Latinx Literature in Transition, 1992–2020: Volume 3

This volume examines the formal and theoretical innovations of Latinx literature in a period of rapid change and transformation.

William Orchard (Edited by)

9781009314145, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 3 July 2025

436 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2.8 cm, 0.78 kg

This book chronicles important formal and theoretical innovations in Latinx literature during a period when Latinx writers received increasing acclaim while their communities became targets of rising hostility. The essays in this collection show how Latinx writers confront this contradiction by cultivating an understanding of Latinx experience in its transnational dimensions, by recovering histories that were suppressed or erased, by engaging in burgeoning decolonial projects that resist Western epistemologies, and by forming coalitions and solidarities within Latinx groups as well as with other minoritized racial and ethnic communities to challenge state violence and US imperial projects. The book highlights the increasingly important role of genre, form, and media in the contemporary Latinx literature and provides an account of how the shifting demographics and new migrations of Latinx people have not only resulted in new narratives and art but also altered and expanded how we imagine the category 'Latinx.'

List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction William Orchard
Part I. Shifting Coordinates: 1. Periodizing the contemporary: Latinx literature and recent US history Alberto Varon
2. The overflows of water in Latinx literature Rebeca Hey-Colón
3. On Huecos and Desaparecidos: state-sanctioned violence and undocumented migration in Latinx South American literary imaginaries Jennifer Harford Vargas
4. Haiti in the Latinx literary imaginary John Ribó
5. CantoMundo, undocupoets, Letras Latinas and the cultivation of Latinx poetry Francisco E. Robles
6. Global wanderings: Latinx literature in translation Marion Rohrleitner
Part II. Transforming Genres: 7. The trouble with solidarity: fictions of pan-ethnicity Aarón Aguilar-Ramírez
8. Arendt's children in US Central American poetry Guadalupe Escobar
9. Launching into a brown Future: Latinx science fiction narratives Cathryn Merla-Watson
10. Latinx speculative fiction, speculative Latinx Maia Gil'Adí
11. US empire and Latinx children's literature Sonia Alejandra Rodríguez
Part III. Emerging Media: 12. Latinx melodrama: telenovela legacies in twenty-first century audiovisual narratives Adriana Estill
13. Cyberspace (s)exiles: Latin@ digital textuality for the twenty-first century Margarita Castromán Soto
14. Sonic Latinidades in Latinx theater and performance Marci McMahon
15. Comics go to school: Latinx graphic narratives and the university William Orchard
16. Video gaming Latinidad: Latinx representation and narrative in twenty-first century games and ludic narratives Regina Marie Mills
Part IV. Theoretical Turns: 17. AfroLatina embodied archives of knowledge production Omaris Z. Zamora
18. Contemporary Latinx indigeneities Yolanda Padilla
19. Cruising Utopia and the queering of Latinx literature Ricardo Ortíz
20. The formal turn in Latinx literature and criticism Thomas Conners
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]