Édouard Glissant, long recognized in the French and francophone world as one of the greatest writers and thinkers of our times, is increasingly attracting attention from English-speaking readers. Born in Martinique in 1928, Glissant earned a doctorate from the Sorbonne. When he returned to his native land in the mid-sixties, his writing began to focus on the idea of a relational poetics, which laid the groundwork for the créolité movement, fueled by the understanding that Caribbean culture and identity are the positive products of a complex and multiple set of local historical circumstances. Some of the metaphors of local identity Glissant favored--the hinterland (or lack of it), the maroon (or runaway slave), the creole language--proved lasting and influential.
In Poetics of Relation, Glissant turns the concrete particulars of Caribbean reality into a complex, energetic vision of a world in transformation. He sees the Antilles as enduring suffering imposed by history, yet as a place whose unique interactions will one day produce an emerging global consensus. Arguing that the writer alone can tap the unconscious of a people and apprehend its multiform culture to provide forms of memory capable of transcending nonhistory, Glissant defines his poetics of relation--both aesthetic and political--as a transformative mode of history, capable of enunciating and making concrete a French-Caribbean reality with a self-defined past and future. Glissant's notions of identity as constructed in relation and not in isolation are germane not only to discussions of Caribbean creolization but also to our understanding of U.S. multiculturalism. In Glissant's view, we come to see that relation in all its senses--telling, listening, connecting, and the parallel consciousness of self and surroundings--is the key to transforming mentalities and reshaping societies.
This translation of Glissant's work preserves the resonating quality of his prose and makes the richness and ambiguities of his voice accessible to readers in English.
The most important theoretician from the Caribbean writing today. . . . He is central not only to the burgeoning field of Caribbean studies, but also to the newly flourishing literary scene in the French West Indies. --Judith Graves Miller, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Édouard Glissant is Distinguished Professor of French at City University of New York, Graduate Center. Betsy Wing's recent translations include Lucie Aubrac's Outwitting the Gestapo (with Konrad Bieber), Didier Eribon's Michel Foucault and Hélêne Cixous's The Book of Promethea.

Funeral for Flaca is an exploration of things lost and found-love, identity, family-and the traumas that transcend bodies, borders, cultures, and generations.

Emilly Prado retraces her experience coming of age as a prep-turned-chola-turned-punk in this collection that is one-part memoir-in-essays, and one-part playlist, zigzagging across genres and decades, much like the rapidly changing and varied tastes of her youth. Emilly spends the late 90's and early aughts looking for acceptance as a young Chicana growing up in the mostly-white suburbs of the San Francisco Bay Area before moving to Portland, Oregon in 2008. Ni de aquí, ni de allá, she tries to find her place in the in between.

Growing up, the boys reject her, her father cheats on her mother, then the boys cheat on her and she cheats on them. At 21-years-old, Emilly checks herself into a psychiatric ward after a mental breakdown. One year later, she becomes a survivor of sexual assault. A few years after that, she survives another attempted assault. She searches for the antidote that will cure her, cycling through love, heartbreak, sex, an eating disorder, alcohol, an ever-evolving style, and, of course, music.

She captures the painful reality of what it means to lose and find your identity, many times over again. For anyone who has ever lost their way as a child or as an adult, Funeral for Flaca unravels the complex layers of an unpredictable life, inviting us into an intimate and honest journey profoundly told with humor and heart by Emilly Prado.

I felt these essays deep in my heart. Funeral for Flaca is like a Chicana punk rock ballad in prose. Soulful and brave, these essays of Prado's life made me feel less lonely, less outcasted, and more seen-and isn't that why we come to books in the first place? -Kali Fajardo-Anstine, author of Sabrina & Corina

Once I started reading Funeral for Flaca, I could not stop. The series of essays traverses Prado's life and weaves a narrative that is gripping and beautifully told. Each essay is a finely crafted tribute to periods in Prado's labyrinthine path, intersecting trauma, pathology, loss and, ultimately, perseverance and healing. -Lisa Congdon, artist and author of Find Your Artistic Voice: The Essential Guide to Working Your Creative Magic

This book is brilliant. It tells the unique stories of what it means to grow up Latina in the U.S. and the universal experiences of love, coming of age and finding your own voice and self. Prado weaves personal stories that make you laugh, cry and give you hope for the future. -Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, author and co-editor of Presente!

