The Afro-Latino Memoir

Race, Ethnicity, and Literary Interculturalism

Trent Masiki

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781469675275, 9781469675268
• eBook ISBN: 9781469675282
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Despite their literary and cultural significance, Afro-Latino memoirs have been marginalized in both Latino and African American studies. Trent Masiki remedies this problem by bringing critical attention to the understudied African American influences in Afro-Latino memoirs published after the advent of the Black Arts movement. Masiki argues that these memoirs expand on the meaning of racial identity for both Latinos and African Americans. Using interpretive strategies and historical methods from literary and cultural studies, Masiki shows how Afro-Latino memoir writers often turn to the African American experience as a model for articulating their Afro-Latinidad. African American literary production, expressive culture, political ideology, and religiosity shaped Afro-Latino subjectivity more profoundly than typically imagined between the post-war and post-soul eras. Masiki recovers this neglected history by exploring how and why Black nationalism shaped Afro-Latinidad in the United States.

This book opens the border between the canons of Latino and African American literature, encouraging greater intercultural solidarities between Latinos and African Americans in the era of Black Lives Matter.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Between Cultures and Canons
• Chapter One: Laughing the Demons Away. Piri Thomas and the Black Aesthetic
• Chapter Two: From Bohemian Piolo to Leftist Jorocón. The Pan-African Radicalization of Carlos Moore
• Chapter Three: Morenophilia/Morenophobia. Marta Moreno Vega, Afro-Caribbean Religion, and Ethnic Intermarriage
• Chapter Four: Post-Soul Latinidad. Black Nationalism in the Memoirs of Veronica Chambers and Raquel Cepeda
• Coda: Literary Nationalism, Postrace Aesthetics, and Comparative Latino Literary Studies
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index