Latinx Heritage Month Showcase
For Latinx Heritage Month, we are celebrating and showcasing the research of Prof. Antonio López, who works on Latinx literature and culture from the colonial era to the contemporary period. He is the author of “Unbecoming Blackness: The Diaspora Cultures of Afro-Cuban America” (New York: New York University Press, 2012). This book won Honorable Mention, Modern Language Association Book Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies, 2014. Citation: Antonio López’s “Unbecoming Blackness“ shows the demonstrable imprint of Cuban blackness on the cultural history of United States latinidad. With careful attention to performance, theater, archival work, photography, and memoir from the periods before 1959 and after 1980, López’s book offers Latina/o and Chicana/o studies a method for refusing to silence race in the process of archive building, in literary analysis, and in observation of the cultural interactions among African Americans and United States-based Puerto Ricans and Cubans. López’s book nimbly reads across a wide range of genres and cultural forms—journalism, rap lyrics, Miami slang, accounts of the Miami race riot of 1980, proverbs, and testimonio—in a way that teaches us new strategies for bringing literary-critical interpretative tools to the task of reconstructing America cultural history.
Prof. Lopez teaches a range of courses like U.S. Latino Literature & Culture. His current book project considers the literatures and cultures of indigeneity, swamplands, and Cuban diaspora in South Florida.
