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Chapter 7 - The Trouble with Solidarity

Fictions of Pan-Ethnicity

from Part II - Transforming Genres

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 June 2025

William Orchard
Affiliation:
Queens College, CUNY
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Summary

This chapter attends to Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019) as an exemplary text in the burgeoning corpus of Latinx solidarity narratives in the United States in the twenty-first century. The chapter focuses on the narrative innovations that Luiselli orients toward the task of envisioning new terms for pan-ethnic solidarity. The chapter shows how, at a time of renewed Latinx literary attention to the experiences of Central Americans fleeing violence in the isthmus, Lost Children Archive stylizes a narrative of pan-ethnic solidarity through strategies of scrupulous narratorial self-awareness and an ethical refusal to represent the experiences of ethnic others. In spite of these innovations, however, the chapter also demonstrates how the novel reiterates and amplifies certain essentializing expressions of unity that characterize Sanctuary Movement–era narratives from the 1980s and 1990s.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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References

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