Emilly Prado's Funeral For Flaca is fierce, funny, intelligent, and vulnerable. This memoir-in-essays speaks with ease and honesty about the ferociously hard, isolating moments of youth, and Prado's matter-of-fact tone reads like a friend's voice talking us through the worst of it. Funeral for Flaca is here to remind us: there is a woman lying dormant inside every girl. -Margaret Malone, author of People Like You

The Event of the anti-colonial struggle which began in the case of a then British Jamaica in the late 1930s, cut across the childhood and early adolescence of Sylvia Wynter, providing the raison d'être of the first phase of her important body of work seen in this collection. The imperative of decolonizing the order of discourse that had legitimated the then imperial order (that is, to the colonizer as well to the colonized), gave rise to a theoretically sustained argument manifest here in a set of seminal critical and historical essays. At the time of their writing, Wynter was a practicing novelist, an innovative playwright, a scholar of Spanish Caribbean history, and an incisive literary critic with a gift for the liveliest kind of polemics. This intellectual virtuosity is evident in these wide-ranging essays that include an exploration of C.L.R. James's writings on cricket, Bob Marley and the counter-cosmogony of the Rastafari, and the Spanish epoch of Jamaican history (including a pioneering examination of Bernado de Balbuena, epic poet and Abbot of Jamaica 1562-1627).

Across this varied range of topics, a coherent and consistent thread of argument emerges from Wynter's oeuvre. In the vein of C. L. R. James, she placed the history of Spanish Jamaica (and therefore the Caribbean) in the context of the founding of the post-1492 European settler colonies in the New World, which remained an indispensable element in the first stage of the institutionalization of the Western world system. Therefore, a central imperative of her initial work has always been to reconceptualize the history of the region, and therefore of the modern world, but doing so, from a world-systemic perspective; that is, no longer from the normative perspective of the settler archipelago, but rather more inclusively, from those of the neo-serf (i.e. Indian) and that of ex-slave (i.e. Negro) archipelagos; this latter, as what she defines, adapting Enrique Dussel's terms, as the gaze from below perspective of the ultimate underside of modernity.

Strongly influenced by Marx together with Black thinkers such as Aimé Césaire, Jean Price-Mars (seen in the Jonkunnu essay), W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, and with an appreciation of the insights brought by the New Studies of the Sixties (including that of Black redemptive co-humanist thought, feminism), Wynter's work has sought, from its origin, to find a comprehensive explanatory system able to integrate these knowledges, ones born of struggle.

This volume makes an important contribution to restoring to view an essential strand in the 500-year emergent thought generated from the slave/ex-slave archipelago of the Caribbean and the Americas--thought important to what our increasingly integrated world-system, the first such in human history.

Though the civil-rights abuses by the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile (1973-1990) were later recognized by reparations and truth commissions, the difficult emotions suffered by the victims and their families were often pushed into the background or out of the national conversation entirely. In response, novelists began writing memory of feelings experienced during the dictatorship into their books. In The Chilean Dictatorship Novel, Weldt-Basson examines fifteen novels and one testimony written on the topic of dictatorship to illustrate how these Chilean narratives center on affect and emotions. Each chapter focuses on a different emotion: feelings of loss because of father abandonment and spatial injustice caused by the neoliberal urbanization of Santiago; despair articulated through tragic romances and affective landscapes; left-wing nostalgia and melancholia communicated through allegory; feelings of abjection caused by torture and betrayal; and the creation of affect through violent events, aggressive child play, and sexual torture. Through a close look at the work of José Donoso, Ariel Dorfman, Diamela Eltit, Carlos Franz, and Nona Fernández, among others, Weldt-Basson effectively argues that by inspiring emotion and creating empathy within readers, the authors of these books instill a drive in the readers for ongoing social-justice advocacy, thereby transforming the process of reading into a platform for future action. Weldt-Basson's landmark study will serve as a basis for the future study of Latin American literature for decades to come.

