The Afro-Latino Memoir

Race, Ethnicity, and Literary Interculturalism

By Trent Masiki

252 pp., 6.125 x 9.25

  • Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-7527-5
    Published: August 2023
  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-7526-8
    Published: August 2023
  • E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-1-4696-7528-2
    Published: August 2023
  • E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-6120-7
    Published: August 2023

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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.

About the Author

Trent Masiki is assistant professor of Africana studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.


For more information about Trent Masiki, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"Trent Masiki raises questions of canonicity and categories of racial and national identity that require intense interrogation while making a strong case for the preeminence of the memoir in the Afro-Latinx canon. His book provides a much-needed consideration of work that has conjoined African American and Latinx literatures and cultures."—John Wharton Lowe, author of Calypso Magnolia

"By examining Afro-Latinx memoirs and the influence of African American culture on these works, Masiki's highly enjoyable and pathbreaking book makes an important contribution to a myriad of established and emerging academic disciplines."—Vanessa Pérez-Rosario, Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York