TY - JOUR
AU - Balachandran Orihuela,, Sharada
AB - Abstract The Latino Nineteenth Century: Archival Encounters in American Literary History (2016), edited by Rodrigo Lazo and Jesse Alemán, is a formative volume that, 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. The Latino Nineteenth Century: Archival Encounters in American Literary History, Rodrigo Lazo and Jesse Alemán, editors. New York University Press, 2016. Latinx studies is a field with a complicated history: it cannot neatly be identified as either a US ethnic studies program—akin to Chicanx, Asian American, Puerto Rican, and African American studies, for example—nor is it an area studies program akin to Latin American studies. Instead, as any Latinx can tell you regarding their own relationship to the US and Latin America, Latinx studies exist at the thorny interstice of both. As an ethnic studies program, its emergence could be traced to post-civil rights era restructuring of the university so as to include the occluded histories of US people of color through the creation of ethnic studies programs. Now, years later, Latinx (or Latino/a) has come to function as a catch-all term to refer to persons of Latin American descent living in the US, and has supplanted the use of ethnic-specific terminology—Cuban American, Mexican American or Chicanx, Puerto Rican, and South and Central American.1 While ethnic studies programs have a seemingly noble activist and intellectual history, the making of Latin American studies is much spottier. Emerging in the era of the Cold War, Latin American studies in US academic history was marked by its interdisciplinarity, as well as its interest in the socioeconomic and political issues of Latin America with a particular emphasis on understanding, and ultimately preventing, the spread of communism throughout the hemisphere. Yet, as Juan Poblete notes, scholars across the hemisphere in recent years have undertaken the points of contact between US ethnic and Latin American studies, a project concomitant with a reassessment of the way “area studies practitioners were not always loyal to Cold War objectives and, in fact, oftentimes became highly critical of U.S. Cold War policies toward Latin America” (Critical xii). Moreover, scholars interested in recuperating the progressive strands of Latin Americanist scholarship are sometimes also concurrently working on dislodging ethnic studies from its US-centered origins. Rodrigo Lazo and Jesse Alemán’s The Latino Nineteenth Century: Archival Encounters in American Literary History (2016) is an important contribution to this project. 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 texts, while also helping to broaden the extant archive through its focus on print culture beyond novelistic production and through its investment in expanding the theoretical apparatuses used to examine this corpus.2 While the title seems to betray its focus on nineteenth-century American literary studies, the volume’s contribution, in my estimation, lies in continuing to build the deep, meaningful ties between US ethnic and Latin American studies. As the editors demonstrate through their inclusion of a range of Latinx and Latin American studies scholars, nineteenth-century literary and cultural studies lends itself to reestablishing the bonds between these fields while also helping to seize these area studies programs from national hegemonic frameworks and projects. To do this work, the editors, in part, have to buy into utilizing Latino as a term indicating that contact point between US ethnic studies and Latin American studies. Poblete writes, “Latino/a studies posits itself as the analytical space where borders themselves can be investigated and with them all kinds of transnational, translingual, and transcultural phenomena” (Critical xv). And yet, Latinx studies, too, has been incorporated into neoliberal institutions of higher learning, where multiculturalism has been highly desirable and valued, and where inclusion, academic and social, continues to be a key buzzword. It is in this era that both Latinx studies and Latinxs have become marketable entities, as Arlene Dávila has expanded upon in Latinos, Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People (2001). Latinx studies as an academic discipline has, however, opened up new ways to think of the multidirectional flows of persons. Latinx studies is where scholars can grapple with the global flows of persons and capital, the effects of US intervention in the hemisphere, and the numerous ways in which Latinxs are reshaping the US nation-state. Latinx studies privileges the political, social, and cultural points of contact between Latin America and the US across the hemisphere, thereby circumventing problematic attachments to individual nation-states and nationalism writ large. The privileging of “multiple positionings,” as Poblete emphasizes in Critical Latin American and Latino Studies (2003), lends itself to thinking of the hemisphere, to include the US, as a “world-region” (xxvi, xxiii). The editors of The Latino Nineteenth Century push these transnational critical frameworks and extend them into the nineteenth century. At the same time, the various essays have been tasked with the responsibility of steering the field away from historical abstraction and toward a form of local, linguistic, ethnic, and historical specificity that demonstrates the innumerable points of contact between the US and Latin America. In the volume, Latino refers less to a particular ethnic group as much as it refers to a framework for understanding what Carmen Lamas calls a spatial and temporal “continuum” of contact and exchange. To understand the volume’s contributions in these terms eclipses the editors’ stated goals. In the preface, Alemán notes that the collection has two main interventions: the first, to make visible the expansive network of Spanish-language print culture in the nineteenth century typically omitted from Anglophone literary history; the second, to reorient US literary history away from its geopolitical roots in New England and toward those networks extending across the nation and throughout the hemisphere. While Alemán clearly lays out their proposed objectives, Lazo’s introduction traces the history of the use of the term Latino to mean at various times an ethnic category, identity, or concept across the long nineteenth century. Alemán also stresses the importance of opening nineteenth-century Latino literary studies to include a range of different printed and nonprinted materials, like “diaries, newspaper clippings, and letters” (“Preface” 9). This new focus ultimately makes a case for the “textual multiplicity” necessary to the excavation of both text and textuality, as well as the circulation of certain formations of Latinidad across the Americas (12). Both the editors and contributors also stress examining these printed materials not merely for the information contained within them but also to emphasize the importance of reading their circulation as evidence of the materiality of Latinx literary and cultural production in the nineteenth century. To this end, Lazo underscores the volume’s emphasis on “textual,” rather than “numerical,” multiplicity to mean the varied forms of representation contained within the expansive range of materials examined by the contributors (12). Lastly, the editors stress the importance of looking to the lesser-known figures of the Latinx nineteenth century—writers other than José Martí and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, for example—along with the more minor trajectories and discrete movements taking place across the hemisphere. The diverse entries themselves show a range of different approaches to the evolving definition of the subject. From Kirsten Silva Gruesz’s contribution on Antonio José de Irisarri’s El cristiano errante (1847), which argues for “errancy” as providing a different ethos and mythos of migration in American cultural studies (23), to Marissa López’s entry on Latino dismodernity, the contributions reveal the expansive circulation and theoretical richness of Latinx print culture. The entries can be divided into three different approaches to the Latinx nineteenth century: essays that examine extant Latinx archives through the exciting theoretical lenses that define the current state of literary criticism; contributions that expose new sites, territories, and geographies of the Latinx nineteenth century; and essays that expand the nineteenth-century Latinx archive by turning to underexamined genres in this period, as well as the vast archive of Latinx print across the hemisphere. Said differently, the volume’s importance to Latinx studies extends beyond Alemán’s desire to reintroduce a rich history of Spanish-language print culture into Anglophone literary history. Instead, the importance of the collection is revealed in the new terrains—literary, geographic, and theoretical—it enters and how it creates new sites of intellectual contribution to the period. Moreover, these essays are crucial to reorienting American literary history and periodization so that it includes Latinx writers and intellectuals who were formative in shaping and at times reorienting the development of US literature in the nineteenth century. Raúl Coronado’s contribution on historicizing Latino textuality, for example, returns to the important interrelation between nation formation, literary canons, and modern historiography. In part, Coronado responds to and complicates Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s 2004 lecture on the transnational turn in American studies and the central place it occupies, even now, 15 years later, in establishing the key markers of Latinx historiography. Instead, Coronado proposes we “refuse this periodization and think creatively through and with the archive” (51). So he urges scholars to think past the representational quality of literature and toward the discursive potential and the textuality of a range of different texts, an argument echoed in Ralph Rodriguez’s recent monograph, Latinx Literature Unbound (2018). Indeed, Coronado’s essay pairs nicely with José Aranda’s essay that, in part, addresses his role in the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Project. That endeavor helped to create a particular version of Mexican American literary history where “the emergent archive of nineteenth-century Mexican America had collided with the counternationalist, Marxist-learning, activist archive of the Chicana/o movement” (147). Together, these essays ask us to rethink Latinx canonization, archivalization, and periodization. For this reason, Aranda’s contribution is exciting in that it argues for a Mexican American modernity marked by the anxieties of becoming marginal to two nation-states and their respective nation-building projects, and not by the characteristic dread that accompanies capitalism, a focus through which we have typically come to understand this literary, cultural, and historical epoch. The importance of rethinking periodization extends to López’s “Feeling Mexican,” which understands sentimentalism through the prism of affect and the tension between the material body and the abstractions of feeling present in Ruiz de Burton’s well-known historical novel, The Squatter and the Don (1885). López suggests reading Squatter as a dismodern text and the dismodern bodies—doubly disabled and racially marked—contained within it as the site where the political and aesthetic converge. More specifically, López sees the inextricability of physical and emotional feelings mirrored in the inextricability of human and machine (the railroad, specifically) in the novel. In this way does López use the interdependence of different bodies (both human and the machine) to expand upon the sentimentalist tropes contained within the novel as expressions of dismodernity. From the contours of Mexican American modernity to Lopez’s argument about Latino dismodernity, the collection as a whole is attentive to literary periodization, while also being invested in widening the scope of how we typically understand these genres and forms. Certainly, approaching texts through the theoretical frameworks provided here reveals the numerous ways in which scholars in this period can continue to interrogate how writers of color have been critical in shaping these forms and genres, as well as the ways in which even canonical works, like The Squatter and the Don, can be reread as asynchronous with the literary periods in which they have typically been located. Aranda’s and López’s contributions point to another key intervention of this volume: in examining how nineteenth-century Latinx texts attend to the idiosyncrasies of the period, the scholars collected here wrest Latinx studies from the twentieth century. After all, I suspect that the editors are responding to how Latinx studies by and large is considered to be a twentieth- and twenty-first-century discipline, with a specific emphasis on the literary and cultural production emerging from the civil rights movement. As Aranda notes, recovered archival materials continue to be interpreted using the hermeneutics that emerged from the Chicanx movement. Yet, as the editors and contributors alike repeatedly emphasize, a historicist approach to these materials risks reducing Latinx texts to representational artifacts of the nineteenth century, which is particularly knotty given that US multiethnic writing is often rendered as ethnographic material or is erased of its imaginative complexity. The editors are thus careful to assemble essays that take Anglo American literary history to task, even as they are also interrogating the interpretive frameworks that scholars of Latinx studies typically engage. Lazo and Alemán have challenged their contributors to maintain rigorous transnational historical specificity, thereby avoiding some of the pitfalls of reading solely through US-ethnic frameworks, while also maintaining a cross-racial, multiethnic, multilingual, and anti-imperialist politics. Plus, in keeping with recent trends in literary criticism, the editors have also chosen essays that reflect the turn to affect, aesthetics, and form. In doing so, the collection may even be further relevant to scholars in contemporary literary and cultural studies. Some of the more intriguing contributions are those that connect the Latinx nineteenth century to the contemporary period in ways that remain attentive to historical specificity. Robert McKee Irwin’s “Almost-Latino Literature,” which challenges the use of Latino to speak of a historical moment that predates the use of the term, is one such essay. Irwin’s response is to distinguish Latino from Latin American by hinging this distinction on territoriality and subjectivity (112). In addition to articulating a generative difference between Latino and Latin American, Irwin also offers the category of “almost” or “failed” immigrant, which he writes, “point[s] to the stories of migration we do not know so well” in Latinx, US, and Latin American studies (112). Instances of failed immigration, Irwin provocatively writes, link nineteenth-century immigration narratives to contemporary Latin American migration to the US. Irwin uses Vicente Pérez Rosales’s memoir Recuerdos del Pasado (Times Gone By), published in Chile in 1882, to make a case for Rosales and others like him who migrated to the US with the intention of staying, but who ultimately returned to the nations from which they emigrated, as neither immigrants nor visitors. These instances of “truncated or impeded” Latinidad, Irwin suggests, allow us to think multidirectionally and transnationally about ethnicity, and to think of ethnicity as an oftentimes “incomplete transnational process” (120, 122). Irwin’s attention to the multidirectional flows of persons at a historical juncture where Latinx migration was not yet criminalized and when movement across the hemisphere—a lengthy and expensive endeavor—was possible opens up a new way to think of nineteenth-century Latinx archives and persons. These multidirectional flows are precisely what Lamas calls the “Latina/o continuum,” a term capturing the long history of Latinx literary production that both exists in and also transcends time and space. A “Latina/o continuum” is not merely transhistorical or transnational, but an identity “that simultaneously occupies multiple spatialities while inhabiting and crossing diverse temporal moments” (212). Lamas’s investment in this simultaneity results in her challenging how US Latinx studies has insulated itself from Latin American studies, itself a response to the exclusion of Latinx texts, persons, and scholarship from the field of Latin American studies. Her contribution on Raimundo Cabrera makes a compelling case for the importance of Latin American archives in understanding US Latinx studies, and illustrates the stakes of this archive by iterating that Latinxs in the nineteenth century lived transnationally and bilingually. By highlighting the multidirectionality of migration and the multiplicity of languages in which some nineteenth-century Latinxs trafficked, Lamas’s contribution upends “the very nature of Latina/o identity and what [it] implies” and also makes possible rereadings of nineteenth-century Latinx and Latin American intellectuals (210). In particular, Lamas is interested in recuperating the works of nineteenth-century Latinx writers and thinkers from perspectives other than those emerging from a Latin American intellectual tradition. Conversely, she also explores the importance of a figure like Cabrera who, despite living in the US for less than two years, became a central figure in Latino intellectual and literary history. In part, what establishes Cabrera as a preeminent Latino intellectual is his translation of Andrew Carnegie’s Triumphant Democracy, or Fifty Years’ March of the Republic (1886), which as Lamas notes is critical to establishing the mutual interdependence of Cuba and the US, and in particular is explicit in promoting Cuban self-rule, a topic that Carnegie does not address outright. Together with Irwin’s essay, Lamas’s contribution is a key component in revitalizing the Latinx nineteenth century and making it capacious enough so that it can track the varied flows of persons and texts across time and space yet maintaining the historical and geographic specificity that underwrites the important claims made throughout the collection. I anticipate that scholars of the Latinx nineteenth century have recognized the stakes of Irwin’s and Lamas’s—and as I will discuss below, Poblete’s—arguments in expanding the nodes of intersection between US Latinx studies and Latin American studies. Their attention to persons who migrated, albeit temporarily, to the US only to return to the nations from which they emigrated and then proceed to fundamentally alter the trajectory of both Latinx and Latin American literary and cultural histories demonstrates a key component of the new directions of both Latinx and Latin American studies: Latinx and Latin Americanist studies are both invested in “deconstructing and overcoming the limitations of the nation-state as a naturalized container for the perfect coincidence of territory, culture, and society” (Poblete, “Introduction” 6). These fields also share an investment in overcoming the limitations of naturalized containments of time and of historicity. For this reason, both Latinx and Latin American literary criticism have aimed for historical rigor and regional specificity while also persistently interrogating periodization, given the close ties between literature and national(ist) cultural projects. For scholars of Latinx and Latin American literature and cultural production have oftentimes faced the problem of periodization, whereby critics have to ask in which national tradition(s) and/or literary period(s) to locate certain texts and writers that defy these limitations (think of Jovita González, for example). The scholars included in The Latino Nineteenth Century are committed, albeit to a greater and lesser degree, to the project of unmooring the place and time of the Latinx nineteenth century insofar as the contributors refuse to be contained by either US or Latin American spatial and literary historical limitations. To that end, John Alba Cutler’s, Aranda’s, and López’s essays, as with those by Irwin, Lamas, and Poblete, also unsettle US and Latin American literary histories through their engagement with underexamined fictive genres or by placing certain texts on distinct but concurrent literary historical axes in ways ultimately upsetting the forms of historical, spatial, national, ethnic, racial, and linguistic containment on which these area studies rely. Perhaps another way to organize this provocative volume is to think through the alternative geographies of the Latinx nineteenth century. Coronado, along with Emily García and Alemán, for example, focuses on the central place of Filadelphia, to mean, as García contends, the “intersection of the physical city and the cultural imaginary of the city in Spanish American circles” in nineteenth-century Latinx life (75). For García, Filadelphia is another borderlands where nineteenth-century thinkers and revolutionaries like Manuel de Trujillo y Torres enact new ways of thinking of Latinx identity. More significantly, García makes a case for a revolutionary ethos emerging with multidirectional temporality across the Americas, not simply unidirectionality from the US into the rest of the hemisphere. Alemán focuses on the nexus of Philadelphia in fostering a Cuban nationalism through the presence of the brothers Cavada, “trans-American” figures who participated in forms of radical insurgency in Cuba while there (“Union Officers” 105). The Cavada brothers, Alemán asserts, also help to reorient the archetype of the Cuban revolutionary émigré figures with whom scholars of the period are familiar insofar as those brothers, as members of the military, were also instruments of US power even as they also actively participated in revolutionary acts on the island. In a vein similar to García, Gerald Poyo examines the Cuban émigrés in Key West and shows the extent to which this Cuban American community consisting increasingly of “nationalist and radical anarchist labor activists” helped to further the cause of Cuban independence, as well as becoming a central figure in Key West politics (262). Poyo’s contribution, however, stands out for its responsiveness to the peculiar racial and political dynamics between Anglo Americans and Cubans in Key West, relationships that differ from those in the rest of the US. Poyo’s essay is instructive in how careful attention to highly specific and local histories and archives reveals the dynamic forms by which racialized and politicized bodies are formed. Though sometimes reflective of what is occurring in the US during this period, the place of Cuban émigrés in Key West fluctuates—from agitating foreigners to important civic actors in local and national politics. The relationship that Poyo describes between white and black Cubans and Anglo Americans living in Key West marks his essay as one of many that address race, racialization, and cross-racial alliances in the volume. Laura Lomas’s entry focuses on well-known nineteenth-century Latinx activists and intellectuals Martí, “Pachín” Marín, and Lucy Parsons to argue for the importance of cross-racial and cross-class alliances in understanding late nineteenth-century Latinidad, which positions “itself against monolingualism, imperialism, and U.S.-style racism” (318). Similarly, Nicolás Kanellos examines Sotero Figueroa as a predecessor of Alfonso Arturo Schomburg in recuperating Afro-Latinx history, decolonizing archives, and rewriting Western history. The editors and contributors are especially alert to the importance of including discussions of the racial Möbius strip occupied by Latinxs in the period. Poblete’s contribution on Chilean miners during the California Gold Rush prompts consideration of Chilean migration to the US as, alternatively, a great possibility and a grave threat to the Chilean state, while also being integral to the racialization of Latinxs in the US. Poblete’s entry, which looks to both Chilean and US writers depicting the gold rush, reveals the foundational moments for thinking about the relationship between immigration and illegality; the origins of Latinx discrimination in California; and the rise of Chile’s white social imaginary. Poblete’s contribution is further instructive in revealing the meaningful connections between Chile and California. That relationship, when understood through the immigration of Chileans to California, is integral to understanding the emergent racialization of Californios as unlawful, despised residents of US land, or as Poblete notes, the ways in which “many Latinos would quickly move from the category of foreign miners to that of illegal and undeserving foreigners” (297). Moreover, Poblete helps to highlight the central place of California in the complex relationship between racialized white European immigration to the US and Chile, particularly a series of “racialized arguments against ‘inferior races’” and legalized discrimination in both US and Chilean immigration policies (294). While Poblete’s essay greatly differs from Poyo’s in its geographical scope, they share a dedication to nineteenth-century Latinxs’ specific, somewhat unanticipated, and highly contingent relationship to Anglo Americans and whiteness more generally. Poblete’s contribution speaks to his investment in examining not migrants alone, but also migrating ideas about race and nation across the hemisphere, ideas that, as he urges us to see, are neither epistemologically nor ontologically static. It bears highlighting that The Latino Nineteenth Century is a necessary addition to the field of nineteenth-century literary studies, if only because it encourages readers to extend the literary archive to include newspapers and other forms of print culture beyond the American novel or poem. Cutler’s “Toward a Reading of Nineteenth-Century Latino/a Short Fiction,” for example, focuses on regional print culture by examining Carlos F. Galán’s “Recuerdos de California,” printed in the Spanish-language newspaper La Voz del Nuevo Mundo in 1881, and Nicandor Bolet Peraza’s short story “Historia de un guante,” published in his own New York literary magazine, Las Tres Américas, in 1895. Cutler analyzes these texts, examining issues of genre, form, and both US and Latin American literary history. As he suggests, their publication, which coincides both with Latin American modernism as well as the rise of regionalist writing in the US, reflects the dynamism of print culture across the hemisphere. At the same time, these texts’ popularity and their presence in these magazines upset a US-centered literary history. Cutler insists that Galán’s costumbrista sketch and Peraza’s modernista fictions allow us to reclaim lesser-examined popular genres emerging across the hemisphere, while also allowing us to rethink the orientations of modernity during this period. Although Cutler’s study instructs scholars, in ways that compare to Aranda’s and López’s essays, in how lesser-examined genres found in literary magazines are critical to understanding and unsettling US and Latin American literary periodization, his contribution is especially exciting in that he looks to literary magazines as a compelling source of information regarding the far reach of Spanish-language printed materials circulating across the hemisphere. This essay, like Alberto Varon’s chapter on Juan Nepomuceno Cortina, is exemplary in its pursuit of a rich archive of sources mined in service of its argument too. As Varon observes, Cortina’s “proclamations,” published in both English- and Spanish-language newspapers across both the US and Mexico, are central to the development of Latinx modernity and the creation of a different, hemispheric-imagined community, one that “interpellate[s] Mexican Americans as [US] national subjects” even as it maintains a form of Mexican American identity rooted in Mexican patriotic resistance to US imperialism (193). There is no question that The Latino Nineteenth Century is an important contribution to nineteenth-century literary and cultural studies writ large, and it will likely form part of the core readings for specialists. I find myself repeatedly returning to the ways in which each of these contributors explores new ways of creating an archive of primary materials for the study of the Latinx nineteenth century. More importantly, the contributors to The Latino Nineteenth Century impressively alternate between rich textual studies and broader claims about US, Latinx, and Latin American literary histories. Especially valuable for young scholars committed to the field of Latinx studies is the collection’s display of how nineteenth-century American literary studies can push Latinx studies in new and exciting directions. The collection’s message is clear: Latinx studies must engage more fully with the varied, if divergent, flows of Latinxs in the nineteenth century. Latinx studies cannot simply be understood through contemporary patterns of migration and/or cultural production, even as the scholars included in the volume are informed by the formative works in twentieth-century Latinx studies by Suzanne Oboler, Poblete, Nicholas De Genova, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, and others. In a field saturated by the study of twentieth-century Latinx writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Cristina García, and Junot Díaz, both the editors and contributors of The Latino Nineteenth Century repeatedly push back against framing Latinx studies as a twentieth-century discipline. There is no doubt that the editors have successfully revitalized Latinx nineteenth-century literary studies by forcing us to widen the historical scope of the term Latino. As the contributors repeatedly emphasize, the Latinx nineteenth century offers its own set of archives that should prove critical to understanding both US literary history and Latinx studies, especially since these essays help us reenvision other archives, geographies, and approaches to Latinx literary and cultural production. While the editors and contributors are certainly indebted to scholars who have made a critical contribution to the formation of Latinx studies, they are in equal measure indebted to US Americanists responsible for the institutionalization of the transnational turn in American studies. These critics—John Carlos Rowe, Winfred Fluck, Amy Kaplan, and Donald Pease, to name but a few—have been instrumental in furthering transnational, hemispheric, and postnational forms of inquiry. These thinkers, formative to the field of American studies, however, have found themselves critiqued for furthering a form of late twentieth-century exceptionalism that reified a historical epoch marked by exploitative economic and social policies that unequally and negatively affected the Global South. And so it was in this climate that such critics as Fishkin, Anna Brickhouse, Robert Levine, Caroline Levander, Wai Chee Dimock, and Gruesz took up the project of dislodging a transnational studies model from the late twentieth century and instead applying this critical apparatus to the nineteenth century. It is no surprise, then, that this table of contents seems to include and build upon Levander and Levine’s formative collection, Hemispheric American Studies (2008). Of course, one can still object to the volume having accomplished the task of confronting the bi- and/or multidirectional flows of persons and things, given its publication in the US and, with the exception of Poblete and Irwin, its lack of inclusion of any Latin Americanists, a critique equally applicable to Hemispheric American Studies. I wish the collection also could have reflected the work of scholars to include María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, José David Saldívar, Francine Masiello, and Julio Ramos, for example—all of whom engage with the Latinx and Latin American nineteenth centuries, and who teach in departments other than English. The work of these aforementioned scholars would have been especially valuable given that most, if not all, of the scholars included in the volume are already in conversation with Latin Americanists and Latin American studies. Consequently, scholars interested in how Latin Americanists are entering into the field of nineteenth-century Latinx studies will find themselves wanting a more robust engagement with scholars and scholarship from the Global South. Relatedly, there are no essays in translation even as most of the contributors include English- and Spanish-language texts in translation in their chapters. The editors’ overall interest in questions of multiplicity, multidirectionality, and multilingualism, as well as their inclusion of key scholars in the field of Latin American cultural studies—like Poblete and Irwin—makes the omission of more Latin Americanists even more problematic. Perhaps it is for this reason that the essays I found to be most successful were those which tried to think of the Latinx nineteenth century more holistically, with a specific emphasis on unsettling US centrism in Latinx literary and cultural studies. Essays like those by Poblete and Lamas, for example, are models not only for scholars of the Latinx nineteenth century, but also for younger scholars in Spanish and Comparative Literature departments interested in approaching nineteenth-century hemispheric literature from a perspective that does not solely privilege US literary and cultural production and publication. Regardless, it is exciting to see such a large collection of Latinx scholars who for reasons having to do with their scholarly investments in the Latinx nineteenth century have struggled to find the full range of their academic interests reflected in the fields of American, Latin American, and/or nineteenth-century literary studies. Ultimately, these essays provide a necessary contact point between a Latin American and a US-Latinx nineteenth century. In doing so, they reveal the numerous nineteenth centuries across the hemisphere at our disposal for further scrutiny. This contact point is especially important when considering that Latinx studies has oftentimes seen itself to be at odds with Latin American studies. This volume bridges these disciplines, and interestingly finds the nineteenth century to be the period indispensable to mending this disciplinary rift. The editors’ effort to include essays that span these two fields demonstrates the need for thinking meaningfully about how to continually disassemble the distinction between the Latinx and Latin American subjects in this period, given the patterns of migration repeatedly touched upon by the scholars included here. Relatedly, given the number of Latinx intellectuals who were also formative Latin American thinkers in the nineteenth century, it makes little sense to preserve the sometimes-hierarchical mode through which Latinx theorists are framed as derivative of or secondary in value to their Latin American counterparts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the contributors illuminate that these intellectuals are oftentimes the very same persons who moved freely across the hemisphere. 