ABOUT THIS BOOK

Latinx Comics Studies: Critical and Creative Crossings offers an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach to analyzing Latinx studies and comics studies. The book draws together groundbreaking critical essays, practical pedagogical reflections, and original and republished short comics. The works in this collection discuss the construction of national identity and memory, undocumented narratives, Indigenous and Afro-Latinx experiences, multiracial and multilingual identities, transnational and diasporic connections, natural disasters and unnatural colonial violence, feminist and queer interventions, Latinx futurities, and more. Together, the critical and creative works in this collection begin to map out the emerging and evolving field of Latinx comics studies and to envision what might be possible in and through Latinx comics.

This collection moves beyond simply cataloguing and celebrating Latinx representation within comics. It examines how comics by, for, and about Latinx peoples creatively and conceptually experiment with the very boundaries of “Latinx” and portray the diverse lived experiences therein.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

FERNANDA DÍAZ-BASTERIS is an assistant professor of Latinx new media and ethnic studies at The Ohio State University. Her research and teaching seek to understand US Caribbean/Latinx cultural forms of resistance to displacement, coloniality, and racial capitalism through literature, popular art, and graphic narratives from the mid-twentieth to twenty-first centuries.

MAITE URCAREGUI is an assistant professor of Latinx literatures in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at San José State University. Her research and teaching examine twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latinx and multiethnic US literatures, visual cultures, and comics through feminist, queer, and critical race theories and histories.

REVIEWS

"Latinx Comics Studies is an indispensable volume that dives into the crosscurrents of Latinx identity and how it is shaped by and shapes the comics medium. A vital resource, this interdisciplinary collection firmly establishes that Latinx comics is a dynamic field at the forefront of today's critical study of graphic narratives."— Nhora Lucía Serrano, editor of Immigrants and Comics: Graphic Spaces of Remembrance, Transaction, and Mimesis

"Shattering mainstream understandings of comics, these essays reveal how comic art by Latinx creators has played important roles in forging communities, mobilizing archives, and enriching our understandings of space, place, and identity."— William Orchard, editor of Latinx Literature and Critical Futurities, 1992–2020

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Zotz: Serpent and Shield

Puerto Rico Strong

El Peso Hero

Blackbird

United States of Bananas: A Graphic Novel

Alienation