Overview

A compelling exploration of materiality and semiotics in Latinx inscriptions Writers and artists from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Latinx New York operate under the pressures of inscription: the material and semiotic entanglement of making a mark as a marked artist. By employing layered material tropes and figures, such as stone, dust, viscera, and animality, their works do not represent a singular Latinx experience and instead, must be read at the margin of language and matter. Matters of Inscription explores feminist and queer inscriptions of Latinidad, encompassing the intersections of materiality and semiotics in art, performance, poetry, plays, and fiction. By delving into these figural matters, Christina A. León highlights how writers and artists such as Zilia Sánchez, Ana Mendieta, Manuel Ramos Otero, María Irene Fornés, Justin Torres, and Roque Salas Rivera forge material inscriptions that transcend individual lives and call for a broader analytical perspective unmoored from biographical anchors. The book urges readers to reevaluate the notion of difference, which has momentarily sought solace in identitarian terminology. León engages in rhetorical analysis that reassesses how the terms of Latinx studies have been challenged and how they are failing. Rather than categorizing texts based on predetermined taxonomic terms or individual subjects’ lives, the book tracks figures situated at the edges of materiality and semiosis. This approach addresses the continuous marginalization and dispossession that shape the phenomenon of Latinx identity (“latinidad”) by recentering conceptual questions of origin, diaspora, pedagogy, and belonging. The book contends that losses and deprivations should be rendered incommensurate to avoid collapsing the richness of different experiences or scales of ontological debasement. By focusing on the interplay of materiality and semiotics, Matters of Inscription challenges conventional approaches that seek to homogenize and anticipate what Latinx might mean and instead calls for a more capacious and nuanced analysis that goes beyond individual biographies.

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9781479816774

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"""Wandering through the signs of Latinidad, Christina León offers a reading of some of its radiantly opaque figures, calling forth attention to the marks that matter through a counterpoint of abstraction and materiality. Identity does not disappear: it emulses into canvas, earth, and print; it challenges us to envision another relationship between experience and its aesthetic expression. Refusing categories such as outsider, misfit, and minoritarian, León fractures mere symbolic inclusion and offers a path to the sensible. Shifting from a straightforward reading of identity to an intricate reading of reference, León goes beyond ethnic/racial and sexual-gender identity markers to unearth Latinidad as catachrestic, incommensurate with its mark."" * Licia Fiol Matta, author of A Queer Mother for the Nation: The State and Gabriela Mistral. * ""Rich and passionate, and simply superb. In a moment of critical pressure on the very categories of ‘latinidad’ and ‘latinx,’ in a moment of reflection on the status of queerness as ‘cuir,’ Matters of Inscription provides a complex and rich ethical-political reading of their construction in and through aesthetic practice. Powerful in its conceptual approximation, it is even more impressive in its readings of Ana Mendieta, Manuel Ramos Otero, María Irene Fornés, Justin Torres, and Roque Salas Rivera."" * Rocío Zambrana, author of Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico *"

Wandering through the signs of Latinidad, Christina León offers a reading of some of its radiantly opaque figures, calling forth attention to the marks that matter through a counterpoint of abstraction and materiality. Identity does not disappear: it emulses into canvas, earth, and print; it challenges us to envision another relationship between experience and its aesthetic expression. Refusing categories such as outsider, misfit, and minoritarian, León fractures mere symbolic inclusion and offers a path to the sensible. Shifting from a straightforward reading of identity to an intricate reading of reference, León goes beyond ethnic/racial and sexual-gender identity markers to unearth Latinidad as catachrestic, incommensurate with its mark. * Licia Fiol Matta, author of A Queer Mother for the Nation: The State and Gabriela Mistral. * Rich and passionate, and simply superb. In a moment of critical pressure on the very categories of ‘latinidad’ and ‘latinx,’ in a moment of reflection on the status of queerness as ‘cuir,’ Matters of Inscription provides a complex and rich ethical-political reading of their construction in and through aesthetic practice. Powerful in its conceptual approximation, it is even more impressive in its readings of Ana Mendieta, Manuel Ramos Otero, María Irene Fornés, Justin Torres, and Roque Salas Rivera. * Rocío Zambrana, author of Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico *

Author Information

Christina A. León is Assistant Professor in the Program in Literature at Duke University. Her writing has been published in Diacritics, Representations, GLQ, ASAP/Journal, and Women and Performance, among other places.

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