Afro-Hispanic American literature

TL;DR: The post-soul condition and the mid-1970s boom in the scholarly study of Afro-Latinidad are coterminous, and it is high time that the two concepts be put in dialogue with each other as discussed by the authors .

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyze the means by which the world order is conceived on literary works in Spanish language that reflect the crossroads of such constructions on the American and on the African side of the Atlantic.

Abstract: On the occasion of the Panama Canal’s centennial, this special issue aims to excavate the waterway’s multiple maps, and reconsider it as a reference and site for lived critical practices from a Global South perspective. The Panama Ca nal’s global infrastructure gives rise to a range of stories and interactions that transcend the locality of this referent for American skill and greatness. To adopt Denison Kitchel’s terms, we aim to discursively redirect what has long been regarded as a “cherished part” of American “national heritage, a symbol of unique national accomplishment,” and engage with the embodied “backwaters,” if you will, of the Canal (15). The building of this pathway and interoceanic communication transpired from the 1903 separation and organization of a new state, Panama, Central America’s narrowest and most southerly point. Greg Grandin concisely puts across that Theodore Roosevelt’s collaborative effort with J. P. Morgan “to shave the province of Panama off Colombia” steered “the new nation into an impor tant global transit route” that structured “America’s hemispheric might” (20).1 Panama’s emergence as a “youthful Republic,” to use census taker and policeman Harry A. Franck’s words (4), may have contributed, in Ana Elena Porras’s estimation, to a widely spread discourse in which said nation is imagined as an artificial state that has been “made in USA” (21; cf., Weeks and Gunson, 1991). 2