Foreword

Abstract

From its earliest days, in the 1990s, Colonial Latin American Review sought to publish a wide variety of perspectives. Eschewing prescriptions and proscriptions, Fred Luciani described the journal’s ambition as endeavoring ‘to represent the broadest possible range of scholarship on colonial Latin America.’ Even a quick scan of back issues reveals how seriously the Editorial Board took this charge, cultivating disciplinary, geographic and methodological diversity. At the Taylor & Francis website, it is possible to see the number-of-views per article: while such accounting says precious little about how many people have actually read a CLAR essay from start to finish or mulled its arguments, the numbers show that all the genres of scholarship published in CLAR have their fans. Visual culture, literary practices, and historical projects all have piqued readers’ curiosities. No less importantly, the journal has been unwavering in its commitment to publish the work of scholars just finding their footing along with that written by those who have been walking through the field for decades. This, too, represents a kind of breadth. Nevertheless, as CLAR has participated in—and reshaped—discussions in colonial Latin American studies over the last thirty years, certain themes and geographies have come to the fore. For instance, reading through the backlist I see that the journal has contributed more emphatically to debates about Indigeneity than Blackness; it has developed histories of New Spain and the Andes most often, and it has discussed land and politics more intently than waterways or performance. Gender, too, has been a constant theme. Let me be clear, impressive articles that address Black histories or theatrical works have appeared (and, I hope, will continue to appear) in CLAR. Yet these are arenas where the journal has not yet made its most consistent interventions. This, I suspect, has much to do with approaches to colonialism in Latin America that have held sway through 1990s and early 2000s. The same might well be said of trans-Pacific histories and animal studies, environmental histories and studies of orality and sound—all of which have surfaced in CLAR, but not more frequently than trans-Atlantic histories, human-centered histories or studies of writing, mapping and texts. Every academic journal has its patterns, its editorial leanings, its scholarly predilections. And no journal, no matter how willing to embrace heterogeneity, can address everything. What interests me most, as CLAR enters its 30th year, is what leading interdisciplinary scholarship on colonialism and Latin America could look like. Submissions to the journal are healthy—in number and in seriousness of purpose— yet I see challenges on the nearhorizon that implicate all of us who work at the intersection of the humanities and the social sciences. These include the viability of traditional peer-review and current economic models for open-access publishing. Relatedly and, at least to me, more vexing are the ethics of research based on long-distance travel. Given the climate crisis and increasingly harsh divides amongst scholars with strong financial support and those without, it seems well past time to envision and to create new habits of scholarship. While I am hardly among the first to signal these concerns, I raise them here for two reasons. First, I think it worth building out, and continuing to deliver on CLAR’s initial promise, which was to publish serious and diverse, interdisciplinary scholarship on Latin