CLS Director Delgadillo Publishes “Geographies of Relation”

CLS Director Theresa Delgadillo has recently published Geographies of Relation: Diasporas and Borderlands in the Americas with the University of Michigan Press. The book crosses disciplinary and canonical borders to investigate the interrelationships of African-descended Latinx and mestizx peoples through an analysis of Latin American, Latinx, and African American literature, film, and performance. It offers a rare extended analysis of Black Latinidades in Chicanx literature and theory, but also considers over a century’s worth of literary, cinematic, and performative texts to support its argument about the significance of these cultural sites and overlaps. Chapters illuminate the significance of Toña La Negra in the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, reconsider feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa’s work in revising exclusionary Latin American ideologies of mestizaje, delve into the racial and gender frameworks Sandra Cisneros attempts to rewrite, unpack encounters between African Americans and Black Puerto Ricans in texts by James Baldwin and Marta Moreno Vega, explore the African diaspora in colonial and contemporary Peru through Daniel Alarcón’s literature and the documentary Soy Andina, and revisit the centrality of Black power in ending colonialism in Cuban narratives. Geographies of Relation demonstrates the long histories of networks and exchanges across the Americas as well as the interrelationships among Indigenous, Black, African American, mestizx, Chicanx, and Latinx peoples. It argues that geographies of relation are as significant as national frameworks in structuring cultural formation and change in this hemisphere. Prof. Delgadillo will discuss the book at an upcoming LACIS lunchtime lecture on Tuesday, October 22 by Zoom videoconference and in Ingraham Hall 206.  Those interested in the Zoom lecture should register in advance.