Transatlantic LatinX studies, Iberian studies, and the Global South

Abstract

More than a special issue, this endeavor serves as a sourcebook and provocation amplifying embryonic but interlinked sites of inquiry: LatinXness in Spain and its vital conversation with US LatinX studies as well as Iberian studies. LatinXs share historical and cultural connections to the Spanish and American empires. The contemporary period marks a significant moment on both sides of the Atlantic, as Spain now houses Europe’s largest LatinX population and the shifting ground of LatinXness exceeds the United States as well as a North-South axis of analysis. With an eye toward being wide-ranging, bringing forward fresh insights, and offering a crucial reference for an expanding area of interest—transatlantic LatinX studies—this undertaking provides historical contexts, defining moments, conceptual parameters, and critical approaches that appraise how Spain’s sociocultural and intellectual climate has fully entered a LatinX epoch. The exploration faces a cluster of questions: What do current characterizations of Spanishness invigorate when it admits a long ignored—and inseparable—LatinX foundation? What constitutes Spanish national currency when animated by LatinX bodies and imaginations? What is Spain—and what is Europe—to LatinXness and the Global South? What kind of new Spain—and new Europe—emerge from LatinXness and Global Southness? Collected here are original arguments and contributions—academic articles, think pieces, critical conversations, poetry, and creative nonfiction—orienting us on central thematic concerns that include: new directions and perspectives in transatlantic LatinX studies; the idea of Europe and Europeanness from Spain’s southernmost archipelago, the Canary Islands; LatinX nonhuman origins at the Royal Botanical Garden in the Spanish capital; the history, uses, and dissemination of the Panchito/Panchita racial slur; Madrid’s twenty-first century LatinX Spanish language, migration, and culture; present-day brown drag performance and practices; Afro-Spanish-Colombian poetry and politics; rurality, depopulation, and LatinX repopulation in Aguaviva, Spain; diasporic bodies and expressions of identity through movement; and movement in translation, X equivalencies across bodies, geographies, and languages. The volume, as a whole, is an entry point into LatinX studies and Iberian studies marshaling ideas and thinking tools that may be veering toward a new field of study.