This chapter situates three Latinx literary organizations – CantoMundo, Letras Latinas, and Undocupoets – in a trajectory of institution building dedicated to the support and development of Latinx poetry and poetics. Moving through organizational origins, concrete support strategies, founding members, and institutional alliances, the chapter maps out the practical as well as philosophical outcomes of developing Latinx poetry and poetics as a diverse, multiform set of voices. Coinciding with greater recognition of Latinx poets in terms of fellowship support, book prizes, and publication numbers, CantoMundo, Letras Latinas, and Undocupoets, as well as organizations that have built alongside and with them, have decisively shaped twenty-first-century Latinx poetry and given it many possible routes for future development.

This chapter traces the historical construction of whiteness in US law from the late eighteenth century, when the nation limited naturalized citizenship to “white” immigrants, through early twentieth-century Supreme Court cases in which individual Asian immigrants’ attempts to naturalize, citing the vagueness of racial prerequisite in federal law at the time, were denied on the basis of the court’s interpretations of the meaning of racial whiteness enshrined in the original 1790 statute. This genealogy of legal whiteness also examines how the boundaries and meaning of white identity evolve historically in relation to the racial logics of slavery in the law and post-Reconstruction segregationist legal orders. The chapter presents key critical paradigms for legal studies of whiteness and explores their generative potential for literary analysis through a reading of Charles W. Chesnutt’s 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition in relation to the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson.

This chapter examines the interconnectedness of whiteness, gender, and national identity in Hollywood movies. It begins with Birth of a Nation, Hollywood’s first blockbuster and its original sin. It then turns to films that bookend the Classical era – The Jazz Singer (1927) and The Searchers (1956) – to illustrate how much of the ideology put on screen in Birth of a Nation became profitable subject matter and generic habit in the studio era. It then turns to Rocky (1976), examining the centrality of Hollywood in shaping the racial ideology of colorblindness in the decades after the civil rights movement. The chapter concludes by discussing what the author calls Hollywood’s white racial imaginary, a critical framework that allows for a more adequate diagnosis of the implications of the machinations of whiteness in contemporary Hollywood.

Whiteness has been at the center of the history of American citizenship and naturalization. The exact definition of whiteness, however, was historically far from certain. This essay argues that whiteness was being negotiated not only in the courts, but also in the pages of literary texts: Legal naturalization and naturalistic literature show remarkable parallels in their respective definitions of whiteness. Looking at Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Stephen Crane’s Maggie in conjunction with nineteenth- and early twentieth-century court cases, the chapter suggests that the legal and literary logics of naturalization are in fact highly similar. In both literature and law, immigrants tried to prove their whiteness by denigrating other immigrant groups whose whiteness they contested. Finally, literary and legal histories are instructive for today’s understanding of whiteness since they reveal the shifting nature of whiteness: Some groups seen as non-white in the nineteenth century seem indisputably white to us today.

Contemporary US climate fiction articulates the climate crisis as a whiteness crisis. It often represents white, mostly privileged, characters and communities becoming destabilized, if not undone, by climate catastrophe. The existential precarity long experienced by people of color in the US and elsewhere is often figured in US climate fiction as a white apocalypse. This essay focuses on how contemporary US climate fiction stages confrontations with whiteness. Focusing on first-person narratives by Lauren Groff, Jenny Offill, and Ben Lerner that foreground a privileged whiteness by making it hypervisible, it analyzes how climate fiction not only reifies whiteness but also reflects, demystifies, and disrupts it. By submitting whiteness to the spotlight, these texts allow whiteness to become available for investigation and interrogation. The extent to which such critiques end up reifying or recuperating whiteness, however, remains a pressing question.

This chapter explores the impact of José Esteban Muñoz’s 2009 book Cruising Utopia on both the creative production and critical reception of queer Latinx literary work in the following decade-plus. While Latinx literature and its study were already “queered” and “queering” before Cruising Utopia, the chapter argues that Muñoz’s work prompted a greater focus on futurity, potentiality, and the speculative, thanks especially to the unique generativity of his (queer, ethnic) performance studies methodology (especially his inquiries into affectivity, ephemera, and brownness) for literary studies. The discussion engages critical work from the 2010s to gauge both the scope of Muñoz’s contributions to salient critical debates over that period and the scope of some skeptical responses to those contributions. It then turns in closing to a targeted close reading of Carmen Maria Machado’s literary production from the late 2010s and early 2020s as a “representative” archive of queer Latinx literature “after” the utopian “turn.”

A review of whiteness through a feminist lens could not begin anywhere but with Black feminists’ critiques of white feminism. This chapter then moves on to use white celebrity feminist mogul Reese Witherspoon’s media production empire Hello Sunshine as a case study to argue that both enacting and studying white feminism or whiteness through a feminist lens, when authored by white people, cannot help but perpetuate some status quo structures of domination. But there is hope it might also serve to render those structures cogent and visible with an eye toward disrupting and dismantling them. The chapter argues that the invisibility of Witherspoon’s whiteness and the inequitable power dynamics of contemporary mainstream feminist media production cultures that she represents continue to be celebrated in the twenty-first century, just as popular feminist practices often fail to critique the complex interchanges of power between whiteness and feminism.

