Author: ems040

Today I received the official word from the Modern Language Association that I have been elected to a five-year term on the executive committee of the forum for Latina and Latino Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. That means I will serve as a member of the committee from January 8, 2018 until the end of the January 2023 convention.

The Latina and Latino forum organizes various panels on the topic of US Latinx Studies at the MLA convention by issuing thematic CFP’s in advance of the conference. Additionally, the forum is tasked with sustaining a scholarly community and offers opportunities for networking outside of the convention sessions by hosting cash bar receptions, often in collaboration with other forums. Finally, Latina and Latino forum promotes Latinx literary studies via MLACommons.

At the 2017 Caribbean Studies Association conference held in the Bahamas, Elena Machado Sáez chaired a panel on “Absent Presence: Silenced Histories in Caribbean Writing and Art.” She presented on “Blackout on Broadway: Affiliation and Audience in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton.” Her fellow panelists included Jocelyn Stitt from the University of Michigan who presented on “Raw Materials? Absence and Caribbean Knowledge” and Sobeira Latorre from Southern Connecticut State University who presented on “Blackness, Taínos, and Historical Recovery in Dominican Literature in the US.”

The journal American Literary History has published a review of Market Aesthetics.

Phillips Casteel finds that “Machado Sáez’s comparative analysis of diasporic Caribbean literary production has the advantage of foregrounding commonalities among second-generation writers who emerged in an era of multiculturalism in various regions of the Global North.” Additionally, she argues that “Machado Sáez strikingly demonstrates that the novels introduce author- and reader-doubles in order to stage the challenges of reception and communication between author and reader.”

Check out the rest of the review here.

Machado Sáez published her review of Rosamond King’s Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination (2014) in the December 2016 issue of the Caribbean Studies journal Anthurium.

 

The journal ARIEL has just published a review of Market Aesthetics.

Karen Fay Yaworski lauds Market Aesthetics for its “insightful and complex” arguments, particularly the “elegant, fluid discussion in which Machado Sáez draws incisive, macro­level conclu­sions about Caribbean diasporic historical fiction.”

Check out the rest of the review here.

Check out the creative nonfiction piece I recently published in the online literary journal, Aster(ix). My microeditorial, “Haunting Hamilton,” is inspired by my experience listening to the soundtrack of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical, Hamilton.

The journal Postcolonial Text has just published a review of Market Aesthetics.

Describing Machado Sáez’s approach as “fruitful and illuminating,” Shane Graham argues that “Market Aesthetics gives us a framework for reading Caribbean diasporic literature that has both flexibility and explanatory power.”

Check out the rest of the review here.

I had the pleasure of having Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction (University of Virginia Press 2015) launched at the Caribbean Studies Association conference in Haiti in June 2016. Carol Bailey of Westfield State University graciously agreed to introduce the book, providing an overview of its arguments and (thankfully) some its merits.

I’m grateful to the organizers of the Author Celebration panel, Kamille Gentles-Peart, Karen Flynn, and Sheri K. Lewis, for their hard work, generous spirit, and joyful celebration of Caribbean Studies scholarship.

The Author Celebration panel also included presentations on Yarimar Bonilla’s Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment, Angelique Nixon’s Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture, and Andrea Queeley’s Rescuing Our Roots: The African Anglo-Caribbean Diaspora in Contemporary Cuba.