This course is a study of Latinx literatures and cultures produced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will concentrate our attention on works by Chicanos, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, and Dominican Americans. We will consider how these works represent and participate in the upheavals that characterize the…[Read more]

Attentive to the disjunctures of the Chinese diaspora in the Americas, Patricia Powell’s “The Pagoda” intertextually re-territorializes the tropes of Asian American literature and cultural criticism in a Jamaican context in order to fashion a queer utopian historical romance. The novel portrays a simultaneously pluralist and creolizing…[Read more]

This essay argues that narco-narratives–in film, television, literature, and music–depend on structures of narrative doubles to map the racialized and spatialized construction of illegality and distribution of death in the circum-Caribbean narco-economy. Narco-narratives stage their own haunting by other geographies, other social classes, other…[Read more]

Drawing on Arabic textual traditions and foregrounding the liminal time and space of administrative detention, of the expired visa, of deportation, and of repatriation, Muslim slave narratives deserve recognition as generative forebears of transnational, multicultural literature in both England and the United States. Yet these forebears were…[Read more]

Drawing on Arabic textual traditions and foregrounding the liminal time and space of administrative detention, of the expired visa, of deportation, and of repatriation, Muslim slave narratives deserve recognition as generative forebears of transnational, multicultural literature in both England and the United States. Yet these forebears were…[Read more]

This essay reexamines the figure of Franz Kafka (1883–1924) in light of his largely ignored, recursive links to circum-Caribbean and Black Atlantic processes of racialized exploitation and corporal punishment. When we centre Kafka’s extensive biographical and literary engagements with these processes, the persistent debate over Kafka’s statu…[Read more]

This essay reexamines the figure of Franz Kafka (1883–1924) in light of his largely ignored, recursive links to circum-Caribbean and Black Atlantic processes of racialized exploitation and corporal punishment. When we centre Kafka’s extensive biographical and literary engagements with these processes, the persistent debate over Kafka’s statu…[Read more]

The media reception of Drown frames Junot Díaz as a voice of the street that denounces the subjugating violence of internal US colonialism. However, Drown itself suggests that this extra-textual critique displaces the reader’s analytic gaze. The stories in the collection intimate that it is not oppressive socio-economic conditions that co…[Read more]

This essay examines the Hindi Nayī Kahānī, or New Story, Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which was influential for the short stories, criticism, and literary history that its writers produced. Incorporating a view toward the larger “metaliterary” corpus in relation to which properly “literary” nayī kahānī texts were written, the essay shows h…[Read more]

This article covers an entire generation of American popular novels published between the Civil War and World War I: campus fictions, focusing all but exclusively on homosocial scenes of undergraduate merriment. Centering on the camaraderie of fraternal sociality, campus novels model friendship as a democratic ideal for dispensing with conflict,…[Read more]