Latining America : Black-Brown Passages and the Coloring of Latino/a Studies

Abstract

Claudia Milian proposes that the economies of blackness, brownness, and dark brownness summon a new grammar for Latino/a studies that she names “Latinities.” Milian argues that this ensnared economy of meaning startles the typical reading practices deployed for brown Latino/a embodiment. Latining America keeps company with and challenges existent models of Latinidad, demanding a distinct paradigm that puts into question what is understood as Latino and Latina today. Milian conceptually considers how underexplored “Latin” participants—the southern, the black, the dark brown, the Central American—have ushered in a new world of “Latined” signification from the 1920s to the present.