Associate Professor of Latina/o Literature and Latina/o Studies, Carmen E. Lamas, has been awarded the MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies for her book, The Latino Continuum and the Nineteenth-Century Americas: Literature, Translation, and Historiography, published by Oxford University Press. The honor was awarded by The Modern Language Association of America at its annual convention in January.
In The Latino Continuum and the Nineteenth-Century Americas: Literature, Translation, and Historiography, Carmen E. Lamas treats the emergence of Latina/o literature in the 1800s as a literary and historical formation that decenters and reorients both US and Latin American cultural formations, fundamentally reconfiguring our understanding of the literary history of the American continent. Lamas recovers a continuum of latinidad that is neither confined to North America or South America nor wholly the purview of the past or present. In doing so, she places under scrutiny how the story of América has been written and narrated: which sources are chosen, how these sources are interpreted, and whose voices are heard. Lamas challenges us to reconsider which American futures have been imagined or foreclosed and to envision not only new pasts but also new futures.
Read more about the MLA Prize here.