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An exploration of magical realism’s contemporary resurgence, as writers attempt to capture the realities of climate change.

What literary mode could possibly convey the extent of today’s climate catastrophes? In The Surprising New Life of Magical Realism, Charlotte Rogers argues that the answer is magical realism, a genre whose defining characteristic is to make the unbelievable an unremarkable part of everyday life. She pairs classic works by Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, and Rosario Ferré with contemporary novels by Carlos Fonseca, Fernanda Melchor, and Rita Indiana to show how the techniques of magical realism enable new approaches to scenes of environmental collapse and social injustice. Challenging widespread accounts of the genre’s decline, Rogers shows that the signature aesthetics of magical realism—the marvelous, the amazing, the strange—are integral to twenty-first-century fiction.

In her work as poet, essayist, editor, dramatist, and public intellectual, Chicana lesbian writer Cherríe Moraga has been extremely influential in current debates on culture and identity as an ongoing, open-ended process. Analyzing the "in-between" spaces in Moraga's writing where race, gender, class, and sexuality intermingle, this first book-length study of Moraga's work focuses on her writing of the body and related material practices of sex, desire, and pleasure.

Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano divides the book into three sections, which analyze Moraga's writing of the body, her dramaturgy in the context of both dominant and alternative Western theatrical traditions, and her writing of identities and racialized desire. Through close textual readings of Loving in the War Years, Giving Up the Ghost, Shadow of a Man, Heroes and Saints, The Last Generation, and Waiting in the Wings, Yarbro-Bejarano contributes to the development of a language to talk about sexuality as potentially empowering, the place of desire within politics, and the intricate workings of racialized desire.

The capstone of a quarter-century career in poetry, To the Boy Who Was Night collects the poetry published by Rigoberto González since 1999, including selections from five previous books as well as new work. Mirroring González’s personal trajectory, the arc of this work articulates the course of a life: these poems recall leaving a beloved homeland, confront masculinity and sexuality in new adulthood, imagine the earth devoid of human inhabitants, descend into the realm of ghosts, and return to arrive at Dispatches from the Broken World. This latest section ventures into foreign terrain — an autobiographical confrontation with isolation and the aging body. His lyrical exploration, like the weather reports scrawled on ancient temple walls, will preserve this age-old message: “likely a poem, surely an epitaph.” To the Boy Who Was Night bears the fruit of 25 years of poetry, González’s boldest and most comprehensive volume yet.

Winner of the 2024 Roberto Reis Book Award
Winner of the LASA Environment Section Best Book of 2023
Winner of the LASA Amazonian Studies Section Best Book of 2024 
Co-Winner of the LASA Book Award for the Visual Culture Studies 2024

A richly illustrated examination of photography as a technology for documenting, creating, and understanding the processes of modernization in turn-of-the-century Brazil and the Amazon

Photography at the turn of the twentieth century was not only a product of modernity but also an increasingly available medium to chronicle the processes of modernization. Traces of the Unseen: Photography, Violence, and Modernization in Early Twentieth-Century Latin America situates photography’s role in documenting the destruction wrought by infrastructure development and extractive capitalist expansion in the Amazon and outside the Brazilian metropole. Combining formal analysis of individual photographs with their inclusion in larger multimedia assemblages, Carolina Sá Carvalho explores how this visual evidence of violence was framed, captioned, cropped, and circulated. As she explains, this photographic creation and circulation generated a pedagogy of the gaze with which increasingly connected urban audiences were taught what and how to see: viewers learned to interpret the traces of violence captured in these images within the larger context of modernization.

Traces of the Unseen draws on works by Flavio de Barros, Euclides da Cunha, Roger Casement, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Mario de Andrade to situate an unruly photographic body at the center of modernity, in all its disputed meanings. Moreover, Sá Carvalho locates historically specific practices of seeing within the geopolitical peripheries of capitalism. What emerges is a consideration of photography as a technology through which modern aspirations, moral inclinations, imagined futures, and lost pasts were represented, critiqued, and mourned.

A groundbreaking study of commerce, conflict, and survival in colonial Spanish Florida.

Trade and Privateering examines the illegal yet highly profitable and mutually beneficial trade between Spanish Florida and the English colonies on the eastern seaboard in the mid-18th century. In St. Augustine, the arrival of subsidies from Spain was erratic, causing shortages of food and supplies, so authorities ignored the restrictions on trade with foreign colonies and welcomed British goods. Likewise, the British colonists sought Spanish products from Florida, especially oranges.
But when England and Spain became declared enemies in the War of Jenkins’ Ear and the French and Indian Wars, this tacit trade arrangement was threatened, and the result was a rise of privateering in the region. Rather than do without Spanish goods, the English began to attack and capture Spanish vessels with their cargoes at sea. Likewise, the Spaniards resorted to privateering as a means of steadily supplying the Florida colony. Harman concludes that, both willingly and unwillingly, the English colonies helped their Spanish neighbor to sustain its position in the Southeast.
 

Twilight is the intermediary state of becoming, the suspension between, when one is no longer who one was and not yet who they will be. At the end of psychoanalysis, after one has worked through the symbolic investitures one has been relegated to, one is reduced to such a state. In this state of momentary suspension, one is, in a sense, nothing.

Twilight also names a historical moment, when one world is ending but the next has yet to appear. That we are existing in the suspension between the the end of the world as we have known it and the void of what has yet to come is a commonly repeated truth. Hegel describes twilight as “a flash” that in “a single stroke brings to view the structure of the new world,” suggesting that novelty arises out of darkness and obscurity. We are living, in other words, in a state of twilight.

Cruz’s tenth poetry collection takes the concept of twilight and presents, through a series of elliptical poems, a working through of the term. The speakers in these poems exist within this wavering. As she writes in one of several poems titled “Twilight,” “Twilight, its world between worlds / its miraculous suspension. / I belong to the school of Freud’s / hypothetical boarding school girls. / We wait and we wait / for the world to begin.”