Black in Print examines the role of narrative, from traditional writing to new media, in conversations about race and belonging in the isthmus. It argues that the production, circulation, and consumption of stories has led to a trans-isthmian imaginary that splits the region along racial and geographic lines into a white-mestizo Pacific coast, an Indigenous core, and a Black Caribbean. Across five chapters, Jennifer Carolina Gómez Menjívar identifies a series of key moments in the history of the development of this imaginary: Independence, Intervention, Cold-War, Post-Revolutionary, and Digital Age. Gómez Menjívar's analysis ranges from literary beacons such as Rubén Darío and Miguel Ángel Asturias to less studied intellectuals such as Wingston González and Carl Rigby. The result is a fresh approach to race, the region, and its literature. Black in Print understands Central American Blackness as a set of shifting coordinates plotted on the axes of language, geography, and time as it moves through print media.
ISBN-13: 9781438492827
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Publication Date: 11-02-2023
Pages: 294
Product Dimensions: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.67d
Series: Suny Series - Afro-Latinx Futures
Jennifer Carolina Gómez Menjívar is Associate Professor of Media Arts at the University of North Texas. She is coeditor (with Héctor Nicolás Ramos Flores) of Hemispheric Blackness and the Exigencies of Accountability; editor of Amefrica in Letters: Literary Interventions from Mexico to the Southern Cone; coeditor (with Gloria Elizabeth Chacón) of Indigenous Interfaces: Spaces, Technology, and Social Networks in Mexico and Central America; and coauthor (with William Noel Salmon) of Tropical Tongues: Language Ideologies, Endangerment, and Minority Languages in Belize.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface: Coastal Stories
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Fictions of Blackness and Their Narrative Power
Part 1. Pacific/Pacífico
1. Disappearing Acts
Part 2. Interior/Centro
2. Strategies of Containment
3. Mesoamerican Core, Kriol Periphery
Part 3. Caribbean/Caribe
4. Multicultural Plots
5. From Caribbean Sea to Digital Shore
Conclusion: The Battlegrounds of Central American Identity
Appendix: Transcript of the “Cocorí” Episode on Radio Ambulante
Notes
Works Cited
Index
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