanned and spurred on some of the most important political sequences in the last forty years in Latin America.Almost unknown ...

Winner, 2019 Isis Duarte Book Prize, given by the Haiti/Dominican Republic Section of the Latin American Studies AssociationWinner, 2019 Barbara Christian Literary Award, given by the Caribbean Studies AssociationHighlights the histories and cultural expressions of the Dominican peopleUsing a blend of historical and literary analysis, Colonial Phantoms reveals how Western discourses have ghosted—misc...

Latin America’s Indigenous writers have long labored under the limits of colonialism, but in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, they have constructed a literary corpus that moves them beyond those parameters. Gloria E. Chacón considers the growing number of contemporary Indigenous writers who turn to Maya and Zapotec languages alongside Spanish translations of their work to challenge the tyranny of monolingualism and cultural homogeneity. Chacón argues that these Maya and Zapot...

Derived from the nationalist writings of José Martí, the concept of Cubanidad (Cubanness) has always imagined a unified hybrid nation where racial difference is nonexistent and nationality trumps all other axes identities. Scholars have critiqued this celebration of racial mixture, highlighting a gap between the claim of racial harmony and the realities of inequality faced by Afro-Cubans since independence in 1898. In this book, Rebecca M. Bodenheimer argues that it is not only th...

After generations of being rendered virtually invisible by the US academy in critical anthologies and literary histories, writing by Latin Americans of African ancestry has become represented by a booming corpus of intellectual and critical investigation. This volume aims to provide an introduction to the literary worlds and perceptions of national culture and identity of authors from Spanish-America, Brazil, and uniquely, Equatorial Guinea, thus contextually connecting Africa to the histo...

This collection explores the contributions of Hispanic women writers to ongoing Western debates on gender, power, ethics, and the environment, offering a wide range of essays that specifically portray the ways in which contemporary writers focus on issues of global impact in a deliberate and purposeful manner. The contributors analyze texts pertaining to all literary genres, examining a myriad of ethical, philosophical, and political perspectives including feminism, postcolonial theories, ...