Buenas Noches, American Culture

María DeGuzmán is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of Latina/o Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is author of Spain's Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo American Empire.

• PrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Critically Inhabiting the Night1. Dreaded Non-Identitites of Night: Night and Shadow in Chicana/o Cultural Production2. Queer "Tropics" of Night and the Caribe of "American" (Post) Modernism3. Postcolonial Pre-Coloumbian Cosmologies of Night in Contemporary U.S.-Based Central American Texts4. Transcultural Night Work of U.S.-Based South American Cultural ProducersConclusion: Two Homelands Have I: "America" and the NightNotesBibliographyIndex

"In this study, DeGuzmán has been able to accomplish what no study to date has been able to do: to investigate how "night"—in all its figurations—has constituted an aesthetics of both self-representation for Latinos as well as a viable and effective form of resistance to state-sanctioned inclusion. Its diversity of texts and clearly reasoned analysis make it a potential standard text for the field."—Lázaro Lima, author of The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory"This wonderfully complex and comparative analysis of the aesthetics of night in Latino literature breaks new ground. . . . it offers a compelling argument about the transvaluation of night in Latino literature that is completely new, original and insightful, deepening scholarship on the critical role of Latino literature in the U.S. body politic."—Theresa Delgadillo, author of Spiritual Mestizaje: Religion, Gender, Race and Nation in Contemporary Chicana Narrative"DeGuzmán . . . offers new insights into how representations of night have been employed to form (impose) a Latino identity within and beyond the borders of the US. Juxtaposing historical illustrations with modern literary and artistic depictions of night from Central and South America, the Caribbean, and the US, she compellingly argues that there are new trends in representations of night used by Latino/a writers and artists as a means of self-representation."—Choice"[T]he multidisciplinary approach of this work allows DeGuzmán to reflect on the complexity and multiplicity of Latinidades in both content and method, successfully situating the volume in the broad, and often deliberately complex and nuanced, fields of Latina/o Studies, American Studies, and Cultural Studies (to mention a few). Jan 2016"—Modern Language Review