Problematic Paradigms and the Contours of US Latinidad (Paperback)

Silvio Torres-Saillant’s collected writings examine political contradictions within Latinx identity in the United States.

Since the 1990s Silvio Torres-Saillant’s work has questioned the notion of Latinidad, challenging presumptions of panethnic unity within the US Hispanic population and assessing dominant modes of Latinx representation. The essays in Problematic Paradigms and the Contours of US Latinidad examine the dynamics of a diverse collective of over 65 million people whose cultural heritage, ancestral origins, and belief systems arguably differ as much as they resemble one another. The volume dissects prevailing assumptions, namely the essentializing sense of homogeneity in the Latinx “community,” which mask important nuances and fascinating contradictions. Torres-Saillant also targets the role of marketing and mass communications in shaping popular perceptions of ethnic groups, thereby tracing connections between media rhetoric and the language of scholarship.

Newly revised by editors Nancy Kang and Michael Nieto Garcia, this collection curates Torres-Saillant’s core contributions to Latinx studies over the last two decades and underscores the veteran scholar’s evolving thoughts on key conversations in the field. The epilogue narrates his beginnings in Caribbean studies, acknowledges his ongoing analysis of Dominican blackness, and discourages uncritical views of cultural heritage.

Silvio Torres-Saillant is a professor of English and Dean’s Professor of the Humanities at Syracuse University. He is the author of Caribbean Poetics: Toward an Aesthetic of West Indian Literature, El retorno de las yolas, and An Intellectual History of the Caribbean.

Nancy Kang is an associate professor of women’s and gender studies at the University of Manitoba, where she holds the Canada Research Chair in Transnational Feminisms and Gender-Based Violence. She is a coauthor of The Once and Future Muse: The Poetry and Poetics of Rhina P. Espaillat with Silvio Torres-Saillant.

Michael Nieto Garcia is a professor of literature at Clarkson University. He is the author of Autobiography in Black & Brown: Ethnic Identity in Richard Wright and Richard Rodriguez and the widely-accessed essay, “Do Brown People have Brown Thoughts?”