Description: Milian proposes that the economies of blackness, brownness, and dark brownness summon a new grammar for Latino/a studies that she names "Latinities." Her innovative study argues that this ensnared economy of meaning startles the typical reading practices deployed for brown Latino/a embodiment.
Brief description: CLAUDIA MILIAN is an assistant professor of romance studies at Duke University.
Review Quotes:
Latining America is a pathbreaking intervention into the field of U.S. Latino/a studies. Claudia Milian dislodges the mainline North-South axis of analysis of U.S. southern and American studies in order to build a new analysis of African American and Latino/a positionalities in what she terms the 'Global Nuevo South.' Milian thus establishes a breathtaking commonality of Latinidades based upon the ways Central American Americans, Dominican Americans, and Chicanos and Chicanas have historically traveled through the raciological color lines of the United States. By bringing some of the rich, ethnoracial heterogeneity of U.S. Latinos and Latinas from the diasporas and borderlands of the Americas into her analysis of the U.S. South and the Global South, Milian raises important questions relating to the geospatial inequalities that determine so many of the visions of U.S. Latino and Latina writers and intellectuals.
--David Saldívar "Stanford University"