Arguably, all of Guatemalan writer Eduardo Halfon's fictional works deal with quandaries of translation, even in their original versions. The award-winning author of fifteen books claims to have lost his mother tongue when his family fled to the United States after his tenth birthday. This displacement, echoing the displacement of his four grandparents from different corners of the Jewish diaspora to Guatemala, gives Halfon, like his ancestors before him, good reason to consider translation a natural environment for his creative work and for life itself. Indeed, Halfon's uncanny ability to translate his family's history into fictions that resonate across the globe with readers in Spanish, English, and several other languages helps explain why he has received numerous prizes in the United States, Spain, Guatemala, and even France, some as a Latin American author, others as a Latino or Jewish author.

Marilyn G. Miller has written the first study to focus exclusively on this important voice in Jewish-Latin American letters. Only after returning to Guatemala and regaining his command of Spanish through reading literature did Halfon begin to build his life as a writer and translator. Nonetheless, the author admits that one thing is stubbornly true, and it's this: every sentence that I write, every verb or adjective that I painstakingly insert or remove, every literary thought that I have while writing, always . . . begins and ends in English. Halfon's translated works are never parallel texts, however. Thus, translation and its side effects (foreign words, linguistic lacunae, multilingual modes of perception) offer us crucial keys to understanding the author's fictional world as a vehicle for retelling and surviving Jewish trauma and finding his own particular plurilingual voice.

Abiayalan Pluriverses: Bridging Indigenous Studies and Hispanic Studies looks for pathways that better connect two often siloed disciplines. This edited collection brings together different disciplinary experiences and perspectives to this objective, weaving together researchers, artists, instructors, and authors who have found ways of bridging Indigenous and Hispanic studies through trans-Indigenous reading methods, intercultural dialogues, and reflections on translation and epistemology. Each chapter brings rich context that bears on some aspect of the Indigenous Americas and its crossroads with Hispanic studies, from Canada to Chile. Such a hemispheric and interdisciplinary approach offers innovative and significant means of challenging the coloniality of Hispanic studies.

How the queer Chicano punks of post-1960s Los Angeles developed a unique politics of style

In this groundbreaking work, Joshua Javier Guzmán explores the queer punk and Chicano/Latino avant-garde art scenes in post-1968 Los Angeles from the rise of Ronald Reagan to the height of the AIDS epidemic. He demonstrates how style-as a cultural form and sensibility-becomes essential to Latino politics at the moment the utopian impulses of the 1960s begin to fade.

Guzmán uncovers how queer Latinos in Los Angeles used performance, underground media, experimental art, and literature to interrogate the limits of Chicano nationalism and the burgeoning politics of gay liberation. These subcultural forms give rise to a theory of what he calls stylized discontent, expressed as nausea, lo-fi, ambivalence, and malaise. Each chapter of the book is framed by a specific stylized discontent, demonstrating how they were repurposed by queer punk Latinos as responses to the AIDS crisis and the rise of neoliberalisms.

Dissatisfactions highlights the middle ranges of political agency strategically utilized by queer racialized historical actors to underscore how negative feelings become instrumental to social change. Revealing new forms of activism and art that continue to structure the way we understand systemic violence and survival, Dissatisfactions insists on the significance of both the politics of style and the different styles politics may take.

Examining the power of speculative fiction to reimagine historical accounts of the conquest of the Americas

The historical conquest of the Americas resides at the core of all first-contact narratives, which stage colonization and resistance in the generic guise of speculative fiction. Starting from this axiom, First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas moves through a corpus of Mexican novels, Andean visual arts practices, and other cultural artifacts that have dramatized counterfactual narratives. Reimagining the early colonial period's historiography from a south-to-north directionality while inventing parallel realities, these texts, which are concerned with limit cases, alterities, and alternative temporalities, refuse any reliance on the imperial ontologies of European expansion. Zac Zimmer examines these works to explore the slippage that exists between science fiction as the exemplary genre of the modern, colonial reality and literary speculation as an aesthetic tool that can be used to imagine other possible worlds. First Contact thus poses a foundational question: Can we understand the conquest as an originary world-historical event without eclipsing the other cosmologies that existed, and continue to exist, within the contact zone? Can we decolonize the speculative imagination itself?

