In the United States, white nationalism forms one part of an originary contradiction, dialectically entwined with an aspiration toward egalitarian openness that can, but often doesn’t, include people considered to be outside the boundaries of Americanness. The resulting tension animates struggles to define national identity in the past and present and both the contradiction and struggles loom over its future. Drawing on work in multiple disciplines, the chapter traces the persistence of this structuring antinomy by highlighting instructive literary examples at particular historical moments. What is now called “white nationalism” has long been part of mainstream – not just marginal or extremist – literary and intellectual discourse; thus, consideration of white nationalism takes precedence. However, the discussion also notes the equally tenacious hopes for a society open to those who are excluded based on conceptions of race. Lastly, the chapter identifies the utopian genre as an especially useful arena showcasing the contradiction.

This chapter focuses on “Hot Time in the Old Town” (1896), a popular US song that played an important role in turn-of-the-century imperial culture. Tracing the Black origins and reputation of this de facto anthem, Stecopoulos demonstrates that white Americans used “raced” domestic culture as a means of asserting a national identity even as they sought to extend the borders of the United States through Caribbean and Pacific conquest. By contrast, African American intellectuals of the era recognized that the popularity of “Hot Time” might offer them a cultural means of legitimating Black claims on national identity.

The introduction provides an overview of the volume, situating the chapters within some of the historical, social, and literary transformations of the past thirty years and providing an account of the different sections that organize the collection. Part I chronicles the new migrations, emerging literary institutions, conceptual shifts, and historical events that have transformed the field of Latinx literary studies since 1992. Part II focuses on genre, paying particular attention to how popular genres have fostered new racial imaginaries. Part III focuses on the different media that emerged as important vehicles for Latinx storytelling and literary expression, while the final part surveys important theoretical developments concerning race, sexuality, and literary form. The volume thus surveys a period that begins with historical recuperations of texts that were marginalized and ends with decolonial critiques that seek new ways of knowing.

This chapter “listens in detail” to hybrid Latinx literary forms, including drama and spoken word poetry, as they respond to neoliberal anti-immigrant policy, whiteness, and homophobia from 1992 to our current global pandemic moment. The chapter registers how Latinx literature turns to hybrid texts that perform sound (language, accents, music), utilizing the sonic an agentive site to respond to neoliberal constructions of citizenship and to articulate new forms of belonging. Josefina López’s play Detained in the Desert (2010) shows the affective experiences of a second-generation Chicana tuning into border language, Spanish-language radio, and musical soundscapes to resist the racist and sexist profiling of her body in the aftermath of Arizona’s SB 1070. Tanya Saracho’s El Nogalar (2013) demonstrates how Latinx border communities wield silence as a strategy to survive narcoviolence. Virginia Grise’s Your Healing Is Killing (2021) amplifies the intersectional and structural traumas that shape BIPOC communities’ access to health care. These inequities speak to the continued need for collective self-care.

This chapter highlights US Central American poetic responses to the increased social significance of legality, a ripple effect of the 1990s. The chapter expands Carolyn Forché’s concept of poetry of witness, testimonial verse foregrounding extremity, to include the nexus between constructions of illegality for many Central American refugees and legacies of US colonialism. The chapter considers what new insights might emerge from drawing on the conventions of witness poetries that incorporate both war trauma and Central American child migration. The chapter focuses on the Central American child and how it has been reconfigured in the poetic work of Afro-Panamanian Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Guatemalan American Maya Chinchilla, and Honduran American Roy G. Guzmán. Finally, it treats the poetry collection Unaccompanied (2017) by Salvadoran American Javier Zamora and shows that unaccompanied poetics can reimagine perspectives from (formerly) stateless children and confront the artificial stratifications of legal statuses.

Latinx comics articulate popular understandings of Latinidad. However, in recent years, Latinx comics, like comics broadly, have become closely aligned with the university. Although much has been written about comics as objects of study, less has been said about the university as a site of publication. The shift in publication sites from small publishers to university presses entwines the comic book with the university’s thought and material conditions. While acknowledging how this open spaces for Latinx creators, the chapter investigates how this shift impacts Latinx thought. Do Latinx comics conform to academic understandings of Latinidad when published by a university? Can comics still incite vernacular understandings of Latinidad? Focusing on Alberto Ledesma’s Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer, the anthology Tales from La Vida, and Leigh-Anna Hidalgo’s “augmented fotonovelas,” the chapter considers how artists negotiate the university’s influence. The chapter also shows how comic book aesthetics and the history of Latinx image-text cultural forms point us to forms of thought that resist, challenge, and supplement academic understandings.

In the US at the turn of the twentieth century, poor whites became objects of both fascination and empirical research by eugenicists and race scientists. Existing stigmas and stereotypes of poor whites were rarely challenged by these progressive reformers bent on improving American society though eugenic programs of human betterment. Researchers imagined and portrayed poor whites as a grave dysgenic threat to the racial purity of other whites. Their very existence was seen as inimical to the ideals of white supremacy that fueled the Social Darwinism of the era. As a result, poor whites were targeted for institutionalization and compulsory sterilization and durable stigmatypes of poor whites were formed.

Through analysis of the novels of racial passing by six early twentieth-century authors – William Faulkner, Nella Larsen, James Weldon Johnson, Walter Francis White, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Fannie Hurst – this essay explores how whiteness as unmarked norm at once facilitates passing in modern America and complicates narrative representation of it, and how literary modernism informs the authors’ negotiations with the complication. In doing so, the essay focuses on the paradoxical operation of the passer’s “Black-passing-for-white” identity. For, while enabling plot development and dramatization in accordance with passing fiction’s genre conventions, this identity framework inevitably suppresses passing’s unmarked working by making it narratively visible to the reader. The essay demonstrates that the modernist attentiveness to subjectivity – applied to varying degrees of experimentation, from fragmented interior monologue to third-person limited narration – helps the novels to reenact the invisible passing as well as resist essentializing the Black-passing-for-white identity around which their stories revolve.

This chapter traces and contingently periodizes the development of Latinx science fiction from the early 1990s to the present, and charts its historical, political, and cultural contexts. While noting the complex genealogies of the genre, the chapter begins with a survey of Latinx dystopian and post/apocalyptic works responding to the nightmarish aftermath of the passing of NAFTA. The chapter then shifts to examine how Latinx science fiction following 9/11 foregrounds how Latinxs have never been safe in our own ostensible homeland. The remainder of the chapter maps how the genre proliferates in an unprecedented manner following the turn of the millennium, diversifying in terms of ethno-racial identity, subgenres, tropes, and subject matter that demand hemispheric approaches. The diverse narratives comprising Latinx science fiction reengage the post/apocalyptic, cyberpunk, and dystopian/utopian to excavate and linger in the past so as to radically restructure both the present and future. This chapter explores how Latinx science fiction narratives – differential, dissensual, and generative – collectively envision brown temporalities and futures of being-in-common.

This chapter replays the origin story of whiteness to better recover how Toni Morrison, in her field-defining Playing in the Dark (1992), identified whiteness’s hauntings by the twinned shadow of Blackness and disability. By rereading Morrison’s interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1838 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, the chapter traces out how the critical study of whiteness needs to reevaluate and expand key ableist concepts and terms within the field lest it repeat and reinscribe disability oppression. Returning to Morrison’s foundational essay identifies interpretive strategies for a “crip abolitionist critique” that dismantles an entangled history of whiteness and disability. In its last section, the chapter then maps out this crip abolitionist methodology for whiteness studies through a reading of Victor LaValle’s 2012 novel The Devil in Silver, in which LaValle reimagines the white race traitor as an abolitionist caretaker.

This chapter posits that water’s repudiation of containment transforms this element into a space, place, and being that can usher in new directions for Latinx studies. Specifically, the chapter contends that when water overflows it “undoes” the work of borders, a move signaled by the Spanish word for this action, desbordar. Underscoring how water can generate theoretical frameworks that reach across geographic divides, the chapter provides a succinct analysis of this element in Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier, Myriam J. A. Chancy’s What Storm, What Thunder, and Daniel José Older’s Shadowshaper. The chapter also stresses the connections between environmentalism and spirituality by emphasizing readings of water informed by Afro-diasporic religions such as Haitian Vodou and Santería/Regla de Ocha. By highlighting water’s capacity to sustain conversations regarding such topics as violence, memory, and repair, the chapter offers water as an entryway into critical conversations in Latinx literature that do not disregard cultural and/or national specificity but remain provocatively untethered to these allegiances.

This chapter surveys recent interventions within queer studies on race in American literature to demonstrate how whiteness depends upon sexuality and gender. Queer studies scholarship on the linked history of whiteness and heterosexuality in turn-of-the-century racial science shows how whiteness draws strength through alliance with heterosexuality as normative, natural, and hegemonic. Meanwhile, the deep skepticism in queer and trans studies of heteronormativity and the biological bases of gender helps to excavate the constructedness of whiteness. Finally, recent scholarship on same-sex desire identifies how homoeroticism has affirmed whiteness across centuries of American literature. The essay further explores these approaches with three novels as case studies: Thomas Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots (1902), Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), and Casey McQuiston’s Red, White, and Royal Blue (2019). These novels demonstrate how gender and sexuality contribute to race-making and how whiteness can conscript heterosexual romance and homoerotic desire into the project of white supremacy.

This chapter proposes that the English-language Latinx melodrama of the twenty-first century owes much of its rise in visibility and market viability to the transnational success of the Latin American telenovela in the late twentieth century. The chapter traces the notable influence that the telenovela genre has had on Latinx melodrama and highlights the way telenovelas have mobilized and attracted Latinx audiences as well as registered the political intensities of Latinx life in the twenty-first century. The chapter includes a brief overview of how Latin American telenovelas first came to the attention of English-language television producers and a definition of the genre as a melodramatic vehicle informed by José Muñoz’s “brown feeling.” Ugly Betty and Jane the Virgin offer examples of how adaptations have recognized their telenovela origins and influences. East Los High (2013–2017) stands out as one of the few successful English-language telenovelas. Party of Five (2020) – a reboot of the 1994 dramedy – leans into a telenovela-style melodrama that emphasizes the stakes of the story. The chapter ends with a brief overview of several recent shows that are influenced by the telenovela genre.

This chapter analyzes how representations of Mexico and Mexican-descent people have been used as foils for rendering whiteness as Americanness. Exploring literary, musical, and cinematic representations of Latinx people, this chapter examines four critical US cultural tropes of Mexico, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans (and Latin America and Latinxs more broadly): the greaser, the sexy señorita, the Mexican Problem, and the infernal paradise. Together these tropes and others work to fashion white American masculinity as heroic and desirable; white American womanhood as pure, good, and in need of protection; the United States as a beacon of equality and justice; and its whiteness as under threat of invasion. Through these tropes and their racial logics, the chapter exposes how ideas about whiteness and Americanness are coterminous.