This collection of academic essays introduces new research on Latina histories and cultures from the mid-nineteenth century to 1980. Examining a wide range of source materials, including personal and institutional archives, literature and oral history, the authors of the fifteen articles use transnational approaches and Latina feminist theory to remind us of a principle that is still too often forgotten: that sex and gender should be centered as crucial problematics in the study of the long history of Latina/o/x literature and culture. Applying an intersectional methodology that analyzes gender in relation to numerous identities—race, class, sexuality, language and nationality—the scholars explore diverse subjects such as the literary work of historical Latina authors Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton and Maria Cristina Mena; the travails of Basque women in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and Chicana activism in Wyoming in the 1970s and 1980s. The book is divided into four sections: Feminist Readings of Latina Authors; Gender, Politics and Power in the Spanish-Language Press; Radical Latinas’ Politics; and Reclaiming Community, Reclaiming Knowledge. In their introduction, editors Montse Feu and Yolanda Padilla map significant elements in the practice of Latina feminist recovery and suggest the importance of using queer studies frameworks and speculative approaches to archives in order to amplify queer, Afro-Latina/o and indigenous voices. Published as part of the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Series, Latina Histories and Cultures continues the efforts to rescue the written legacy of the Hispanic population in what has become the United States and will be required reading for academics and students in a variety of disciplines.

Identifies the ways writers in Cuba and the US represented the island as "gothic" in the nineteenth century.

From the country's beginning, essayists in the United States have used their prose to articulate the many ways their individuality has been shaped by the politics, social life, and culture of this place. The Cambridge History of the American Essay offers the fullest account to date of this diverse and complex history. From Puritan writings to essays by Indigenous authors, from Transcendentalist and Pragmatist texts to Harlem Renaissance essays, from New Criticism to New Journalism: The story of the American essay is told here, beginning in the early eighteenth century and ending with the vibrant, heterogeneous scene of contemporary essayistic writing. The essay in the US has taken many forms: nature writing, travel writing, the genteel tradition, literary criticism, hybrid genres such as the essay film and the photo essay. Across genres and identities, this volume offers a stirring account of American essayism into the twenty-first century.

Taking his cue from Philadelphia-born novelist Charles Brockden Brown's Annals of Europe and America, which contends that America is shaped most noticeably by the international struggle between Great Britain and France for control of the world trade market, Stephen Shapiro charts the advent, decline, and reinvigoration of the early American novel. That the American novel "sprang so unexpectedly into published existence during the 1790s" may be a symptom of the beginning of the end of Franco-British supremacy and a reflection of the power of a middle class riding the crest of a new world economic system. Shapiro's world-systems approach is a relatively new methodology for literary studies, but it brings two particularly useful features to the table. First, it refines the conceptual frameworks for analyzing cultural and social history, such as the rise in sentimentalism, in relation to a long-wave economic history of global commerce; second, it fosters a new model for a comparative American Studies across time. Rather than relying on contiguous time, a world-systems approach might compare the cultural production of one region to another at the same location within the recurring cycle in an economic reconfiguration. Shapiro offers a new way of thinking about the causes for the emergence of the American novel that suggests a fresh way of rethinking the overall paradigms shaping American Studies.

Examines how the boundaries of the Latina/o public sphere and representations of gender are negotiated through mass media in twentieth and twenty-first century literature.

Tracking Cuban history from 1492 to the present, The Cuba Reader includes more than one hundred selections that present myriad perspectives on Cuba's history, culture, and politics. The volume foregrounds the experience of Cubans from all walks of life, including slaves, prostitutes, doctors, activists, and historians. Combining songs, poetry, fiction, journalism, political speeches, and many other types of documents, this revised and updated second edition of The Cuba Reader contains over twenty new selections that explore the changes and continuities in Cuba since Fidel Castro stepped down from power in 2006. For students, travelers, and all those who want to know more about the island nation just ninety miles south of Florida, The Cuba Reader is an invaluable introduction.

Since 1980, the number of people in U.S. prisons has increased more than 450%. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called "the biggest prison building project in the history of the world." Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces, ranging from global to local, conjoined to produce the prison boom. In an informed and impassioned account, Ruth Wilson Gilmore examines this issue through statewide, rural, and urban perspectives to explain how the expansion developed from surpluses of finance capital, labor, land, and state capacity. Detailing crises that hit California’s economy with particular ferocity, she argues that defeats of radical struggles, weakening of labor, and shifting patterns of capital investment have been key conditions for prison growth. The results—a vast and expensive prison system, a huge number of incarcerated young people of color, and the increase in punitive justice such as the "three strikes" law—pose profound and troubling questions for the future of California, the United States, and the world. Golden Gulag provides a rich context for this complex dilemma, and at the same time challenges many cherished assumptions about who benefits and who suffers from the state’s commitment to prison expansion.