On the Very Edge: Bidentities in Michelle Cliff's Fiction uses the life and work of bisexual, biracial, and bicultural author Michelle Cliff (1946-2016) to develop an entirely new approach to intersectional cultural, race, and gender/sexuality studies that prioritizes bi-ness as a methodological tool. The book focuses not simply on bisexuality, biracialism, or biculturalism as isolated identity concepts; rather, it explores the very nature of these intersectional identity categories as configured by Cliff. The text, therefore, represents a reclamation of bi identity in Cliff's work as a much broader cultural, and not just sexual or racial, category, arguing that Cliff's spaces and/or stages of bi-ness are in themselves significant in understanding contemporary global identity politics, as well as in navigating complex and often damaging identity constructs.

Michelle Cliff, partnered with poet Adrienne Rich and passing as white, had an often-invisible sexuality and cultural identity. Yet her acclaimed work--Abeng, No Telephone to Heaven, Bodies of Water, If I Could Write This in Fire, Free Enterprise, and others--demonstrates the intersections between bisexuality, biracialism, and biculturalism in often profound ways. Drawing on original research, interviews, diaries, editorials, and other correspondences, On the Very Edge will have far-reaching implications in the understanding of complex Caribbean identity politics and intersectional race, gender, and sexuality studies at large.

Exploring how Latin American print culture has informed global exchange



The first volume in English to focus on Latin American serialized print culture, Periodicals in Latin America
assembles research on a diverse range of publications, including
avant-garde reviews, comics, specialized journals, mass-market
magazines, and political periodicals, from the late nineteenth century
to the present day.



In this book, scholars from a variety
of disciplines examine both celebrated and little-known periodicals to
demonstrate how publications supported emerging movements such as
Indigenismo and feminism; undermined hegemonic conceptions of statehood
and national identity; and questioned ideas about the relationship
between the visual, literary, and political. Bringing Latin American
print culture together with research and theories from the largely
Anglophone field of periodical studies, this volume contests readings
that discount the region's periodicals, situating Latin America as a
contributor to--not just a recipient of--global exchanges. Contributors
also challenge the idea that periodicals are only useful for the
insights they can offer into history, championing close attention to
their material and materiality.



The writers in this book
reflect on the unique qualities and divergences of the region's
periodicals from those of other parts of the world and the need for
different approaches to studying them. The volume bridges and brings
into dialogue new research on print serials and their readers in the
Spanish-, Portuguese-, and English-speaking worlds.



Contributors: Joanna
Crow María del Pilar Blanco José
Chávarry Jorge Catalá Isabella Cosse M. Paula Bontempo Sandra
Szir Camilla Sutherland Luis Rebaza-Soraluz Claire Lindsay
Valentino Gianuzzi Sofía Mercader Rielle
Navitski Luz Ainaí Morales Pino Maria Chiara D'Argenio



A
volume in the series Reframing Media, Technology, and Culture in
Latin/o America, edited by Héctor Fernández L'Hoeste and Juan Carlos
Rodríguez

Las Raras proposes that the Modernistas' advocacy for a writing style they considered feminine helps us to understand why so few (and perhaps no) women were accepted as active participants in Modernismo. Author Sarah Moody studies how particular writers contributed to the idea of a feminine aesthetic and tracks the intellectual networks of Modernismo through periodicals and personal papers, such as albums and correspondence. Buenos Aires, Paris, and Montevideo figure prominently in this transatlantic study, which reexamines some of the most important period writers in Spanish, including Rubén Darío, Amado Nervo, and Enrique Gómez Carrillo.

This book also considers the critiques launched by women writers, such as Aurora Cáceres, Clorinda Matto de Turner, and María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira, who experienced Modernista exclusion firsthand, deconstructed the Modernista discourse of a modern, feminine style, and built literary success in alternative terms. These writers reoriented the discussion about women in modernity to address women's education, professionalization, and advocacy for social and civic improvements. In this study, Modernismo emerges as both a literary style and an intellectual network, in which style and sociability are mutually determining and combine to form a system of prestige and validation that excluded women writers.

In Absorption Narratives, Stephanie M. Pridgeon explores cultural depictions of Jewishness, Blackness, and Indigeneity within a comparative, inter-American framework. The dynamics of Jewishness interacting with other racial categories differ significantly in Latin America and the Caribbean compared with those in the United States and Canada, largely due to long-standing and often disputed concepts of mestizaje, broadly defined as racial mixture. As a result, a comprehensive understanding of Jewishness and the construction of racial identities requires an exploration of how Jewishness intersects with both Blackness and Indigeneity in the Americas.

