A review of whiteness through a feminist lens could not begin anywhere but with Black feminists’ critiques of white feminism. This chapter then moves on to use white celebrity feminist mogul Reese Witherspoon’s media production empire Hello Sunshine as a case study to argue that both enacting and studying white feminism or whiteness through a feminist lens, when authored by white people, cannot help but perpetuate some status quo structures of domination. But there is hope it might also serve to render those structures cogent and visible with an eye toward disrupting and dismantling them. The chapter argues that the invisibility of Witherspoon’s whiteness and the inequitable power dynamics of contemporary mainstream feminist media production cultures that she represents continue to be celebrated in the twenty-first century, just as popular feminist practices often fail to critique the complex interchanges of power between whiteness and feminism.

Novels by AfroDominican writers like Loida Maritza Pérez and Nelly Rosario center the embodied archive as an epistemological site. As Afro-Caribbean feminist philosopher Jacqui Alexander reminds us, “So much of how we remember is embodied: the scent of home: of fresh-baked bread; of newly grated coconut stewed with spice (we never called it cinnamon), nutmeg, and bay leaf from the tree.... Violence can also become embodied, that violation of sex and spirit.” To echo Alexander, we can understand our bodies as archives where the records of multiple translocations, transformations, and the violence done to us are kept. The chapter proposes that in this same way, we can understand an AfroLatina embodied archive at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, and transnational migration as a site of knowledge production. The chapter argues that bodies and archival memory are linked to form an embodied archive where memories are kept. The body becomes the place in which experiences are recorded and engrained. This knowledge is often passed on to future generations and creates new AfroLatina feminist knowledges of being, belonging, and self-knowing.

The introduction sets the stage for the chapters to come by offering a brief historical overview of writers’ and scholars’ engagements with whiteness. Starting with Toni Morrison’s insights into the whiteness of the whale in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), this chapter traces an intellectual genealogy that proceeds from what Morrison saw in Melville’s work to what Melville learned from reading Frederick Douglass’s 1845 autobiography. It surveys different kinds of literary treatments of whiteness, more than two centuries of which are treated in this volume, and offers a quick history of the development of whiteness studies before looking ahead to each chapter’s main arguments.

This essay examines how television/streaming producer Misha Green and her white collaborators Joe Pokaski, H. P. Lovecraft, and Matt Ruff participate in a centuries-old tradition of “whiting up.” Over two short-lived but impactful scripted drama series, Underground (2016–2017) and Lovecraft Country (2020), Green and her partners crafted compelling twenty-first-century whiteface minstrels and stage Europeans. Their work represented all four modes or functions of “whiting up” – satire/parody, imitation/emulation, exposing white terror, and dissidentification/transference – while also exploring the themes of white privilege and Black agency. However, Green and company not only inhabit this African American performance tradition but push the boundaries of performed whiteness, ultimately questioning its efficacy. In the process, Green and her partners reimagine how Black televisual figures are represented in thriller, superhero, and sci-fi horror genres.

Chinelo Okparanta’s Harry Sylvester Bird (2022) is unique in focusing deeply on its white narrator, Harry Bird, a boy from rural Pennsylvania who longs to be Black. As a twenty-first-century white life novel, Okparanta’s book shares with its postwar predecessors a profound engagement with the meanings of whiteness. Harry Sylvester Bird offers a relentless critique of the willed blindness and hypocrisies endemic to whiteness. However, while earlier white life novels largely presented characters who are at ease with their racialized privileges as well as the violence that make such privileges possible, Harry Sylvester Bird tells the story of a young man who becomes disgusted by his race and especially by his bigoted parents. Okparanta’s novel is a powerful exploration of contemporary whiteness that demonstrates how the desire for Blackness is yet another iteration of the privilege and willed delusion endemic to whiteness.

This chapter surveys attitudes to and depictions of whiteness in nineteenth-century speculative writing. These genres (the gothic, science fiction, utopia, and dystopia) were in conversation with and shaped by cultural and scientific discussions throughout the century that treated whiteness as both a biological and social concept that could shift, expand, and potentially degrade. Speculative texts articulated and often exorcised fears that whiteness could be lost and white Americans could experience the dispossession associated with the non-white Other due to failures to embody white civic values and shifting demographics. Across three categories (gothic whiteness, fantasies of white transformation, future whiteness) this chapter demonstrates that whiteness itself became speculative and open to change beyond the physically possible. As part of each category, this chapter also draws attention to how African American writers used speculative genres to return the othering gaze to whiteness and briefly imagine worlds without white supremacy.

Attending to Latinx South American writing generates a more expansive understanding of how violence and migration shape Latinx literary history and narrative forms. This chapter elucidates the theoretical salience of el Hueco through its multiple significations as gap, hole, hollow, space of detention, liminal status, and form of undocumented migration. Likewise, the chapter demonstrates how the term desaparecido illuminates the emotional holes and the gaps in kinship structures left by those who are disappeared by state terror practices and immigration policies. Using texts by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Romina Garber, Juan Martinez, Carolina de Robertis, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Daniel Alarcón, and Cristina Henríquez, the chapter demonstrates how prose narrative draws linkages between various kinds of state-perpetrated violence in the Américas. The chapter analyzes genres – from creative nonfiction to speculative fiction – and narrative strategies – from temporality and spectrality to focalization and characterization – to illuminate how Latinx South American fiction activates narrative as a form of reappearance and as a means of imagining different Latinx futurities.

