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Since the 1990s, there has been unparalleled growth in the literary output from an ever more diverse group of Latinx writers. Extant criticism, however, has yet to catch up with the diversity of writers we label Latinx and the range of themes about which they write. Little sustained scholarly attention has been paid, moreover, to the very category under which we group this literature. Latinx Literature Unbound, thus, begins with a fundamental question “What does it mean to label a work of literature or an entire corpus of literature Latinx?” From this question others emerge: What does Latinx allow or predispose us to see, and what does it preclude us from seeing? If the grouping—which brings together a heterogeneous collection of people under a seemingly homogeneous label—tells us something meaningful, is there a poetics we can develop that would facilitate our analysis of this literature?
In answering these questions, Latinx Literature Unbound frees Latinx literature from taken-for-granted critical assumptions about identity and theme. It argues that there may be more salubrious taxonomies than Latinx for organizing and analyzing this literature. Privileging the act of reading as a temporal, meaning-making event, Ralph E. Rodriguez argues that genre may be a more durable category for analyzing this literature and suggests new ways we might proceed with future studies of the writing we have come to identify as Latinx.
As Ralph Rodriguez acutely and brilliantly demonstrates, the ‘troublingly unstable signifier’ has always provoked artistic risk from our writers. In disentangling—but not disengaging—the word from the art itself, he provides a widening spotlight to the fascinating range of aesthetic practices and narrative approaches at the root of so many of our complex representations of race, class, gender, and desire.---Manuel Muñoz, author of What You See in the Dark and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue
Rodriguez examines the narrative voice, and in focusing on characterization, he delves into the affective, challenging authors to become more involved in evoking mood through complex sensitivities outside of intimacies and traumatic life experiences that are prominent themes in Latinx writings.
Introduction: What We Talk about When We Talk about Latinx Literature 1
1. Brown Like Me? The Author-Function, Proper Names, and the Rise of Fictional Nobodies 21
2. Confounding the Mimetic: The Metafictional Challenge to Representation 54
3. From Where I Stand: The Intimacy and Distance of We and You in the Short Story 76
4. The Lyric, or, a Radical Singularity in Latinx Verse 98
Conclusion: Thinking beyond Limits 127
Acknowledgments 135
Notes 139
Works Cited 161
Index 175