Novels by AfroDominican writers like Loida Maritza Pérez and Nelly Rosario center the embodied archive as an epistemological site. As Afro-Caribbean feminist philosopher Jacqui Alexander reminds us, “So much of how we remember is embodied: the scent of home: of fresh-baked bread; of newly grated coconut stewed with spice (we never called it cinnamon), nutmeg, and bay leaf from the tree.... Violence can also become embodied, that violation of sex and spirit.” To echo Alexander, we can understand our bodies as archives where the records of multiple translocations, transformations, and the violence done to us are kept. The chapter proposes that in this same way, we can understand an AfroLatina embodied archive at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, and transnational migration as a site of knowledge production. The chapter argues that bodies and archival memory are linked to form an embodied archive where memories are kept. The body becomes the place in which experiences are recorded and engrained. This knowledge is often passed on to future generations and creates new AfroLatina feminist knowledges of being, belonging, and self-knowing.

The introduction sets the stage for the chapters to come by offering a brief historical overview of writers’ and scholars’ engagements with whiteness. Starting with Toni Morrison’s insights into the whiteness of the whale in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), this chapter traces an intellectual genealogy that proceeds from what Morrison saw in Melville’s work to what Melville learned from reading Frederick Douglass’s 1845 autobiography. It surveys different kinds of literary treatments of whiteness, more than two centuries of which are treated in this volume, and offers a quick history of the development of whiteness studies before looking ahead to each chapter’s main arguments.

This essay examines how television/streaming producer Misha Green and her white collaborators Joe Pokaski, H. P. Lovecraft, and Matt Ruff participate in a centuries-old tradition of “whiting up.” Over two short-lived but impactful scripted drama series, Underground (2016–2017) and Lovecraft Country (2020), Green and her partners crafted compelling twenty-first-century whiteface minstrels and stage Europeans. Their work represented all four modes or functions of “whiting up” – satire/parody, imitation/emulation, exposing white terror, and dissidentification/transference – while also exploring the themes of white privilege and Black agency. However, Green and company not only inhabit this African American performance tradition but push the boundaries of performed whiteness, ultimately questioning its efficacy. In the process, Green and her partners reimagine how Black televisual figures are represented in thriller, superhero, and sci-fi horror genres.

Chinelo Okparanta’s Harry Sylvester Bird (2022) is unique in focusing deeply on its white narrator, Harry Bird, a boy from rural Pennsylvania who longs to be Black. As a twenty-first-century white life novel, Okparanta’s book shares with its postwar predecessors a profound engagement with the meanings of whiteness. Harry Sylvester Bird offers a relentless critique of the willed blindness and hypocrisies endemic to whiteness. However, while earlier white life novels largely presented characters who are at ease with their racialized privileges as well as the violence that make such privileges possible, Harry Sylvester Bird tells the story of a young man who becomes disgusted by his race and especially by his bigoted parents. Okparanta’s novel is a powerful exploration of contemporary whiteness that demonstrates how the desire for Blackness is yet another iteration of the privilege and willed delusion endemic to whiteness.

This chapter surveys attitudes to and depictions of whiteness in nineteenth-century speculative writing. These genres (the gothic, science fiction, utopia, and dystopia) were in conversation with and shaped by cultural and scientific discussions throughout the century that treated whiteness as both a biological and social concept that could shift, expand, and potentially degrade. Speculative texts articulated and often exorcised fears that whiteness could be lost and white Americans could experience the dispossession associated with the non-white Other due to failures to embody white civic values and shifting demographics. Across three categories (gothic whiteness, fantasies of white transformation, future whiteness) this chapter demonstrates that whiteness itself became speculative and open to change beyond the physically possible. As part of each category, this chapter also draws attention to how African American writers used speculative genres to return the othering gaze to whiteness and briefly imagine worlds without white supremacy.

Attending to Latinx South American writing generates a more expansive understanding of how violence and migration shape Latinx literary history and narrative forms. This chapter elucidates the theoretical salience of el Hueco through its multiple significations as gap, hole, hollow, space of detention, liminal status, and form of undocumented migration. Likewise, the chapter demonstrates how the term desaparecido illuminates the emotional holes and the gaps in kinship structures left by those who are disappeared by state terror practices and immigration policies. Using texts by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Romina Garber, Juan Martinez, Carolina de Robertis, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Daniel Alarcón, and Cristina Henríquez, the chapter demonstrates how prose narrative draws linkages between various kinds of state-perpetrated violence in the Américas. The chapter analyzes genres – from creative nonfiction to speculative fiction – and narrative strategies – from temporality and spectrality to focalization and characterization – to illuminate how Latinx South American fiction activates narrative as a form of reappearance and as a means of imagining different Latinx futurities.

This chapter explores Latinx speculative fiction – the capacious term for genres that include anything from science fiction, fantasy, and apocalyptic fiction to horror, alternative histories, and supernatural fiction and their vast array of subgenres – and asks why Latinx writers turn to speculative tropes to tell their stories, and what unique narrative possibilities genre fiction offers. The chapter argues that Latinx speculative fiction offers a powerful tool for examining race, ethnicity, national belonging, and diaspora, revealing how Latinx identities and Latinidad have been shaped by violent historical forces that veer on the otherworldly, and how reading through this lens uncovers tropes and narratives that might otherwise remain hidden. The chapter illustrates the importance of Latinx speculative fiction as a paradigm for reading, one that exceeds national boundaries, establishes thematic networks across time and space, offers new avenues for discussing identity formations, and, moreover, requires a redefinition of Latinidad as a speculative endeavor.