This paper examines the appearance of Malintzín across various texts as an intersectional critical approach to teaching early Latinx studies. Malintzín is best known as the multilingual, enslaved Nahua woman who “assisted” the Spanish in conquering Mexico. In Hernán Cortés’s second letter and the 1826 Philadelphia-published novel Xicoténcal, she appears as an interlocuter who assists the Spanish. In Miguel León-Portilla’s influential The Broken Spears, she is named by the common Spanish-language and derogatory nickname “La Malinche.” Across these and other texts, the shifts in representations of Malintzín taught through juxtaposition offer what E. Mar García calls “productive untranslatability”—differences across context that, in their irreducibility, encourage reading characterization as contextual, showcase the multiplicity of Latinidad, and engage what Chela Sandoval calls “differential consciousness.”
This article draws from Latinx literary scholars’ approaches to archives as well as the author’s teaching experiences to show how confronting expectations for representation can function as a pedagogical framework. While the 1960s serves as a powerful origin story for ethnic studies in the United States, shifting the timeline further back can expand students’ understanding of ethnic identity. Building on Ralph E. Rodriguez’s concept of undoing ethnic expectation, this article argues for the inclusion of early Latinx texts in Latinx studies courses and in American literature courses more broadly. Before and after engaging with archival materials, students can benefit from discussing and reflecting on the various identities (including class, gender, religion, etc.) that shaped the lived experiences of early Latinx figures. These discussions can help students to push past any preconceptions that they may have about American and US Latinx identities and to revise their expectations about the kinds of stories they will find.
Southeast Asian American literature, once seen as emergent and marginal, has undergone a proliferation of creative and critical production over the last two decades. Nonetheless, the corpus remains undertheorized as a discrete field of study and is typically analyzed in terms of war and refugee narratives by Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, and Hmong writers. This article argues for an expanded definition that encompasses works by authors with heritage of a wider Southeast Asian region, including Filipino, Indonesian, Malaysian, Singaporean, Burmese, and Thai American writing. In reviewing English-language prose (mainly fiction) published to date, this article presents a brief overview of historical and ongoing trends in the developing canon. It finds abiding concerns with shared global histories of European colonialism and Cold War imperialism; a border-crossing approach to postcolonial nation-states; and variances in the phenomenon of racialization and Asian American panethnicity within a transnational frame. The study of Southeast Asian American literature, especially when it considers the experiences of different groups more comparatively, illuminates a subjecthood marked by multiplicity and points to a distinct cultural and political strain within Asian American and US literature.
Gloria Naylor composed a three-act teleplay in 1985 that remains unpublished. This teleplay, titled “M’Dear,” which is included in Naylor’s archive, provides critical insight into her political ideology regarding Black folk practices. The archive includes a treatment for the teleplay, several drafts of the work, notes and comments, as well as contracts written for a television performance. Her notes signal a political agenda to counter reductive interpretations of Black folk practitioners. In Mama Day, Naylor expands the world created in “M’Dear” through the character of Miranda Day. Mama Day is arguably Naylor’s most popular text and has spawned a dynamic critical discussion concerning Black folk practices and the conjure tradition. Missing from the critical discussion of conjure in Mama Day is the literary connection between “M’Dear” and Mama Day. This article argues that to fully understand the political implications of conjure within Mama Day, readers should read the character of M’Dear as an initial iteration of Mama Day.
Science fiction writer Joanna Russ, best known for her futuristic feminist novel The Female Man (1975), made one lone foray into the world of realistic fiction: On Strike Against God (1980). Reissued by the Feminist Press with superb supplementary materials, On Strike Against God is a fascinating novel that highlights both how the suppression of lesbian desire leads to the suppression of self and, conversely, how making visible lesbian desire is akin to making it real and possible, both for Russ herself and for her readers. The story is narrated by Esther, a lesbian college professor on a quest for freedom, for sexual satisfaction, and for love. At turns humorous, bewildering, and polemical, On Strike Against God is a revolt against all that historically has been deemed “natural” for women: femininity, passivity, heterosexuality. The supplemental materials—which include alternate endings of the novel, letters between her and fellow writer Marilyn Hacker, an interview with Russ’s friend, renowned science fiction writer Samuel Delany, and essays by contemporary literary critics—enhance and illuminate Russ’s novel. This edition of On Strike Against God provides longtime admirers of Russ and those just discovering her work with a thoughtful, admiring exploration of her unapologetic feminist vision.
