The Cambridge History of Latina/o American Literature

This comprehensive history of US Latina/o literature from the colonial period through the present elucidates the complex roots of Latina/o writing within the Americas.

John Morán González (Edited by), Laura Lomas (Edited by)

9781107183087, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 February 2018

854 pages
23.6 x 15.8 x 4.9 cm, 1.27 kg

'This edited collection extends the discussion of Latin literature beyond the borders of the Americas. … This book is an absolute necessity for students of Latin American literature. Essential.' K. Gale, Choice

The Cambridge History of Latina/o American Literature emphasizes the importance of understanding Latina/o literature not simply as a US ethnic phenomenon but more broadly as an important element of a trans-American literary imagination. Engaging with the dynamics of migration, linguistic and cultural translation, and the uneven distribution of resources across the Americas that characterize Latina/o literature, the essays in this History provide a critical overview of key texts, authors, themes, and contexts as discussed by leading scholars in the field. This book demonstrates the relevance of Latina/o literature for a world defined by the migration of people, commodities, and cultural expressions.

List of contributors
Acknowledgements: Introduction
Part I. Rereading the Colonial Archive: Transculturation and Conflict, 1492–1810: 1. Indigenous Herencias: Creoles, mestizaje, and nations before nationalism
2. Performing to a captive audience: dramatic encounters in the borderlands of empire
3. The tricks of the weak: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the feminist temporality of Latina literature
4. Rethinking the colonial Latinx literary imaginary: a comparative and decolonial research agenda
5. The historical and imagined cultural geographies of Latinidad
Part II. The Roots and Routes of Latina/o Literature: The Literary Emergence of a Trans-American Imaginary, 1783–1912: 6. Whither Latinidad?: the trajectories of Latin American, Caribbean, and Latina/o literature
7. Father Félix Varela and the emergence of an organized Latina/o minority in early nineteenth-century New York City
8. Transamerican New Orleans: Latino literature of the Gulf of Mexico, from the Spanish colonial period to post-Katrina
9. Trajectories of exchange: toward histories of Latino literature
10. Narratives of displacement in places that once were Mexican
11. Latina feminism, Latina racism and unspeakable violence: travel narratives, novels of reform, and histories of genocide and lynching
12. José Martí, comparative reading, and the emergence of Latino modernity in gilded-age New York
13. Afro-Latinidad: phoenix rising from a hemisphere's racist flames
Part III. Negotiating Literary Modernity: Between Colonial Subjectivity and National Citizenship, 1910–1979: 14. Oratory, memoir, and theater: performances of race and class in the early twentieth-century Latina/o public sphere
15. Literary revolutions in the borderlands: transnational dimensions of the Mexican Revolution and its diaspora in the United States
16. Making it nuevo: Latina/o modernist poetics remake high Euro-American modernism
17. The archive and Afro-Latina/o field-formation: Arturo Alfonso Schomburg at the intersection of Puerto Rican and African American literatures
18. Floricanto en Aztlán: Chicano cultural nationalism and its epic discontents
19. 'The geography of their complexion': Nuyorican poetry and its legacies
20. Cuban American counterpoint: the heterogeneity of Cuban American literature, culture, and politics
21. Latina/o theater and performance in the contexts of social movements
Part IV. Literary Migrations across the Americas, 1980–2017: 22. Undocumented immigration in Latina/o literature
23. Latina feminist theory and writing
24. Invisible no more: US central American literature before and beyond the age of neoliberalism
25. Latina/o life narratives: crafting self-referential forms in the colonial milieu of the Americas
26. Poetics of the 'majority minority'
27. The Quisqueya diaspora: the emergence of Latina/o literature from Hispaniola
28. Listening to literature: popular music, voice, and dance in the Latina/o literary imagination, 1980–2010
29. Brazuca literature: old and new currents, countercurrents, and undercurrents
30. Staging Latinidad and interrogating neoliberalism in contemporary Latina/o performance and border art
31. Transamerican popular forms of Latina/o literature: genre fiction, graphic novels, and digital environments
32. trauma, translation, and migration in the crossfire of the Americas: the intersection of Latina/o and South American literatures
33. The Mesoamerican corridor, central American transits, and Latina/o becomings
34. Differential visions: the diasporic stranger, subalternity, and the transing of experience in US Puerto Rican literature
35. Temporal borderlands: toward decolonial queer temporality in Latina/o literature
Epilogue: Latina/o literature: the borders are burning
Chronology
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: History of the Americas [HBJK], Literary reference works [DSR], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK]