These three critical works offer new ways of thinking through transnational literary connections and are conscious of both the historical resonances of colonialism and the structures of power in today’s globalized world. Each study is attentive to questions of scale—geographical and temporal—and the limits inherent in the frames that we use to position literature. Jennifer Harford Vargas’s Forms of Dictatorship offers an expansive view of transnational American literature, applying dictatorship as a literary trope, well-established in Latin American literature, to a subset of Latina/o fiction: the Latina/o dictatorship novel. Harford Vargas’s work seeks to extend explorations to more fully incorporate the hemispheric “haunting afterlives” of dictatorships (4). John C. Havard’s Hispanicism and Early US Literature expands the framing of United States literature to consider those texts created at the margins of the nation, conceptualizing Hispanicism, “a literary tradition that displays a US interest in producing knowledge about Hispanophone peoples” (3)....
Forms of Dictatorship: Power, Narrative, and Authoritarianism in the Latina/o Novel
Hispanicism and Early US Literature: Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and the Origins of US National Identity
Where the New World Is: Literature about the U.S. South at Global Scales
Jenna Grace Sciuto is an associate professor of English at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. Her current book project, under contract with the University Press of Mississippi, examines literary representations of sexual policing of the color line across spaces with distinct colonial histories and constructions of race: Mississippi, Louisiana, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. Her work has appeared in Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, ARIEL, and Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas, and Southern Comforts: Drinking and the U.S. South.
Jenna Grace Sciuto; Forms of Dictatorship: Power, Narrative, and Authoritarianism in the Latina/o Novel
Hispanicism and Early US Literature: Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and the Origins of US National Identity
Where the New World Is: Literature about the U.S. South at Global Scales. American Literature 1 September 2020; 92 (3): 609–612. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-8616307
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