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. The editors’ commitment to include essays addressing noncanonical works is critical to dilating the field. The Latino Nineteenth Century is expressive of the new directions in Latinx studies, and demonstrates the capaciousness of this field in accommodating nineteenth-century literary studies, and not the other way around. Indeed, the collection as a whole demonstrates that the Latinx nineteenth century is not a smaller, narrow subfield of this period, but rather constitutive of and formative to the field of nineteenth-century US literary studies. The editors of this volume challenge us to rethink our own orientations in C19 so as to think and teach in this field more expansively. Indeed, the collection as a whole demonstrates that the Latinx nineteenth century is not a smaller, narrow subfield of this period, but rather constitutive of and formative to the field of nineteenth-century US literary studies. Dr. Balachandran Orihuela’s first monograph, Fugitives, Smugglers, and Thieves: Piracy and Personhood in American Literature, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2018. Her work has appeared in Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, and Arizona Quarterly. Footnotes 1 The project of using Latinx rather than ethnic-specific designation has also been critical to unsettling a certain form of Chicanx or Mexican American hegemony that, while politically and theoretically necessary in certain regions in the US, is alienating in others (to include the mid-Atlantic region where I teach). 2 In keeping with the title of the volume, I will be using Latino, rather than Latinx, only when citing and directly referring to the objectives and materials discussed by the editors and contributors. Works Cited Alemán Jesse. “From Union Officers to Cuban Revels: The Story of the Brothers Cavada and Their American Civil Wars.” Lazo and Alemán, pp. 89 – 109 . Alemán Jesse. Preface. Lazo and Alemán, pp. vii – x . Aranda José. “When Archives Collide: Recovering Modernity in Early Mexican American Literature.” Lazo and Alemán, pp. 146 – 67 . Coronado Raúl. “Historicizing Nineteenth-Century Latina/o Textuality.” Lazo and Alemán, pp. 49 – 70 . Cutler John Alba. “Toward a Reading of Nineteenth-Century Latino/a Short Fiction.” Lazo and Alemán, pp. 124 – 45 . Dávila Arlene. Latinos, Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People . U of California P , 2001 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Fishkin Shelley Fisher. “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies—Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004.” American Quarterly , vol. 57 , no. 1 , Mar. 2005 , pp. 17 – 57 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat García Emily. “On the Borders of Independence: Manuel Torres and Spanish American Independence in Filadelphia.” Lazo and Alemán, pp. 71 – 88 . Gruesz Kirsten Silva. “The Errant Latino: Irisarri, Central Americaness, and Migration’s Intention.” Lazo and Alemán, pp. 20 – 48 . Irwin Robert McKee. “Almost-Latino Literature: Approaching Truncated Latinidades.” Lazo and Alemán, pp. 110 – 23 . Kanellos Nicolás. “Sotero Figueroa: Writing Afro-Caribbeans into History in the Late Nineteenth Century.” Lazo and Alemán, pp. 323 – 40 . Lamas Carmen E. “Raimundo Cabrera, the Latin American Archive, and the Latina/o Continuum.” Lazo and Alemán, pp. 210 – 29 . Lazo Rodrigo , Alemán Jesse , editors. The Latino Nineteenth Century: Archival Encounters in American Literary History . NYU P , 2016 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Lazo Rodrigo. “Introduction: Historical Latinidades and Archival Encounters.” Lazo and Alemán, pp. 1 – 19 . Levander Caroline F. , Levine Robert S. , editors. Hemispheric American Studies . Rutgers UP , 2008 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Lomas Laura. “‘El negro es tan capaz como el blanco’: José Martí, ‘Pachín’ Marín, Lucy Parsons, and the Politics of Late-Nineteenth-Century Latinidad.” Lazo and Alemán, pp. 301 – 22 . López Marissa K. “Feeling Mexican: Ruiz de Burton’s Sentimental Railroad Fiction.” Lazo and Alemán, pp. 168 – 90 . Poblete Juan. “Citizenship and Illegality in the Global California Gold Rush.” Lazo and Alemán, pp. 278 – 300 . Poblete Juan. Critical Latin American and Latino Studies . U of Minnesota P , 2003 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Poblete Juan. “Introduction: Twenty-Five Years of Latin American Studies.” New Approaches to Latin American Studies: Culture and Power , edited by Poblete . Routledge , 2018 , pp. 1 – 13 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Poyo Gerald E. “‘Hacemos la Guerra pacífica’: Cuban Nationalism and Politics in Key West, 1870–1900.” Lazo and Alemán, pp. 255 – 77 . Rodriguez Ralph E. Latinx Literature Unbound: Undoing Ethnic Expectation . Fordham UP , 2018 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Varon Alberto. “Pronouncing Citizenship: Juan Nepomuceno Cortina’s War to Be Read.” Lazo and Alemán, pp. 191 – 209 . Published by Oxford University Press 2019. This work is written by a US Government employee and is in the public domain in the US. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - The Time of the Latinx Nineteenth Century
JO - American Literary History
DO - 10.1093/alh/ajz057
DA - 2020-02-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-time-of-the-latinx-nineteenth-century-sTdbQG04Kv
SP - 140
VL - 32
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -