Argentine Literature continues to figure prominently in Spanish and Modern Languages programs in the English-speaking world, and there are specialists in Argentine literature in most departments in the United States, UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. If we peruse the anthologies commonly used for survey courses, and the requirements for graduate degrees, we will find Argentine literature overrepresented. Certain authors are also regularly taught in English and Comparative Literature departments, and in large survey classes in World Literatures, Third World Literatures, and Gender Studies. This continued interest within and outside foreign language departments, and the recent boom in translation of Argentine works, provides fertile ground for this volume.

As indicated by the title, this chapter covers cases raising issues not covered in other chapters. Most prominent are cases concerning recusal not related to campaign fundraising or expenditures, most of which do not result in an order for recusal. Other issues covered include judicial districting unrelated to voting rights, retaliation, challenges to the creation of new positions arising in the context of filling them, method of selection (appointment or election) unrelated to filling an interim vacancy, recall, and a range of other miscellaneous issues.

New Negro writers and artists often spotlighted the contrast between the liberatory potential of dynamic bodily movement and the restricted social spaces of Harlem, which were shaped by segregation. This chapter examines a variety of cultural texts – social and cultural history by Wallace Thurman and James Weldon Johnson, visual art by Winold Reiss, and short fiction by Rudolph Fisher and Langston Hughes – to argue that representations of dance and bodily movement opened the way for creative engagement with the spatial dynamics of segregation and overcrowding in Harlem, which was fascinated by the look, the sound, and the feel of dance. Fisher’s short story “High Yaller,” for instance, probes the affective or subjective dimensions of segregation, passing, and colorism through a sustained focus on dancing bodies in “jim-crowed” scenes of Harlem cabaret and the traversing of “color lines” in the cityscape of New York.

Chapter 3 provides a statistical portrait of the 2,103 cases concerning the selection of state judges identified in the research. This portrait includes the frequency of such litigation over time and across states, the issues raised in the litigation, and how those issues vary over time, across states, and by type of election used. The chapter includes a comparison of litigation in state courts versus federal courts, noting that federal litigation over state judicial selection is a relatively recent phenomenon and has been driven in significant part by the Voting Rights Act. Importantly, the vast majority of the litigation occurs in states using contested judicial elections to select and/or retain judges.

In the mid-twentieth century a flow of books written by women writers was published. These works reformulated the emancipatory imaginaries of the political and artistic avant-gardes of the 1920s with original explorations of gender and affective relationships. In these books can be seen the emergence of a new sensibility along with a new poetics that nourishes the demands of the market and the expectations of a wider and more diversified audience prone to reading new experiences, innovative aesthetics, and novel affects. This chapter heeds the articulation of the sensitive and the political in different writers. Salvadora Medina Onrubia, Norah Lange, and Sara Gallardo are the writers of different decades who through their work, the literary-discursive figures they created, and their biographical stories displayed passionate and conflictive interactions with their time. They pursued emancipation specially through language. Literary texts, public speech, and print columns help them to mobilize more than just a political idea or a literary project, by activating perceptions, emotions, sensibilities, and public imaginations. This chapter will analyze the host of feelings that emerged in this process, mainly women’s genuine interest to get close to other women.

This chapter makes a case for integrating some musical narratives – both verbal and audiovisual – into the field of Argentine literature. After considering the case of Luis Alberto Spinetta’s 1973 “Cantata de puentes amarillos,” a song generally valued as a poetic achievement, it highlights the historical role of five iconic music works: the Himno Nacional, the national anthem written in 1813 by Vicente López and Blas Parera, which inaugurated a state ritual based on the alleged epic value of personal sacrifice; “Mi Noche Triste,” a tango recorded by Carlos Gardel in 1917, which describes a beloved woman’s absence from the perspective of a suffering male narrator, thus nourishing a topos of gender relations in popular culture; Estancia, a classical ballet composed by Alberto Ginastera in 1941, which displays the nationalist myth of Argentina’s rural authenticity; “Manuelita la Tortuga,” a children’s song by María Elena Walsh, the story of a female turtle who travels to Paris in order to be made beautiful; and Charly García’s “No bombardeen Buenos Aires,” a rock song that in June 1982 proposed a critical view of the Malvinas/Falklands War, contributing to the negative memory of the dictatorship of 1976–83.

This chapter traces the complex legacies of multiple religious traditions, including Christianity, Islam, and syncretistic spirituality, as they inform utopian strands of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American fiction, including the miraculous realism of Toni Morrison, the lyrical historicism of Marilynne Robinson, and the religiously themed science fiction of James Blish and G. Willow Wilson. Apocalyptic concepts, with a strong emphasis on transformative and liberatory possibility, are a recurrent element of these narratives.  The term “spirituality” itself is ambiguous, particularly in a national context in which religion has been a source of both oppression and hope. The chapter draws on postsecular critiques of literature and culture that, in John McClure’s terms, indicate “a mode of being and seeing that is at once critical of secular constructions of reality and of dogmatic religion.” It argues that skeptical perspectives do not necessarily militate against the aesthetic and ethical potential of theologically oriented utopian fiction.

This chapter examines novels by both male and female writers who published some of their mostprominent works in and around 1884, to address issues and themes that illustrate generalarguments about the 1880s and beyond. Authors and their works are presented as aheterogeneous group of men and women whose views pose multiple perspectives on theconnection between Argentine literature and politics. Miguel Cané, Eugenio Cambaceres, JuanaManuela Gorriti, Raimunda Torres y Quiroga, Antonio Argerich, and Lola Larrosa comment oneducation, reading, writing, literature, and family relations, reflecting the frenetic changes inWestern industrialized societies at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as the globalanxieties that these transformations brought to individuals across classes and territories. Theformation of Argentine literature can only be thought of as an unfinished process, with multiplesources, and in connection with other nations and regions. Setting the year 1884 as themoment in which to find the literary bases of the Argentine canon is an exercise that allows usto trace, instead of a clear origin for Argentine national literature, the germ of multiple possibleaccounts of its foundation.

This chapter provides an overview of the importance of utopian theorizing in the twenty-first century. It resituates utopianism, through Blochean theory, as larger than a literary genre and more diverse than representations of perfect societies. Rather, it celebrates an ideal of the utopianism of the everyday, of the here-and-now as much as of the future. It argues for a utopianism that is necessarily decolonial as it seeks to undo the damage of racial capitalism and provide imaginative resources for living differently. It concludes with an overview of the chapters collected in this book, showing that they explore both reactionary or nostalgically inflected visions of America’s settler-colonial utopian foundations, as well as centering new strains of utopian thought emerging from the margins of hegemonic American culture.

This chapter reads César Aira’s work as an intervention in Argentine literature at the end of the twentieth century, which – since its irruption in 1981 – called for new reading protocols based on a fundamental operation: the transformation of the concept of fiction into invention. The radicalness of this invention – which embodied an unprecedented way of writing in Argentine literature – constitutes a point of inflection in storytelling.This phenomenon is described from diverse and converging points of view: the development of a singular economy; writing as the art of continuum and as a form of contemporary art; the imagination of worlds of the present by means of a general theory of documentation. The hypotheses put forward draw on a transversal reading which, while considering the whole of his books (more than a hundred), focuses on key texts which are representative of the diverse profiles of his works: the parable of nineteenth- to twenty-first-century Argentina, between Ema, the captive and Shantytown; the aporias of vision and the machines of thought from An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter to Marble; the fables of the writer in the contemporary world, between Varamo and Parménides.

“Animalia Americana” foregrounds an examination and critical analysis of the historical, literary, and theoretical correlations between Blackness and animality to assess how these correlations, specifically the ways in which animals are found “running free” within a Black literature, might guide us toward more ethical practices. This chapter reads Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha as illuminating the dominant strains of how pest animals have appeared in twentieth-century African American letters: Not only as markers of the gratuitous violence which both marks and mars Black life in modernity, but as figures through which Black writers articulate the ways of thinking about feeling, and sociality, that surviving such violence have produced. From the ways in which K-9 police dogs were unleashed upon Black people during the Civil Rights Movement as a violent form of sociopolitical suppression to the significance of animals in Black communal and familial units emblematized through the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club and DMX’s love for his American pitbull terrier, this chapter complicates the relationship between Blackness, animality, and humanity.

This chapter analyzes the colonial period, taking 1536, the date of the founding of the city of Buenos Aires, as a starting point. It aims to discuss texts linked to the conquest of the River Plate – namely, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Comentarios (1555), Ulrich Schmidl’s Derrotero y viaje a España y las Indias (1567), and Ruy Díaz de Guzmán’s Argentina (1612), among other letters, chronicles, and documents – using water, a key aspect of the spatiality constructed in these works, as a guiding axis for the analysis. This is not aesthetized water, waiting for a contemplative gaze, but water marked by overflow, excessive, water that stagnates, sickens, and stings, overcoming boundaries and impeding the actions of the body attempting to own those lands. In the colonial period, particularly in the texts discussed, a water matrix takes shape which will become the seed of fiction in Argentine literature. The presence of water not as a background or the setting for major events, but as a founding incident of narration, as the main driver of action; a presence which renders spatiality and the bodies traversing it (and enduring it) the keys to the narrative of the River Plate.