Introduction: Las Américas Quarterly

With the 2012 ASA convention in Puerto Rico, “Dimensions of Empire and Resistance” as impetus, and the questions of coloniality and empire raised there fresh in our minds, this special issue of American Quarterly brings together research that rethinks the meaning of American studies from Latin American and Latinx studies. The issue calls attention to the historical complexities of colonial encounters and the making of liberal human rights regimes—traditional paradigms in Latin American studies—as well as counterhistories and aesthetically grounded cultural analyses. Collecting these essays into five sections—Transgeographies, Revisiting Memory Politics and Rights Discourse, Alternative Histories, Cruel Modernities, and Archipelagic Thought—our aim is to encourage new dialogues, particularly in South–South reorientations. The issue focuses on cultural praxis and culture making to refine and outmaneuver critical accounts that otherwise rehearse historical structural inequities and reproduce overdetermined representations of the Américas.