The introduction to this forum provides an overview of pedagogical approaches and useful resources for teaching early Latinx literature, including a brief survey of anthologies and textbooks, research compilations, and teaching guides and practical methods for introducing students to key terms and issues. It highlights central concerns within the forum’s featured articles.
This article delves into Djuna Barnes’s early journalism and poetry, focusing on how her portrayals of New York City during the 1910s shaped her evolution from an emerging journalist to a prominent avant-garde writer. Focusing on her journalistic work before she moved to Paris in 1921, the study highlights texts that feature geographical references to neighborhoods in and around New York City, including Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s spatial theory—particularly his concepts of “strategies,” “tactics,” “maps,” “tours,” and “itineraries”—this analysis illustrates how Barnes’s work transforms the city into a dynamic space of lived experiences and resistance. By focusing on marginalized figures—immigrants, workers, and urban outcasts—Barnes constructs spatial stories that reframe New York as a network of lived trajectories. Her journalistic narratives create itineraries or counter-maps that reconfigure the city’s geography, thereby offering new ways of experiencing the city’s spaces through Barnes’s performative articles, elaborate illustrations, and avant-garde poetry. Ultimately, this study provides valuable insights for scholars interested in urban themes, spatial theory, and avant-garde literature of the 1910s, and it effectively reveals a social and geographical map of New York city through Barnes’s unique perspective.
Eternity Box Films’ 2024 adaptation of Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 gothic novel Wieland starring Christian Peterson, Mike Markoff, and Emily Lapisardi is the first cinematic treatment of this source text. In transforming Brown’s first-person epistolary narrative into a script following the established conventions of script structure, the screenwriters and production team strove to balance fidelity to the source text with changes and additions necessary for successful adaptation to the medium of film. The ambiguities and formal shortcomings of the novel offered both challenges and an increased scope for creativity to the filmmaker. Director Cody Knotts elected to focus on the themes of religious fanaticism and repressed sexuality in Brown’s work, offering a cinematic experience that invites viewers to question the veracity of their own sensory perceptions.
In the course of reviewing Joyce Carol Oates: Letters to a Biographer, edited by Greg Johnson, this article comments on Joyce Carol Oates’s reputation and achievements as an American writer, her treatment of gender norms over the course of her career, and the various topics covered in the Letters. The article discusses the short stories “At the Seminary” and “Faithless” and the novels What I Lived For and Blonde. It discusses the various personae of Joyce Carol Oates: daughter, wife, friend, genius, and woman.
Vado reviews Regina Marie Mills’s Invisibility and Influence: A Literary History of AfroLatinidades, published by the University of Texas Press. Mills’s Invisibility and Influence, part of broader Latinx studies critical engagements with the life writing genre, is not concerned with whether or not we should, as Latinx Studies scholars have debated and continue to debate, affirm or reject the project of Latinidad. Rather, Mills’s wide-ranging text attempts to map a literary history of AfroLatinidades that documents the richness and multiplicity of Black Latinx lives throughout and beyond the twentieth century. Writing over and against the myth of mestizaje that has long captivated the Latin/x American cultural, political, and social imagination, the writers Mills features in her study generatively turn to the life writing genre to resist and counter their invisibilization. Overall, Invisibility and Influence: A Literary History of AfroLatinidades is an intellectually vibrant monograph and a significant contribution to the fields of Black studies, Caribbean studies, Latinx studies, ethnic studies, and studies of life writing.
An important element of E. Thomson Shields, Jr.’s teaching from the late 1980s until his retirement in Spring 2022, especially in American literature survey courses, was including Hispanic American and Latinx texts throughout the semester alongside texts from Anglo-American and other cultural/linguistic traditions. A good example of this inclusion is the approach he used in his department’s undergraduate survey course on American literature from its beginnings to 1900, a class designed for English majors. These majors had a variety of focuses to their studies—creative writing, cultural studies, English education, folklore, linguistics, literature, rhetoric and composition, and technical and professional communications. Hispanic and Latinx writings served well as touchstones alongside more traditional Anglo-American writings, and they showed how a single text could be usefully examined from several different academic perspectives. Drawing from a wide range of historical sources, anthologies, and bibliographies, Shields ensured that students had free access to electronic texts.
