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Winner of the Brazilian Studies Association’s Roberto Reis Book Award for First Monograph • Honorable Mention for the Latin American Studies Association’s Antonio Candido Book Award • Shortlisted for the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment Book Award 

Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America investigates how fictional works have become sites for the production of knowledge, imagination, and intervention in Latin American environments. It investigates the dynamic relationship between fictional images and real places, as the lasting representations of forests, rural areas, and deserts in novels clash with collective perceptions of changes like deforestation and urbanization.

From the backlands of Brazil to a developing Rio de Janeiro, and from the rainforests of Venezuela and Peru to the Mexican countryside, rapid deforestation took place in Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century. How do fictional works and other cultural objects dramatize, resist, and intervene in these ecological transformations? Through analyses of work by João Guimarães Rosa, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Rulfo, Clarice Lispector, and Mario Vargas Llosa, Victoria Saramago shows how novels have inspired conservationist initiatives and offered counterpoints to developmentalist policies, and how environmental concerns have informed the agendas of novelists as essayists, politicians, and public intellectuals. This book seeks to understand the role of literary representation, or mimesis, in shaping, sustaining, and negotiating environmental imaginaries during the deep, ongoing transformations that have taken place from the 1950s to the present.

Winner, 2015 LAJSA Best Book in Latin American Jewish Studies

The practices of interrogation, torture, and confession have resurfaced in public debates since the early 2000s following human rights abuses around the globe. Yet discussion of torture has remained restricted to three principal fields: the legal, the pragmatic, and the moral, eclipsing the less immediate but vital question of what torture does.Figurative Inquisitions seeks to correct this lacuna by approaching the question of torture from a literary vantage point.

This book investigates the uncanny presence of the Inquisition and marranismo (crypto-Judaism) in modern literature, theater, and film from Mexico, Brazil, and Portugal. Through a critique of fictional scenes of interrogation, it underscores the vital role of the literary in deconstructing the relation between torture and truth. Figurative Inquisitions traces the contours of a relationship among aesthetics, ethics, and politics in an account of the "Inquisitional logic" that continues to haunt contemporary political forms. In so doing, the book offers a unique humanistic perspective on current torture debates.

From former U.S. poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera comes a searing bilingual collection that speaks directly to America and all its peoples. Flourishing Shadows / Sombras Florecientes is a lyrical journey through migration, memory, and resistance—an urgent address to a nation grappling with its identity. Blending autobiography and Indigenous, Chicanx, and Beat traditions, Herrera reclaims language as a tool of compassion and truth. With ink drawings and evocative verse, this book honors the migrants who traverse borders and histories, flourishing even in the shadows. A call to listen, to remember, and to act.

More than a poetic critique, this book initiates a conversation—a direct address to readers that invites reflection, solidarity, and action. Drawing on his anthropological training and lived experience, Herrera weaves together the cultural richness of Indigenous Mexico, the urban vibrancy of San Francisco’s literary scene, and the enduring legacy of migrant journeys. Flourishing Shadows / Sombras Florecientes is a vital addition to the Camino del Sol series and a powerful testament to the resilience and humanity of those too often relegated to the margins.

Winner, National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Book Award, 2019

The Royal Chicano Air Force produced major works of visual art, poetry, prose, music, and performance during the second half of the twentieth century and first decades of the twenty-first. Materializing in Sacramento, California, in 1969 and established between 1970 and 1972, the RCAF helped redefine the meaning of artistic production and artwork to include community engagement projects such as breakfast programs, community art classes, and political and labor activism. The collective’s work has contributed significantly both to Chicano/a civil rights activism and to Chicano/a art history, literature, and culture.

Blending RCAF members’ biographies and accounts of their artistic production with art historical, cultural, and literary scholarship, Flying under the Radar with the Royal Chicano Air Force is the first in-depth study of this vanguard Chicano/a arts collective and activist group. Ella Maria Diaz investigates how the RCAF questioned and countered conventions of Western art, from the canon taught in US institutions to Mexican national art history, while advancing a Chicano/a historical consciousness in the cultural borderlands. In particular, she demonstrates how women significantly contributed to the collective’s output, navigating and challenging the overarching patriarchal cultural norms of the Chicano Movement and their manifestations in the RCAF. Diaz also shows how the RCAF’s verbal and visual architecture—a literal and figurative construction of Chicano/a signs, symbols, and texts—established the groundwork for numerous theoretical interventions made by key scholars in the 1990s and the twenty-first century.

Examines the visual qualities of written words in works of art created from 1540 to 1700 across the transatlantic Spanish Empire.

Pieces of text are found across paintings produced in the early modern Spanish Empire, but their role as aesthetic elements has long been overlooked. With Formalities, Aaron M. Hyman argues that these words were important, not only because of their literal content but also because of their forms, which artists and their audiences across the Spanish world understood in terms of meanings beyond semantic content. 

The widespread phenomenon of writing in or on works of art is one of the most distinctive features of art in the early modern Spanish world, yet it has received little art historical attention. Hyman focuses on this feature, demonstrating how artists mobilized particular scripts and carefully integrated the pictorial qualities of the written word. He explores how letterforms of the era were strictly codified, with different forms being particular to different genres and contexts. Chapters look at painted, embroidered, and incised words alongside texts in archival documents, books, and prints, showing how the visual arts drew on sources including calligraphy manuals, notarial documents, merchant account books, liturgical texts, and pictograms. Artists relied on their audiences’ understanding of the contexts in which such objects were used and connotations that texts thus produced, using visual languages to make meaning in addition to—or in spite of—what the words themselves actually said. 

Fictionalized poems that embody the reality of life in twentieth-century China through the voice of Jiang Qing, the wife of Mao Zedong.

From the Diary of Madame Mao is a poetry collection of fictionalized diary entries in the voice of Jiang Qing, wife of Mao Zedong and a vilified leader of the “Gang of Four," a Maoist political faction which wielded unchecked and violent suppression of dissent during China’s Cultural Revolution (1966–76). The haunting voice in this collection recounts the events of twentieth-century China through the imagined inner thoughts of Jiang, a liberated woman in a male-dominated society who struggled to fend for herself but then, upon gaining totalitarian power, became “mentally ill.” Maria Teresa Ogliastri—who has lived under authoritarian regimes in Venezuela for more than two decades— “opts for compassion” in her portrayal of this infamous public figure, conveying the full complexity of human emotion and experience in her singular lyric voice.