In July 2010, the watershed publication of The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States edited by the late Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores blazed a trail for the emerging field of Afro-Latinx* Studies. The reader continues to be a foundational and transformative text and in honor of the scholarly activist legacy of Miriam and Juan, we are announcing the development of The Afro-Latin@* Reader: Volume 2. We are using Afro-Latin@* with an asterisk as a way to respect the original title while making space for multiple identity pathways within Black Latinidad and to disrupt the normative gender politics embedded in the Spanish language. The asterisk, a mathematical symbol, represents multiplication, and underscores for the editors, a multiplicity of ways to engage, identify, or disidentify with the markers of Afro-Latinidad.
In this second volume, we envision expanding the discourses and provocations posed by the first volume and seek to cultivate and unearth new terrains of knowledge production by and for Black Latinx peoples in the United States, whose histories, politics, and cultures remain understudied and undertheorized. This volume highlights the directions in which Afro-Latinx Studies as a field has developed and made major contributions to Black and Latinx Studies, among other fields. This volume focuses on contemporary concerns and developments in Afro-Latinx* Studies that center Blackness and Indigeneity, gender, sexuality, queerness, history, community, spirituality, cultural productions, and politics through transdisciplinary dialogues.
This volume centers the embodied knowledges, cultural productions, and epistemologies rooted in the memories and racialized gendered experiences of Afro-Latinx*s in the US. We seek to engage the politics and genre of testimonios, considering what Nancy Lopez calls “street race,” while expanding Flores’ notion of triple consciousness and Afro-Latinx identity. We open the volume with a meditation on the geographies and cartographies of Afro-Latinidad from slavery and cimarronaje to transnational migration and diasporas. We emphasize hemispheric approaches to Blackness and the role of the U.S. Census in shaping the language of identity formation. In this intellectual and communal gathering of scholars, activists, educators, and artists, the volume crafts directions, pathways, and futurities of Afro-Latinx studies, culture, and life. The collective exercise of this project is rooted in responsive community care, faithful witnessing, and fluidity that continues to center the African Diaspora in the Americas and Black life.
Volume two will be edited by Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vasquez, Paul Joseph López Oro, and Omaris Z. Zamora, and is envisioned as also having a wide array of voices, a chorus, that represent disciplinary, creative, and activist scholars. Through this choral approach, we have invited a team of collaborating section editors, themselves leaders in the fields of thought and practice, to help curate each section of the volume. Section editors include: Zaire Dinzey-Flores, Jessica Marie Johnson, Kaysha Corinealdi, Janel Martinez, Mary Peña, Alan Pelaez López, Petra R. Rivera-Rideau, Ashley Coleman Taylor, Guesnerth Josue Perea, and The Afro-Latin@ Forum.
We invite researchers, educators, artists, activists, writers, and independent scholars, among others, to submit:
A 300-500 word abstract of a proposed critical, research, or personal essay (if critical or research please include a short bibliography of 5-10 selected sources)
OR
A compilation of 1-3 creative works (poetry, short story, visual works; accompanied by a short contextual introduction), for consideration for publication in this volume.
The proposed work should fall within one of the following featured sections of the book, but may certainly go beyond these bounds:
Please submit your abstract (including short bibliography for essays or contextual introduction for creative work) accompanied by your CV to the link below by August 18, 2024.
Final contributions should be 3-5k words for critical/research essays; 2-3k words for creative works; up to two poems; OR up to 2-3 visual works.
Initial decisions will be announced by September 15, 2024. Submission of the first draft of contributions will be November 15, 2024.
Questions can be directed to editorial manager Francheska Pierce: AfroLatinxReader[at]gmail.com Please allow up to two working days for response.