This chapter explores a very early manifestation of Latinx people. Just as Goths, Celtics, and Andalusíes mixed to form something called “Spanish,” in the New World, pre-Latinx people formed when Indigenous, African, and European peoples encountered each other. A philological route to recover those realities is to read the archive, taking care to filter out colonial bias. Since chronicles about the New World were composed in Spanish or Portuguese, a neocolonial reworking of the archive occurs as it is translated into English. An early instance of what could be described as Latinx culture in a place called Cofachiqui in present-day South Carolina appears in Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s polished notes from his conversations with the conquistador Gonzalo Silvestre, La Florida by the Inca (1993). Other authorities add nuance and color to Garcilaso’s narrative, including The Account of the Gentleman of Elvas (1993), Luys Hernández de Biedma’s Relation of the Island of Florida (1993), and Rodrigo Rangel’s Account of the Northern Conquest and Discovery of Hernando de Soto (1993). When read together and reading between the lines, a fuller picture emerges of an early Latinx experience that happened in South Carolina at a place described in the chronicles as Cofachiqui.

This introductory chapter discusses the focus of this monograph, and places it in its theoretical, contextual and methodological context. Working from the premise that while gender shapes violence, violence also shapes gender, I introduce the central line of enquiry of this book: the gendered politics of settler colonialism, with a specific focus on masculinities across the sharply hierarchical divide of Israeli militarism and occupied Palestine.

The empirical research is placed within its historical context, serving to contextualise the settler colonial present – the application of which is explicated within this section. My own positionality, research methodology and the structure of the book is discussed after articulation of the conceptual framework of the book. The latter explores theory and literature surrounding gender, masculinities, violence, and their intersections – affirming Demetriou’s (2001, 342–48) argument that “when the conditions for the reproduction of patriarchy change”, “exemplary masculinities […] adapt accordingly.”

The concluding chapter highlights the fluidity and interconnected nature of masculinities within specific interactional settings across Israel and Palestine, indicating that what is hailed as ‘the ideal’ is ever subject to change amid complex webs of power, patriarchy, and militarised colonisation. Each telling components of much broader and complex stories, I summarise each chapter as indicative of the contingency and mutual adaptability of gendered dynamics across manufactured, militarised, and sharply hierarchical colonial divides. I argue that gendered identities in this context are connected by that which simultaneously separates them – the militarised violence of the colonial regime. In so doing, the intertwined nature of identities across and enmeshed within complex webs of power, violence and resistance are explored, revealing a plurality of scripts and codes that variously constitute the complex gendered politics of settler colonialism.

Chapters V explores the sexual politics of Israel’s colonial regime, serving to undo the all-too-common misconception that sexual violence is “extremely limited” in this context. Emphasising the obfuscation of dynamics of race and coloniality, I start with exploration of hegemonic analyses of conflict-related sexual violence, and the related depiction of Israeli militarism as devoid of sexual violence. I then analyse the eroticisation of the Israeli military and colonial ‘conquest’, and the fetishization of the bodies that undertake it – entangling colonial domination with notions and physiological sensations of erotic pleasure. Finally, I discuss the policing of militarised hierarchies through the logic of sexual violence, trickling from those ‘on top’ to inferior soldiers – by age, gender, and class – to the occupied Palestinian body. I thus argue that sexualised violence pervades the entire structure of Israeli settler colonialism, fusing military activity and colonisation with hetero-masculinised notions of domination, virility, pleasure, and control.

This volume approaches Latinx literatures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the prismatic lens of modernity. Foregrounding from the outset that there is no single Latinx experience, we understand Latinx modernities as multiple and multiplying. Latinx literary modernities constellate the coloniality of US domination, the rapid and often traumatic social changes wrought by new technologies, the displacements associated with domestic revolutions and international warfare, and the innovation of literary forms commensurate with the spiritual yearnings of people on the margins of society. Our volume assumes an organization based on conceptual categories of US and Latin American modernities with the intent of highlighting emergent approaches to Latinx literatures. These conceptual categories – space, being, time, form, and labor – allow scholars working on different national groups across different time periods to be in more direct conversation with one another without assuming that they are telling the same story. Our categories make visible surprising connections, illuminate new methods, and push back against the coloniality of aesthetic models that limit the conditions of possibility for Latinx literature.

Critical stances towards English Medium Instruction (EMI), and to a lesser extent the similar use of French, Portuguese and Spanish Medium Instruction in former colonies of European states, have been growing since ‘independence’ in the 1960s. This discussion contextualises ‘Southern’ critiques of EMI within early decolonial debates, ‘southern multilingualisms’ and ‘transknowledging’ (reciprocal translation and exchange of knowledge), which are often invisibilised in EMI. This is illustrated through critiques in two former British territories: the first, with critiques that circulated in Southern Africa from the 1960s; the second, with critiques that surfaced four decades later in Australia. Whereas EMI is readily recognised in South Africa (with 8 per cent L1 English speakers), Australia (with 250 Aboriginal linguistic communities at colonisation and 250 years of in-migration from all continents) is an EMI context for 23–30 per cent of citizens. Aggressive marketing of Australia as an educational destination for students from the Asia-Pacific amplifies its multilingual and EMI reality in higher education. The critique of EMI includes a history of cognitive capture, debt-trap diplomacy and educational failure. Included are key agents that advance EMI, invisibilise multilingualisms and perpetuate coloniality despite the claims of social justice and access that accompany EMI rationales.

