On February 16, the Department of Romance Studies hosted a celebration of recently published faculty books, listed below.
Many of the works were published just before or during the COVID-19 pandemic, which prohibited the opportunity to honor the research achievements that each represents.
Martin Eisner, a featured faculty author and department chair, shared remarks with colleagues at the celebration: “Although each of these books deserves its own individual celebration, the party is an attempt to recognize and honor this work collectively—to create a monument to the documents of rigorous research and critical thought that these physical tomes embody.”
“Whether crossing the Mediterranean or the Atlantic, the hemispheric Americas or Africa, these books show the richness and variety of research in Global Romance Studies, which engages literary texts, films, visual arts, music, intellectual treatises, and historical documents to find new perspectives on pressing and persistent problems of cultural, literary, and intellectual history.”
The event, which also included a graduate roundtable and celebratory dinner, provided a renewed sense of campus community.
Photography by John West, Trinity Communications.
Lamonte Aidoo
Slavery Unseen: Sex, Power, and Violence in Brazilian History
Duke University Press Book, 2018
In Slavery Unseen, Lamonte Aidoo upends the narrative of Brazil as a racial democracy, showing how the myth of racial democracy elides the history of sexual violence, patriarchal terror, and exploitation of slaves. Drawing on sources ranging from inquisition trial documents to travel accounts and literature, Aidoo demonstrates how interracial and same-sex sexual violence operated as a key mechanism of the production and perpetuation of slavery as well as racial and gender inequality. The myth of racial democracy, Aidoo contends, does not stem from or reflect racial progress; rather, it is an antiblack apparatus that upholds and protects the heteronormative white patriarchy throughout Brazil's past and on into the present. Read more +
Joan Clifford and Deb Reisinger
Community-Based Language Learning: A Framework for Educators
Georgetown University Press, 2018
Community-Based Language Learning offers a new framework for world language educators interested in integrating community-based language learning (CBLL) into their teaching and curricula. CBLL connects academic learning objectives with experiential learning, ranging from reciprocal partnerships with the community (e.g., community engagement, service learning) to one-directional learning situations such as community service and site visits. Read more +
Martin Eisner
Dante's New Life of the Book A Philology of World Literature
Oxford University Press, USA, 2021
Dante's Vita nuova has taken on a wide variety of different forms since its first publication in 1294. How could one work have generated such different physical forms? Through examining the work's transformations in manuscripts, printed books, translations, and adaptations, Eisner reconceives of the relationship between the work and its reception. Dante's New Life of the Book investigates how these different material manifestations participate in the work, drawing attention to its distinctive elements. Read more +
Martin Eisner and David Lummus, eds.
A Boccaccian Renaissance Essays on the Early Modern Impact of Giovanni Boccaccio and His Works
University of Notre Dame Press, 2019
A Boccaccian Renaissance brings together essays written by internationally recognized scholars in diverse national traditions to respond to the largely unaddressed question of Boccaccio’s impact on early modern literature and culture in Italy and Europe. Martin Eisner and David Lummus co-edit the first comprehensive examination in English of Boccaccio’s impact on the Renaissance. Read more +
Gustavo Furtado
Documentary Filmmaking in Contemporary Brazil: Cinematic Archives of the Present
Oxford University Press, USA, 2019
Documentary Film Making examines the vibrant field of documentary filmmaking in Brazil from the transition to democracy in 1985 to the present. Marked by significant efforts toward the democratization of Brazil's highly unequal society, this period also witnessed the documentary's rise to unprecedented vitality in quantity, quality, and diversity of production-which includes polished auteur films as well as rough-hewn collaborative works, films made in major metropolitan regions as well as in indigenous villages and in remote parts of the Amazon, intimate first-person documentaries as well as films that dive headfirst into struggles for social justice. The transformations of Brazilian society and of filmmaking coalesce and become entangled in this cinema's preoccupation with archives. Read more +
Esther Gabara
Non-Literary Fiction Art of the Americas Under Neoliberalism
University of Chicago Press, 2022
With Non-literary Fiction, Esther Gabara examines how contemporary art produced across the Americas has reacted to the rising tide of neoliberal regimes, focusing on the crucial role of fiction in daily politics. Gabara argues that these fictions depart from familiar literary narrative structures and emerge in the new mediums and practices that have revolutionized contemporary art. Each chapter details how fiction is created through visual art forms—in performance and body art, posters, mail art, found objects, and installations. For Gabara, these fictions comprise a type of art that asks viewers to collaborate in the creation of the work and helps them to withstand the brutal restrictions imposed by dominant neoliberal regimes. Read more +
Annette Joseph-Gabriel
Reimagining Liberation How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire
University of Illinois Press, 2019
Black women living in the French empire played a key role in the decolonial movements of the mid-twentieth century. Thinkers and activists, these women lived lives of commitment and risk that landed them in war zones and concentration camps and saw them declared enemies of the state. Annette Joseph-Gabriel mines published writings and untapped archives to reveal the anticolonialist endeavors of seven women. Though often overlooked today, Suzanne Césaire, Paulette Nardal, Eugénie Éboué-Tell, Jane Vialle, Andrée Blouin, Aoua Kéita, and Eslanda Robeson took part in a forceful transnational movement. Their activism and thought challenged France's imperial system by shaping forms of citizenship that encouraged multiple cultural and racial identities. Read more +
Walter Mignolo
The Politics of Decolonial Investigations
Duke University Press, 2022
In The Politics of Decolonial Investigations Walter D. Mignolo provides a sweeping examination of how coloniality has operated around the world in its myriad forms from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first. Decolonial border thinking allows Mignolo to outline how the combination of the self-fashioned narratives of Western civilization and the hegemony of Eurocentric thought served to eradicate all knowledges in non-European languages and praxes of living and being. Mignolo also traces the geopolitical origins of racialized and gendered classifications, modernity, globalization, and cosmopolitanism, placing them all within the framework of coloniality. Read more +
Claudia Milian
University of Minnesota Press, 2020
LatinX, according to Claudia Milian, is the most powerful conceptual tool of the Latino/a present, an itinerary whose analytic routes incorporate the Global South and ecological devastation. Milian’s trailblazing study deploys the indeterminate but thunderous “X” as intellectual armor, a speculative springboard, and a question for our times that never stops being asked. Read more +
Sarah Quesada
The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature
Edited by Debjani Ganguly, Francesca Orsini, and Ray Ryan
Cambridge University Press, 2022
The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature unearths a buried African archive within widely-read Latinx writers of the last fifty years. It challenges dominant narratives in World Literature and transatlantic studies that ignore Africa's impact in broader Latin American culture. Sarah Quesada argues that these canonical works evoke textual memorials of African memory. She shows how the African Atlantic haunts modern Latinx and Caribbean writing, and examines the disavowal or distortion of the African subject in the constructions of national, racial, sexual, and spiritual Latinx identity. Read more +
Deb Reisinger, et al.