This chapter explores Latinx speculative fiction – the capacious term for genres that include anything from science fiction, fantasy, and apocalyptic fiction to horror, alternative histories, and supernatural fiction and their vast array of subgenres – and asks why Latinx writers turn to speculative tropes to tell their stories, and what unique narrative possibilities genre fiction offers. The chapter argues that Latinx speculative fiction offers a powerful tool for examining race, ethnicity, national belonging, and diaspora, revealing how Latinx identities and Latinidad have been shaped by violent historical forces that veer on the otherworldly, and how reading through this lens uncovers tropes and narratives that might otherwise remain hidden. The chapter illustrates the importance of Latinx speculative fiction as a paradigm for reading, one that exceeds national boundaries, establishes thematic networks across time and space, offers new avenues for discussing identity formations, and, moreover, requires a redefinition of Latinidad as a speculative endeavor.

In the United States, white nationalism forms one part of an originary contradiction, dialectically entwined with an aspiration toward egalitarian openness that can, but often doesn’t, include people considered to be outside the boundaries of Americanness. The resulting tension animates struggles to define national identity in the past and present and both the contradiction and struggles loom over its future. Drawing on work in multiple disciplines, the chapter traces the persistence of this structuring antinomy by highlighting instructive literary examples at particular historical moments. What is now called “white nationalism” has long been part of mainstream – not just marginal or extremist – literary and intellectual discourse; thus, consideration of white nationalism takes precedence. However, the discussion also notes the equally tenacious hopes for a society open to those who are excluded based on conceptions of race. Lastly, the chapter identifies the utopian genre as an especially useful arena showcasing the contradiction.

This chapter focuses on “Hot Time in the Old Town” (1896), a popular US song that played an important role in turn-of-the-century imperial culture. Tracing the Black origins and reputation of this de facto anthem, Stecopoulos demonstrates that white Americans used “raced” domestic culture as a means of asserting a national identity even as they sought to extend the borders of the United States through Caribbean and Pacific conquest. By contrast, African American intellectuals of the era recognized that the popularity of “Hot Time” might offer them a cultural means of legitimating Black claims on national identity.

The introduction provides an overview of the volume, situating the chapters within some of the historical, social, and literary transformations of the past thirty years and providing an account of the different sections that organize the collection. Part I chronicles the new migrations, emerging literary institutions, conceptual shifts, and historical events that have transformed the field of Latinx literary studies since 1992. Part II focuses on genre, paying particular attention to how popular genres have fostered new racial imaginaries. Part III focuses on the different media that emerged as important vehicles for Latinx storytelling and literary expression, while the final part surveys important theoretical developments concerning race, sexuality, and literary form. The volume thus surveys a period that begins with historical recuperations of texts that were marginalized and ends with decolonial critiques that seek new ways of knowing.

This chapter “listens in detail” to hybrid Latinx literary forms, including drama and spoken word poetry, as they respond to neoliberal anti-immigrant policy, whiteness, and homophobia from 1992 to our current global pandemic moment. The chapter registers how Latinx literature turns to hybrid texts that perform sound (language, accents, music), utilizing the sonic an agentive site to respond to neoliberal constructions of citizenship and to articulate new forms of belonging. Josefina López’s play Detained in the Desert (2010) shows the affective experiences of a second-generation Chicana tuning into border language, Spanish-language radio, and musical soundscapes to resist the racist and sexist profiling of her body in the aftermath of Arizona’s SB 1070. Tanya Saracho’s El Nogalar (2013) demonstrates how Latinx border communities wield silence as a strategy to survive narcoviolence. Virginia Grise’s Your Healing Is Killing (2021) amplifies the intersectional and structural traumas that shape BIPOC communities’ access to health care. These inequities speak to the continued need for collective self-care.

This chapter highlights US Central American poetic responses to the increased social significance of legality, a ripple effect of the 1990s. The chapter expands Carolyn Forché’s concept of poetry of witness, testimonial verse foregrounding extremity, to include the nexus between constructions of illegality for many Central American refugees and legacies of US colonialism. The chapter considers what new insights might emerge from drawing on the conventions of witness poetries that incorporate both war trauma and Central American child migration. The chapter focuses on the Central American child and how it has been reconfigured in the poetic work of Afro-Panamanian Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Guatemalan American Maya Chinchilla, and Honduran American Roy G. Guzmán. Finally, it treats the poetry collection Unaccompanied (2017) by Salvadoran American Javier Zamora and shows that unaccompanied poetics can reimagine perspectives from (formerly) stateless children and confront the artificial stratifications of legal statuses.