This volume illuminates and gives voice to actors, objects, events, and processes from the early 1400s to the late 1800s and thinks about how they may relate to Latinx expressive literatures and cultures, challenging common paradigms that think of the field as resolutely modern. Drawing on a diverse range of expertise from scholars from around the globe and examining objects ranging from chronicles, histories, letters, journalism, poetry, talismans, performances, and comix, the volume engages with counternarratives and multifaceted contexts that address intersections of race, gender, class, and other social and political locations. The volume significantly contributes to methodological debates around Latina/o/x studies, offering in-depth and multiple explorations of how to imagine the field's complex evolution. It is an indispensable resource for those seeking to broaden their scholarly understanding of Latinx identity and literature, providing fresh insights and critical perspectives that will enrich academic discussions and research in this field.
Part I. Transacting: Archives and the (Un)ma(r)king of Difference: 1. Archiving the future in the early US republic: white elites, racial relics, and trans-Americanism(o) Ruth Hill; 2. Early Sephardic voices in the Spanish North American Atlantic Colbert Cairns; 3. Invoking Allah: tracing the Islamic Atlantic Zeinab Mcheimech; 4. The mid nineteenth-century press and periodical poetry: voices from the archive Ayendy Bonifacio; Part II. Transcending: Narrative and Counter Narratives: 5. La Llorona's ghosts: child death and maternal loss as a Latinx historiography Matthew Goldmark; 6. From Mary Rowlandson to Lola Medina: rethinking the captivity narrative Genre Nicole Eitzen Delgado; 7. Pre-Latinx Spanish encounters with the Lady of Cofachiqui (in South Carolina) Thomas Ward; 8. 'Tragic Time': an unromantic re-reading of nineteenth-century Cuban History Dalia Antonia Caraballo Muller; Part III. Transgressing: Beyond Empire, Nation, or Race: 9. When words are not enough: José Martí, Race, and Writing/Righting the Imagined Nation Kenya C. Dworkin y Méndez; 10. Literature and the trans-oceanic limits of empire: Jose Rizal and the birth of Filipino nationalism Ernest Rafael Hartwell; 11. Tobacco, anarchism, and transnational Latinidad Kirwin Shaffer; 12. Criollo Patriotism and the Colonial Archive: Francisco de Florencia and the Early Florida Frontier Jason Dyck; Part IV. Transcreating: Texts, Subtexts and Creative Anachronism: 13. Early modern theatre and the transatlantic: Bartolomé De Alva's Nahuatl translations and translatio studii José Estrada; 14. Performing the Canon: Latinx Shakespeares, Quijotes and Sor Juana Carla Della Gatta; 15. Beyond colonial censorship Pedro García-Caro; 16. African Spirituality and the emergence of black Cuban literature in the age of Cuban independence Matthew Pettway; 17. Drawing the Latinx Migrant Subject: from Guaman Poma via Cornejo Polar to Martín López Lam's Las edades de la rata Aramburú Villavisencio.
Kenya C. Dworkin y Méndez is Professor of Hispanic studies at Carnegie Mellon University. She holds a PhD in Hispanic Literatures and Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley. She received an NEH grant for a performance ethnography of an unknown chapter of immigrant Cuban theater, is a co-editor of Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States (2001), En Otra Voz: Antología de la Literatura Hispana de los Estados Unidos (2002), has published widely in Cuban, Latinx, and Sephardic studies, and is also a translator. Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela is a reader in Latin American culture at King's College London. Her research focuses on the complex historicising and locating of Latin American cultural production. Her publications have ranged over seventeenth-century women's writing (Colonial Angels, 2000), the nineteenth century, (Ricardo Palma's Tradiciones: Illuminating Gender and Nation, 2012), and contemporary Latin American/x literature. She also plays a leading role in curriculum reform in the UK around Modern Language education.