Affaires globales S'engager dans la vie professionnelle en français, niveau avancé
Georgetown University Press, 2021
Affaires globales’ broad scope of disciplines and cultural content will appeal to students interested in a wide variety of careers while giving them the skills needed to pursue them. This intermediate-high to advanced-level French textbook is designed for French for specific purposes courses such as business or professional French and can be used as a main text for one semester or adapted for two semesters of use. Read more +
Felwine Sarr
University of Minnesota Press, 2020
Through a reflection on contemporary African writers, artists, intellectuals, and musicians, philosopher Felwine Sarr elaborates Africa’s unique philosophies and notions of communal value and economy deeply rooted in its ancient traditions and landscape. Sarr takes the reader on a philosophical journey that is as much inward as outward, demanding an elevation of the collective consciousness. Read more +
University of Minnesota Press, 2023
African Meditations is a unique contemporary portrait of a young philosopher and creative writer as he seeks to establish himself as a teacher upon his return to Senegal, his homeland, after years of study abroad. It is a seamless blend of autobiography, journal entries, and fiction; aphorisms and brief narrative sketches; humor and Zen reflections. Read more +
Felwine Sarr and Achille Mbembe, editors
The Politics of Time: Imagining African Becomings
Polity, 2023
As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, the world is undergoing a major historical shift: Africa, and the Global South more generally, is increasingly becoming a principal theatre in which the future of the planet plays itself out. But not only this: Africa is at the same time emerging as one of the great laboratories for novel forms of social, economic, political, intellectual, cultural, and artistic life. Often arising in unexpected places, these new forms of life materialize in practices that draw deeply from collective memory while simultaneously assuming distinctly contemporary, even futuristic, guises. Read more +
Polity, 2023
In October 2016, thirty intellectuals and artists from Africa, its diasporas, and beyond gathered together in Dakar and Saint-Louis, Senegal, to reflect on the present and future of Africa in the midst of transformations that are sweeping through the contemporary world. The aim was to take stock of the renewal of Afro-diasporic critical thought and to discuss the new perspectives emerging from the ongoing projects constructing political, cultural, and social imaginaries for and from the African continent. Read more +
Helen Solterer and Vincent Joos, editors
Migrants shaping Europe, past and present: Multilingual literatures, arts, and cultures
Manchester University Press, 2022
Europe’s literatures, social cultures, and arts over centuries. Europe has never been a continent bounded by the seas that surround it. In premodern times, migrants imprinted the languages, arts, and literatures of the places where they settled. They contributed to these cultures and economies. Some were on the move in search of a better life; others were displaced by war, dispossessed, expelled; while still others were brought in servitude to European cities to work, enslaved. Today’s immigration flows in Europe are not exceptional but anchored in this longue durée process. Read more +
Curran, C. P. James Joyce Remembered, edition 2022
Edited by Helen Solterer and Alice Ryan
University College Dublin Press, 2022
In 1968, C.P. Curran summed up his views of the seminal Modernist author in James Joyce Remembered. This year—the centennial anniversary of Ulysses’ publication—University College Dublin Press is pleased to bring forth a new edition of this classic remembrance, edited by Curran’s granddaughter and featuring sparkling new essays from a host of Joyce scholars, literary critics, architects, and historians. This group of University College Dubliners takes a new look at Curran’s work, delving into the Curran-Laird collection at the James Joyce Library to offer a singular portrait of the author and his inventive cohort of friends. Read more +
Saskia Ziolkowski
University of Toronto Press, 2020
While many scholars of world literature view national literary traditions as resolved and stable, Kafka’s Italian Progeny takes the fluid identity of the modern Italian tradition as an opportunity to reconsider its dimensions and influencers. Exploring a distinct but unexamined Kafkan tradition in modern Italian literature, it brings Italian literary works into larger debates and reorients the critical view of the Italian literary landscape. The book calls attention to the way Kafkan themes, narrative strategies, and formal experimentation appear in a range of Italian authors. Offering new perspectives on familiar figures, such as Italo Calvino, Italo Svevo, and Elena Ferrante, it also sheds light on some lesser-known authors, including Tommaso Landolfi, Paola Capriolo, and Lalla Romano. Read more +
