Latinx comics articulate popular understandings of Latinidad. However, in recent years, Latinx comics, like comics broadly, have become closely aligned with the university. Although much has been written about comics as objects of study, less has been said about the university as a site of publication. The shift in publication sites from small publishers to university presses entwines the comic book with the university’s thought and material conditions. While acknowledging how this open spaces for Latinx creators, the chapter investigates how this shift impacts Latinx thought. Do Latinx comics conform to academic understandings of Latinidad when published by a university? Can comics still incite vernacular understandings of Latinidad? Focusing on Alberto Ledesma’s Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer, the anthology Tales from La Vida, and Leigh-Anna Hidalgo’s “augmented fotonovelas,” the chapter considers how artists negotiate the university’s influence. The chapter also shows how comic book aesthetics and the history of Latinx image-text cultural forms point us to forms of thought that resist, challenge, and supplement academic understandings.

In the US at the turn of the twentieth century, poor whites became objects of both fascination and empirical research by eugenicists and race scientists. Existing stigmas and stereotypes of poor whites were rarely challenged by these progressive reformers bent on improving American society though eugenic programs of human betterment. Researchers imagined and portrayed poor whites as a grave dysgenic threat to the racial purity of other whites. Their very existence was seen as inimical to the ideals of white supremacy that fueled the Social Darwinism of the era. As a result, poor whites were targeted for institutionalization and compulsory sterilization and durable stigmatypes of poor whites were formed.

Through analysis of the novels of racial passing by six early twentieth-century authors – William Faulkner, Nella Larsen, James Weldon Johnson, Walter Francis White, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Fannie Hurst – this essay explores how whiteness as unmarked norm at once facilitates passing in modern America and complicates narrative representation of it, and how literary modernism informs the authors’ negotiations with the complication. In doing so, the essay focuses on the paradoxical operation of the passer’s “Black-passing-for-white” identity. For, while enabling plot development and dramatization in accordance with passing fiction’s genre conventions, this identity framework inevitably suppresses passing’s unmarked working by making it narratively visible to the reader. The essay demonstrates that the modernist attentiveness to subjectivity – applied to varying degrees of experimentation, from fragmented interior monologue to third-person limited narration – helps the novels to reenact the invisible passing as well as resist essentializing the Black-passing-for-white identity around which their stories revolve.

This chapter traces and contingently periodizes the development of Latinx science fiction from the early 1990s to the present, and charts its historical, political, and cultural contexts. While noting the complex genealogies of the genre, the chapter begins with a survey of Latinx dystopian and post/apocalyptic works responding to the nightmarish aftermath of the passing of NAFTA. The chapter then shifts to examine how Latinx science fiction following 9/11 foregrounds how Latinxs have never been safe in our own ostensible homeland. The remainder of the chapter maps how the genre proliferates in an unprecedented manner following the turn of the millennium, diversifying in terms of ethno-racial identity, subgenres, tropes, and subject matter that demand hemispheric approaches. The diverse narratives comprising Latinx science fiction reengage the post/apocalyptic, cyberpunk, and dystopian/utopian to excavate and linger in the past so as to radically restructure both the present and future. This chapter explores how Latinx science fiction narratives – differential, dissensual, and generative – collectively envision brown temporalities and futures of being-in-common.

This chapter replays the origin story of whiteness to better recover how Toni Morrison, in her field-defining Playing in the Dark (1992), identified whiteness’s hauntings by the twinned shadow of Blackness and disability. By rereading Morrison’s interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1838 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, the chapter traces out how the critical study of whiteness needs to reevaluate and expand key ableist concepts and terms within the field lest it repeat and reinscribe disability oppression. Returning to Morrison’s foundational essay identifies interpretive strategies for a “crip abolitionist critique” that dismantles an entangled history of whiteness and disability. In its last section, the chapter then maps out this crip abolitionist methodology for whiteness studies through a reading of Victor LaValle’s 2012 novel The Devil in Silver, in which LaValle reimagines the white race traitor as an abolitionist caretaker.

This chapter posits that water’s repudiation of containment transforms this element into a space, place, and being that can usher in new directions for Latinx studies. Specifically, the chapter contends that when water overflows it “undoes” the work of borders, a move signaled by the Spanish word for this action, desbordar. Underscoring how water can generate theoretical frameworks that reach across geographic divides, the chapter provides a succinct analysis of this element in Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier, Myriam J. A. Chancy’s What Storm, What Thunder, and Daniel José Older’s Shadowshaper. The chapter also stresses the connections between environmentalism and spirituality by emphasizing readings of water informed by Afro-diasporic religions such as Haitian Vodou and Santería/Regla de Ocha. By highlighting water’s capacity to sustain conversations regarding such topics as violence, memory, and repair, the chapter offers water as an entryway into critical conversations in Latinx literature that do not disregard cultural and/or national specificity but remain provocatively untethered to these allegiances.