In this chapter, I acknowledge the intertwined histories of Afro-Caribbean languaging, Englishes, and literacies across the Black diaspora. In doing so, I draw from the notion of ‘transcendent literacy’ to attend to the long legacy of languaging emerging out of the Black race and reaching across the Black diaspora while also lamenting the invented illiteracy often imposed in characterizations of Black peoples worldwide. Acknowledging the traditional lineage of ‘Diaspora Literacy’ in making visible interconnections across Black peoples within and beyond the US, I then present Caribbean Englishes across the Black diaspora, describing the languaging, Englishes, and literacies of English-speaking Afro-Caribbean students in the Caribbean and in the US. Based on this discussion, I call for a silencing of the historical tradition of invented illiteracy used to characterize Black peoples across the diaspora and invite a strengthening of accessible knowledges surrounding the rich literate and linguistic heritages they inherently possess. Through this discussion, it is possible to understand the broader transnational contexts influencing racialized translanguaging and transsemiotizing in Black immigrant literacies and thus, the inherently induced economic bases for racialization of language.

In this chapter, I begin by complicating how Black immigrants’ perception as a ‘model minority’ in the US creates a challenge for equitably engaging with their literacies and languaging as a function of schooling. Joining the conversation on immigrant and transnational literacies, I present foundational language and literacy research in the US that has functioned as a backdrop against which Black Caribbean immigrants’ literacies and languaging are considered. To situate Afro-Caribbean languaging, Englishes, and literacies within its broader contexts, I then discuss education, migration, and cultures across the Black diaspora addressing the historical and contemporary educational landscape of Black people in the Caribbean. I further accomplish this situational placement of Afro-Caribbean languaging, Englishes, and literacies through a discussion of the historical and contemporary socio-educational landscape of Black immigrants in the US. Through this broadly painted portrait operating at the interstices of the educational, racial, historical, social, linguistic, and religious domains in the lives of Black Caribbean peoples and specifically youth, this chapter serves as a nuanced and contextual backdrop against which to understand the analyses of Black Caribbean immigrant youth’s language and literacies presented in this book.

What makes a text generically trans? A central plank of the term ‘transgender’ and prefixial ‘trans’ was a genre shift. After the modernist and transsexual fixation on autobiography and medical case studies, trans writing was meant to play on a far more open semiotic field. Whether that transformation took place, however, is a matter of debate. If ‘trans’ as the denotive for a genre of writing remains vague and not very well distinguished from its cousin ‘queer,’ and so trans still generates few genres beyond the first person, perhaps the issue is not the narratological genealogy of trans, but an unspoken racial haunting of the very same, a presence that is unspoken even as it is explicitly conjured and exorcised. This chapter investigates three recent works of trans genre—Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby, Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox, and T. Fleischmann’s Time is the Thing A Body Moves Through—to propose an undisclosed inter-racial relation that trans conventionally serves to cover over. The foundational relation of trans genre may prove to be the white trans author to the trans woman of color, she who occupies the text through either absence or idealization.

Here, the book pauses for a brief interlude. Throughout the book I have made the case that ableist practice of reading bodies for meaning is a reflex of coloniality as well as of classicism. But the narrativizing of blindness as a kind of special knowledge and as a kind of ignorance (explored in the previous chapter) is so frequent in colonial writing as to have been adopted (and explicitly subverted) in anti-colonial and decolonial writing. And here we pause to examine some examples of this, including in the plays of Edgar Nkosi White, Ola Rotimi (and Otun Rasheed), Rita Dove, Danai Gurira and Katori Hall. This leads to a discussion of empire’s specific visuality, drawing on the human zoo and the colonial gaze it shared with the European imperialism and the imperial theatre. The chapter concludes with further investigation of the problem of time (which recurs throughout the book), drawing in more detail on some of Deleuze’s formulations of temporality.

Chapter One makes the case for a new way of seeing. Leaning on bell hooks and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s advocacy for an activist type of looking, it sets up some ways we might begin to read against – rather than with – the dominant narratives about disability. This chapter makes the first in a series of connections between classicism and coloniality that will recur in this book, and sees the process of reading bodies for meaning as rooted in colonial eugenics as well as classically-inspired physiognomy. Crucially for the argument of the book, the chapter concludes that reading bodies for meaning is neither a wholly classical nor a wholly colonial practice – and results instead from a particular way of looking back (or a linear inheritance model of classical reception). In closing, it introduces Michael Rothberg’s concept of the ‘implicated spectator’ as a way to return agency to the spectator in an assemblage-thinking model.

This chapter examines shifting understandings of the relationship between sexuality as a biopolitical phenomenon and literary practice by focusing on two uses of the concept “biocentrism.” By holding in tension Margot Norris’s use of “biocentric” to capture specifically modernist aesthetics, based on affirming rather than negating the animality of the human, and Sylvia Wynter’s argument that the post-Darwinian, globally colonialist conception of the human is “biocentric,” the chapter examines how the very concepts of “human,” “animal,” “sexuality,” and “literature” are all products of a colonialist episteme. The final section turns to Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s Becoming Human, which productively stages the confrontation between these two, pressuring literary studies to examine how its attachments to the very concepts of “sexuality” and “animality” reveal the coloniality of the field.