Research & Innovation

In its capaciousness, reorients nineteenth-century literary history toward a substantial engagement with Latinx and Latin American literary and cultural production. Consisting of 15 sections written by leading scholars in the field of nineteenth-century Latinx literary studies, the volume tackles an impressive range of nineteenth-century Latinx thinkers and texts. The essays collected here oscillate seamlessly from macro to micro scales of space, move across the long nineteenth century, and engage with an array of printed materials of the Latinx nineteenth century. This volume is about multiplicity: from Jessie Alemán’s Philadelphia to Juan Poblete’s essay on the close ties between California and Chile in the nineteenth century; from the instances of failed immigration outlined by Robert McKee Irwin to Kirsten Silva Gruesz’s migratory “errancy”; from José Aranda’s essay on Mexican American modernity to Marissa Lopez’s argument about Latino dismodernity. Ultimately, the editors and contributors reveal the numerous nineteenth centuries across the hemisphere, and help us imagine the intersections of US literary history and Latinx studies in the nineteenth century.

From the New York Times bestselling author of the National Book Award-winning title The Poet X comes a dazzling novel in prose about a girl with talent, pride and a drive to feed the soul that keeps her fire burning bright. Ever since she got pregnant freshman year, Emoni Santiago’s life has been about making the tough decisions – doing what has to be done for her daughter and her abuela. The one place she can let all that go is in the kitchen, where she adds a little something magical to everything she cooks, turning her food into straight-up goodness.

Even though she dreams of working as a chef after she graduates, Emoni knows that it’s not worth her time to pursue the impossible. Yet despite the rules she thinks she has to play by, once Emoni starts cooking, her only choice is to let her talent break free.

PMLA 135, no. 2 (March 2020): 370–77, DOI: 10.1632/pmla.2020.135.2.370

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In Virgil’s Aeneid, the famous prophetess known as the Sibyl of Cumae is imagined as coextensive with her cavernous home, a porous volcanic cave that amplifies her voice. However, as the twelfth-century adaptors of the Aeneid reimagined the many-mouthed cavern of prophecy as the murky and blackened ecology at the entrance to the underworld, the Sibyl is similarly transformed into a withered and blackened witch in the Roman d’Eneas. This marginalized and racialized woman is poisoned by her environment, the ‘trans-corporeality’ of flesh and environ a harmful constellation of material and cultural factors. And yet the Sibyl survives, perhaps preserved by the toxic landscape and even granted specialized knowledge. A bit of moss growing from her ear in the German Eneit also suggests that mastery over nature is impossible, entanglement within the environment a kind of feminine resistance to masculine attempts at dominance over nature.

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Annie picks me up from the police station. Jack and Nicole are both asleep in the back seat of the car. Annie turns the key in the engine.

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His wife, Venus, watched too and said many things.

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A short-tempered business man, suffering a mid-life crisis, interviews a Christian grade school math teacher to be his nemesis.

This remarkable reimagining of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning reveals the history of racist ideas in America, and inspires hope for an antiracist future. It takes you on a race journey from then to now, shows you why we feel how we feel, and why the poison of racism lingers. It also proves that while racist ideas have always been easy to fabricate and distribute, they can also be discredited.

A paper presented at The 48th Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900, Louisville, KY, February 20–22, 2020.

Annual judge for publication competitions.