This chapter surveys recent interventions within queer studies on race in American literature to demonstrate how whiteness depends upon sexuality and gender. Queer studies scholarship on the linked history of whiteness and heterosexuality in turn-of-the-century racial science shows how whiteness draws strength through alliance with heterosexuality as normative, natural, and hegemonic. Meanwhile, the deep skepticism in queer and trans studies of heteronormativity and the biological bases of gender helps to excavate the constructedness of whiteness. Finally, recent scholarship on same-sex desire identifies how homoeroticism has affirmed whiteness across centuries of American literature. The essay further explores these approaches with three novels as case studies: Thomas Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots (1902), Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), and Casey McQuiston’s Red, White, and Royal Blue (2019). These novels demonstrate how gender and sexuality contribute to race-making and how whiteness can conscript heterosexual romance and homoerotic desire into the project of white supremacy.

This chapter proposes that the English-language Latinx melodrama of the twenty-first century owes much of its rise in visibility and market viability to the transnational success of the Latin American telenovela in the late twentieth century. The chapter traces the notable influence that the telenovela genre has had on Latinx melodrama and highlights the way telenovelas have mobilized and attracted Latinx audiences as well as registered the political intensities of Latinx life in the twenty-first century. The chapter includes a brief overview of how Latin American telenovelas first came to the attention of English-language television producers and a definition of the genre as a melodramatic vehicle informed by José Muñoz’s “brown feeling.” Ugly Betty and Jane the Virgin offer examples of how adaptations have recognized their telenovela origins and influences. East Los High (2013–2017) stands out as one of the few successful English-language telenovelas. Party of Five (2020) – a reboot of the 1994 dramedy – leans into a telenovela-style melodrama that emphasizes the stakes of the story. The chapter ends with a brief overview of several recent shows that are influenced by the telenovela genre.

This chapter analyzes how representations of Mexico and Mexican-descent people have been used as foils for rendering whiteness as Americanness. Exploring literary, musical, and cinematic representations of Latinx people, this chapter examines four critical US cultural tropes of Mexico, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans (and Latin America and Latinxs more broadly): the greaser, the sexy señorita, the Mexican Problem, and the infernal paradise. Together these tropes and others work to fashion white American masculinity as heroic and desirable; white American womanhood as pure, good, and in need of protection; the United States as a beacon of equality and justice; and its whiteness as under threat of invasion. Through these tropes and their racial logics, the chapter exposes how ideas about whiteness and Americanness are coterminous.

This chapter considers the promises and potential pitfalls of the digital era for Latino/a/@/x/e literature. It begins with an exploration of the multiple iterations of the virtual project/website El Puerto Rican Embassy over the last twenty-nine years as a way to think with evolving attitudes about Puerto Rican nationalism and its relationship to Nuyorican identity. The conversation then shifts to think about the potential dangers of relying on digital archives as safe repositories for Latino/a/@/x/e history. After all, with these new forms of digital power, come new responsibilities, including the need for a steady stream of resources. As exciting as the possibilities for redefining Latin@s online may be, the precarity that Adela Vázquez, Jaime Cortez, and Pato Hebert’s queer, Cuban comic Sexile (2004) currently faces makes clear that the expectation that cyberspace serve as a catchall for the margins may foster a false sense of security that risks reproducing new forms of digital exile.

This chapter links Haiti’s ambivalent place in the Latinx literary imaginary to deep-seated anxieties about race, nation, and belonging entangled in representations of Haiti since the Haitian Revolution and the formation of the Latinx literary canon. It argues that in last thirty years the historical exclusion of Haitian American literature from the Latinx literary canon has come increasingly under pressure due to shifting terminology, the broad turn toward recuperating legacies of the Haitian revolution across academic disciplines, and the institutionalization of Dominican American Studies in the United States. The chapter concludes with close readings of Julia Alvarez’s memoir A Wedding in Haiti (2012), Félix Morisseau-Leroy’s poem “Tourist,” and Loida Maritza Pérez’s novel Geographies of Home (2000) to illustrate both the possible pitfalls and promising potential of transnational approaches linking the literatures of the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and their diasporas.

A strategic, organized, and coordinated attack on the basic tenets of higher education in the United States was launched in late 2020 when the Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping was issued by Donald Trump, prohibiting most diversity training in federal agencies. Republican-controlled states quickly enshrined laws to limit how public schools, colleges, universities, and even individual faculty members can discuss racism, sexism, and gender identity in educational institutions. Characterized as a “culture war,” this conservative backlash to antidiscrimination inroads actually constitutes a massive resistance movement, the likes of which perhaps has not been seen in the United States since the civil rights era. Black writers and intellectuals have a long history of confronting the massive resistance of whiteness. Black nonfiction writings, in particular, offer revealing critiques and warnings about the impacts of whiteness in the modern world.

This chapter provides a preliminary Latinx literary history of both the representation of Latinxs in video games and how games shape narratives of Latinidad in the twenty-first century. The chapter first examines how non-Latinxs have dominated Latinx narratives and representation, shaping a narrow concept of who is Latinx and what it means to live as a Latinx person. While AAA games continue to circulate stereotyped images of Latinxs, more recent game narratives authored by Latin American and Latinx creators and distributed through independent publishers challenge these representations. The chapter provides close readings of Guacamelee! and Guacamelee! 2 from Drinkbox Studies and Minority Media’s Papo & Yo, both created by Latin American immigrants to North America. These games subvert gaming tropes and use characterization and worldbuilding to showcase the diversity of Latinidades. Finally, the chapter assesses video games that expand representation (including AfroLatinidades and trans Latinidades) as well as narratives that use ludic structures, such as Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House: A Memoir and Nona Fernández’s Space Invaders.