The term Afro Latina/os references people in Latin America and in the Latino United States who claim African ancestry. Although the use of the prefix Afrocan be traced back to the work of intellectuals in Cuba, Mexico, and Brazil at the beginning of the 20th century, usages were connected with anti-racist and African Diaspora struggles, organizing, and advocacy in the second half of the 20th century. More recently, the appellation Afro Latina/o has become mobilized in US Latina/o communities as a critique of the processes through which racial diversity and black populations in these communities have been rendered invisible. Because it conjures various meanings and foci, several authors engaged in the study of afrolatinidades suggest that hemispheric, transnational, and comparative approaches are necessary to appreciate the nuances of use, categorization, and experience as Afro Latina/os navigate complex histories and politics of race, ethnicity, and belonging in the United States and the Americas. The author argues that the term appellation does not resolve the complexities of racial subordination, racism, and self-making among Latin Americans and US Latina/os. He further suggests that sites of unintelligibility, confusion, and perplexity are valuable in thinking of “Afro-Latina/o” as a term that points to a cluster of urgent intellectual and political problems stemming from the irreducibility of individual experience to any term or concept. The increase in claims of Afro-Latina/o as a marker of identity must be calibrated by a consideration of how institutional sites and think tanks collaborate in the making and sedimentation of existing and emerging grids of legibility. At the same time, claiming Afro-Latina/o needs to be understood as a project related to yet distinct from one’s racial identification and relationship with blackness, and the experience of US Latina/os and other ethnic/racial minorities suggests that the work continues to be not only to understand how individuals and groups categorize themselves and others, but also to better grasp what it is that terms such as Afro-Latino/a do.
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Afro-Latina/os
Carlos Ulises Decena
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Arab Wests: Maghrib, Europe and the Americas in the Modern Literary Imagination
Ahmed Idrissi Alami
“Arab Wests” is defined by long and complex processes of mobility, cultural exchanges, and imperial encounters in the Western Mediterranean and across the Atlantic in the early modern period. Two novels, Granada: A Trilogy (1994) by Radwa Ashour and The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami (2014), reimagine Arab culture in early modern literary imagination across multiple geographies in the Western Mediterranean and the New World. The two narratives reflect significant aspects of the importance of the late 15th to early 16th centuries to the development of Arab culture in the early modern world—a historically unique time that coincides with advancing global capitalism and its constitutive relations and derivative effects such as slavery, dispossession, conquest, and territorial expansion in North Africa and the Spanish conquest of the New World. This period saw major transformations in trade routes, shifting the center of exchange to the transatlantic sphere and making Iberia an important hub for launching early modern global capitalism. All these new shifts in politics and material economies indicate that the center of action, previously located farther east, would soon be displaced to the Ibero-Maghreb and the Atlantic. Within this purview, the analytical trope of “Arab Wests” offers a site to reimagine the Western Mediterranean cultures and polities as interactive gravitational coordinates in the rapidly changing power balance in the early modern age.
The Arab communities and cultures of the regions of al-Maghrib and al-Andalus have been configured and represented in these two novels in relation to each other as well as through their connections to the New World in the early modern period. Given that the history of Spain is intricately connected to and dependent on that of the Arab Muslims in Iberia, the so-called Moors, these narratives highlight the continuities and iterations of the colonial politics of conquest, exile, and dispossession between the three geographical locations of al-Maghrib, al-Andalus, and the New World. They also challenge the narrow view and understanding of early modern Atlantic world history and its Eurocentric models of analysis and interpretation. The interconnected model of early modern history demonstrates how Arab Muslim cultural history in the Western Mediterranean is not only relevant to understanding the major socio-cultural and political transformations in North Africa and Iberia at that time but is also an integral and significant player in imagining and rewriting the “frontier” and the account of the emerging global Atlantic history in which Africa, Europe, and the Americas are linked through diverse forms of exchanges as well as conflicts. Ashour’s and Lalami’s texts, which draw on a rich and diverse repertoire of Arabic conventions of writing and storytelling, put “Arab West” historical fiction within a transatlantic network of narratives through their rhetorical content and textual dynamics, which also resonate with 21st-century issues such as racial identity politics, global Arab diasporic identity, and transnational forms of belonging. Despite the historical remoteness of the context of these fictions, the narratives are animated by an immediacy that corresponds and speaks to our modern sensibilities, especially the global realities that emerged post-9/11, the increasing awareness of systemic racism, and the call for more engaging and rigorous revisionist readings of imperial histories as well as more ethical representations of our interconnected past legacies.
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History, Memory, and Affect in Postcolonial Arabic Literature and Film
Nouri Gana
While modern Arab history has been marked largely by the experience of colonialism, postcolonial Arab history has been marked particularly by the Palestinian experience of settler colonialism. From the occupation of Palestine in 1948 to the occupation of Iraq in 2003, colonial entrenchments and encroachments have cast a long shadow on the decolonial achievements of several Arab countries, especially during the successful Egyptian and Algerian revolutions in the 1950s. Arabs have come to realize that Arab culture, literature, and film constitute a repository for these experiences, especially in the wake of the 1967 Naksa, the cataclysmic defeat of three Arab armies by Israel. Despite the turn to affect in early 21st-century scholarship, and a much earlier explosion of works on mourning and melancholia in post-World War II modernist and postcolonial studies, there is little theoretical and critical work done at the intersection between Arabic literature and affect theory—a puzzling lacuna, given the centrality of affect in everyday Arab culture and the aforementioned historical convulsions experienced by Arab countries in colonial and postcolonial times. Nothing can be gained by giving short shrift to the affective toll of the serial colonial and postcolonial defeats suffered by Arab regimes.
Affect is inextricably related to subjective experience and individual agency but it is increasingly enmeshed in politics and political mobilization. Grief, for instance, has always taken forms of response that range from declarations of love to declarations of war. Note, for instance, the outpouring of love that followed Lady Diana’s tragic passing or Michael Jackson’s similar fate. By contrast, note the serial declarations of war that followed the tragic events of 9/11 or October 7. The bombings of Afghanistan, Iraq, and, more recently, Libya and Syria, not to mention the catastrophic bombings of Gaza by Israel, all took place because or in spite of grief, and in order to fulfill or foreclose mourning. Colonial powers prescribe offensive and retaliatory violence to settle grief yet proscribe the same measures to the populations in whose dispossession and terrorization they are implicated. The stakes of grief seem so high that they decide who has the monopoly on violence and who wants to subvert that monopoly and claim their rightful share of the use of violence to inflict or overcome grief. Arab culture, literature, and film are bloated with ungrieved and ungrievable corpses, staking, as it were, a claim from beyond the grave to memory and justice.
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Nationalism and Globalization in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction
Janice Ho
Since the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the nation-state has risen to be the dominant form of political organization in the world through its embodiment of the principle of nationalism—that nations should be sovereign unto themselves. The post-1945 era, however, has seen an intensification in the processes of globalization, characterized by the rise of international telecommunications networks; the increasing and accelerated movement of finance capital, labor, and cultural commodities; and the consolidation of supranational and transnational organizations that operate beyond national borders. Although it is commonplace to see the era of globalization inaugurating the decline, if not altogether the obsolescence, of the nation-state, it is more accurate and useful to analyze the particular ways in which globalization has transformed the nature and functions of the nation-state, especially its cultural identities, its existence as a unified economic unit, and the scope of its political sovereignty. Indeed, reading different developments in the cultural, economic, and political realms suggests that the impact of globalization on the nation-state is uneven and partial, rather than teleological in its advancement.
Contemporary anglophone fiction has turned to addressing the complex entanglements between the nation and globalization in multiple and heterogeneous ways. Some fiction melancholically looks back to the political legacies of Third World nationalisms that promised universal emancipation to their citizens, only to chart their subsequent disappointments as the ruling elite of postcolonial nation-states continued to perpetuate legacies of imperialism. Other novels celebrate the syncretic and diasporic transnational identities—and the hybridization of national identities—that emerge through sustained contact with other cultural milieus via the processes of globalization. Still others depict the depredations that economic globalization visits on developed and developing nations alike, albeit in different ways and in different degrees. And many contemporary novels engage with the continuing political sovereignty of the nation-state in the face of human rights violations and planetary catastrophes, reflecting on the role of literature in circumventing the authority of the state and bringing distant suffering to a global audience.
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Premodern Multilingual Arabo-Islamicate Poetics
Rebecca Ruth Gould
Arabo-Islamicate poetics can be divided into three rubrics: philosophical aesthetics, balāgha (rhetoric, poetics, stylistics), and paratextual commentary. Philosophical aesthetics encompasses the writings of al-Fārābī Ibn Sīnā, Ibn Rushd, and Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī, who creatively adapted the Aristotelian tradition to Islamic learning. Balāgha encompasses indigenous literary discourses and originated in an effort to delineate the aesthetic dimensions of the Qur’ān while using poetry to prove the Qurʾān’s inimitability (iʿjāz). The paratextual tradition encompasses commentaries, anthologies, and other forms of literary history.
The models of literary criticism first articulated in Arabic within these frameworks inspired multilingual poetics that spanned the Islamic world. Often alongside their work in Arabic, critics and rhetoricians writing in Persian, Hebrew, Ottoman, Chaghatay, and many other types of literature took Arabic genres and literary norms as templates for theorizing poetics in their respective literature. Hence, the scope of Arabo-Islamicate poetics is broader than the history of the Arabic language and encompasses a range of Islamic literary cultures, extending from Delhi to al-Andalus and from Baghdad to the Malay Archipelago.
