Améfrica in Letters - (Hispanic Issues) by Jennifer Carolina Gómez Menjívar (Paperback)

About the Book

Overlooked Black Spanish-language literary history from the late twentieth and early twenty-first century

Book Synopsis

Traditional histories of Black letters in Latin America have delimited their geographic scope to the Caribbean while also omitting intertwined Afro-Indigenous discourses. Inspired by the legacy of Amefrican thinker Lélia Gonzalez, Améfrica in Letters highlights the Black poets, songwriters, novelists, essayists, and bloggers who have created a counter-multiculturalist literary history on the Latin American mainland. To capture a sense of the variety of their contributions, this book spans Mexico, Central America, the Andes, and the Southern Cone--highlighting the transcontinental nature of the legacy of Black writing and its impact beyond national boundaries. The writers examined in the volume engage with regional intellectual frameworks while putting into circulation a demand for a recalibration of the Hispanophone and Lusophone contexts in which they and other Afrodescendants reside.

Review Quotes

"Coherent and well written . . . draws attention to relatively obscure and unattended areas of literary and cultural production in Afro-Hispanic cartography."
--Jerome C. Branche, author of The Poetics and Politics of Diaspora: Transatlantic Musings

About the Author

Jennifer C. Gómez Menjívar is an associate professor at the University of North Texas.