Cosmopolitan Strangers in Us Latinx Literature and Culture: Building Bridges, Not Walls

This book presents a study of the figure of the stranger in US Latinx literary and cultural forms, ranging from contemporary novels through essays to film and transborder art activism. The focus on this abject figure is twofold: first, to explore its potential to expose the processes of othering to which Latinxs are subjected; and, second, to foreground its epistemic response to neocolonial structures and beliefs. Thus, this book draws on relevant sociological literature on the stranger to unveil the political and social processes behind the recognition of Latinxs as ’out of place.’ On the other hand, and most importantly, this volume follows the path of neo-cosmopolitan approaches to bring to the fore processes of interrelatedness, interaction, and conviviality that run counter to criminalizing discourses around Latinxs. Through an engagement with these theoretical tenets, the goal of this book is to showcase the role of the Latinx stranger as a cosmopolitan mediator that transforms walls into bridges.

Esther Álvarez-López isAssociate Professor of American Literature at the University of Oviedo, Spain. She has published on ethnic literatures, gender, and intersectionality. Her latest publications are ＂Identity, De-colonization and Cosmopolitanism in (Afro)Latina Artists’ Spoken Word Performances＂ (2021) and ＂Strangers, Persisters, and Killjoys: Confronting Gender Inequality through Performance Poetry＂ (Routledge 2022).

Andrea Fernández-García is Assistant Professor at the University of Oviedo, Spain. She studies the relationship between gender, space and decoloniality in US Latina literature. She is the author of Geographies of Girlhood in US Latina Writing: Decolonizing Spaces and Identities (2020), among other publications.