Absorption Narratives charts the ways in which literary works capture differences and similarities among Black, Jewish, and Indigenous experiences. Through an extensive and diverse examination of fiction, Pridgeon navigates the complex connections of these identity categories, offering a comparative perspective on race and ethnicity across the Americas that destabilizes US-centric critical practices. Revealing the limitations of US-focused models in understanding racial alterity in relation to Jewishness, Absorption Narratives emphasizes the importance of viewing the narrative of race relations in the Americas from a hemispheric standpoint.

Este libro aborda la vida y obra de Sergio Pitol durante los anos de 1963 a 1988. La investigacion esta sustentada en el archivo personal del escritor -que se conserva en la Universidad de Princeton-, el archivo de Relaciones Exteriores, testimonios orales, referencias bibliograficas y hemerograficas. La metodologia que seguimos es resultado de una conjuncion entre sociologia literaria, historia y analisis literario. Los anos que aborda este volumen son los del viaje y las estancias en el extranjero; los del aprendizaje creativo, de la escritura de todos sus cuentos y gran parte de sus novelas, y de la traduccion de autores hasta entonces desconocidos para el publico de lengua espanola. Pitol se convirtio en uno de los autores mas originales e innovadores de la tradicion literaria mexicana y este libro explica su recorrido.

Canon, historia y archivo aborda los problemas del establecimiento de un canon nacional y regional de la diáspora africana en el Caribe. Contextualiza y define, a través de una panorámica de la lírica afrodescendiente en el siglo xix cubano, los rasgos de una segunda promoción de autores que comienza a publicar después de la Conspiración de la Escalera (1844). Los paralelismos y rupturas con respecto a la primera promoción, encabezada por Manzano y Plácido, se hacen visibles mediante el contraste con la Poesía completa de Ambrosio Echemendía y las Obras completas de Antonio Medina y Céspedes -uno esclavo, el otro un hombre libre-, a cuya edición crítica se dedican el segundo y tercer volumen de la trilogía.

Amauri Gutiérrez Coto (La Habana, 1974) se doctoró en University of Arizona y actualmente es profesor en Lafayette College, Pensilvania. Ha publicado las monografías Acerca de lo negro y la africanía en la lengua literaria de Motivos de Son (2002), Orígenes y el paraíso de la eticidad (2010) y El grupo Orígenes de Lezama Lima o el infierno de la trascendencia (2012), y los volúmenes de poesía Diario de un intruso (2002), Aprendiz de mudo (2013), A las puertas de Esmirna (2017) y Ágrafa pira (2023). Ha recibido el Premio Nacional de Ensayo José María Heredia de la UNEAC y en dos ocasiones (2010 y 2015) la subvención para el libro del Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte del Gobierno de España.

A long overdue examination of Rubén Darío's multilingual work and influences alongside the contexts and politics of canonization in world literature.

Rediscovering Rubén Darío through Translation addresses the peculiar obscurity of Darío by asking these questions: How can one of the most important writers of a major world language be almost entirely unknown in the English-speaking world? How is it that other writers of the same language (e.g., Lorca or García Márquez) achieve widespread recognition in the anglophone world, while he remains unnoticed? What role does translation play in this? What can it tell us about the way in which world literature is articulated?

Carlos F. Grigsby approaches Darío's oeuvre through translation. In doing so, he explores not only the place of Darío in the translation of Spanish American literature into English, but also the place of translation in Darío's own writing. The result is a double-sided painting, as it were: the recto is titled Translation in Darío and the verso Darío in Translation.

This book challenges the field of world literature by revealing some of the biases present in its representation of Spanish American literature. It adopts a multilingual framework - chiefly using English, Spanish, French, and to a lesser degree Latin and Catalan - in analyzing Darío's writing alongside that of his contemporaries. As a result, it reveals the multilingualism of Darío's own writing, opening new avenues for the study of his work and of Spanish American modernismo more generally.

The Caribbean has a global reputation for extending unparalleled hospitality to foreign guests. Yet local citizens express feeling alienated from the Caribbean nations they call home. Here, Natalie Lauren Belisle probes the relationship between these incompatible narratives of Caribbean life. Departing from tourist-centered critiques of the Caribbean's visitor economy, Belisle instead gives primacy to the political life of the Caribbean citizen-subject within a broader hospitality regime. Reading literary, cinematic, and digital texts that traverse the Spanish, Anglophone, and Francophone Caribbean, Belisle interprets citizens' estrangement through misdirected political deliberation and demonstrates that inhospitality is institutionalized through the aesthetic, reproducing itself in the laws that condition belonging and membership in the nation-state. Ultimately, Caribbean Inhospitality recasts the decay of nation/state sovereignty in the postcolonial Caribbean within the contours of neoliberalism, international relations, and cosmopolitanism.

Science Fusion draws on new materialist theory to analyze the relationship between science and literature in contemporary works of fiction, poetry, and theater from Mexico. In this deft new study, Brian Chandler examines how a range of contemporary Mexican writers fuse science and literature in their work to rethink what it means to be human in an age of climate change, mass extinctions, interpersonal violence, femicide, and social injustice. The authors under consideration here--including Alberto Blanco, Jorge Volpi, Ignacio Padilla, Sabina Berman, Maricela Guerrero, and Elisa Díaz Castelo--challenge traditional divisions that separate human from nonhuman, subject from object, culture from nature. Using science and literature to engage topics in biopolitics, historiography, metaphysics, ethics, and ecological crisis in the age of the Anthropocene, works of science fusion offer fresh perspectives to address present-day sociocultural and environmental issues.

During the twenty-first century, Mexico has escalated extractive concessions at the same time that it has positioned itself as an international leader in the fight against climate change. Cultural production emergent from this contradiction frames this impasse as a crisis of imagination. Subjunctive Aesthetics studies how contemporary writers, filmmakers, and visual artists grapple with the threat that climate change and extractivist policies pose to Mexico's present and future. It explores how artists rise to the challenge of envisioning alternative forms of territoriality (ways of being in relation to the environment) through strategies ranging from rewriting to counterfactual speculation.

Whereas ecocritical studies have often focused on art's evidentiary role--its ability to visualize and prove the urgency of environmental damage--author Carolyn Fornoff argues that what unites the artists under consideration is their use of more hypothetical, uncertain representational modes, or subjunctive aesthetics. In English, the subjunctive is a grammatical mode that articulates the imagined, desired, and possible. In the Spanish language, it is even more widely used to express doubts, denials, value judgments, and emotions. Each chapter of Subjunctive Aesthetics takes up one of these modalities to examine how Mexican artists, writers, and filmmakers activate approaches to the planet not just as it is, but as it could be or should be.

Inside Tenement Time is the first comprehensive treatment of literary and cultural texts on surveillance in the Caribbean. Covering the long historical arc of the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries, Inside Tenement Time uses Jamaica as a case study to examine moments of crisis and particular spaces, especially urban yard enclaves and their environs, in the Caribbean encounter with surveillance. Making the argument that the Caribbean situation reveals flexible hegemonies rather than provinces of exclusive control, the book demonstrates the countervailing force of sussveillance and spiritveillance, Afro-Indigenous variations on surveillance. Sussveillance and spiritveillance are exemplars of vernacular arts and sciences that operate at and within the frangible borders of state power, exposing the unique dynamics of surveillance in the region and marshalling the acts of imagination with which it contends. For example, the Smile Jamaica concert of 1976, headlined by reggae Superstar Bob Marley, and the reputedly US government-backed 2010 Tivoli Gardens incursion in West Kingston, both moments that have dramatic, even mythic residue in Caribbean and global memory, are among the real-life events brought into conversation with literary representations of this history.

Examines the reception of Brazil's most-canonized writer in the United States to shed light on questions of Blackness and hemispheric American experience.

Considered a genius in his own lifetime, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) is Brazil's most canonized writer. Yet, he remains a contested and even enigmatic figure to readers in Brazil and abroad, his relative silence on slavery leaving him vulnerable to charges of aspirations to whiteness. Machado de Assis, Blackness, and the Americas reconsiders this issue by exploring how his prose fiction has been received in the United States. In seven original essays, contributors re-examine his novels and short stories, as well as photographs of the writer, in order to better understand the strategies he employed to navigate Brazil's literary scene as a man of African descent. Framed by a contextualizing introduction and an afterword in the form of a conversation between the editors, the volume speaks to and with our own historical moment and the realities of Black lives in the Americas over the course of the last two centuries.