Latinx Historicisms in the Present

Abstract History is a problem, one that manifests in distinct but interrelated phenomena for Latinx literary studies: first, the pressure on scholars to performatively embody the field; second, the asymmetry of ignorance between scholars of American Literature and Latinx literatures; and third, the presentist orientation of Latinx literary studies. Kandice Chuh argues that diversity management in the field of “American Literature” has led to the segregation of minoritized literatures from dominant literatures under a pernicious logic which distinguishes between aesthetics and politics, reserving the former for white literature and the latter for minoritized literatures. In practice, the distinction between aesthetics and politics is also a distinction between history and identity that makes it possible for racialized subjects to appear in the present wholly formed and wholly subordinate. I argue that Latinx historicism—my shorthand for recent work foregrounding the contingency of Latinx literary histories—offers an urgent corrective to this constrained historical imagination.