Category: News

Despite the obstacles presented by the “bomb cyclone” blizzard, the MLA 2018 panel on “Digital Humanities in Practice: Caribbean Models” was a resounding success. Megan Jeanette Myers of Iowa State University moderated thepanel. While Kaiama L. Glover of Barnard College was unable to attend, the panel opened with a discussion of her multimodal collaborative project, In the Same Boats. Nathan Dize of Vanderbilt University presented on “An Explosion in the Archives: Reframing French Archives through Caribbean Digital Praxis”and discussed on the DH archive project, Colonies in Crisis. As the final presenter, Elena Machado Sáez introduced her current research project, comparing Lin-Manuel Miranda’s strategies for negotiating intimacy and ethics on Twitter with those of other Latinx-Caribbean writers. She focused on a comparative analysis of Miranda’s use of Twitter, distinguishing his rhetoric of affiliation from that of other Latinx writers.

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.