Violentologies

Violentologies: Violence, Identity, and Ideology in Latina/o Literature, explores how various forms of violence undergird a wide range of Latina/o subjectivities, or Latinidades, from 1835 to the present. Drawing upon the Colombian interdisciplinary field of violence studies known as violentología, which examines the transformation of Colombian society during a century of political and interpersonal violence, this book adapts the neologism "violentology" as a heuristic device and epistemic category to map the salience of violence in Latina/o history, life, and culture in the U.S. and globally. Based on one hundred primary texts and archival documents from an expansive range of Latina/o communities - Chicana/o, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, Dominican American, Salvadoran American, Guatemalan American, and various mixed-heritages and transversal hybridities throughout the world - Violentologies features multiple generations of Latinx combatants, wartime non-combatants, and "peacetime" civilians whose identities and ideologies extend through, and also far beyond, familiar Latinidades. Based on this discrepant archive, Violentologies articulates a contrapuntal assessment of the inchoate, contradictory, and complex range of violence-based Latina/o ontologies and epistemologies, and corresponding negotiations of power, or ideologies, pursuant to an expansive and meta-critical Pan-Latina/o methodology and, ultimately, an anti-identitarian Post-Latina/o paradigm.

B. V. Olguín is the Robert and Liisa Erickson Presidential Chair in English, and Director of the Global Latinidades Project, at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University, and is a Ford Postdoctoral Fellow, and National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Research Fellow. He previously served on English Department faculties at Cornell University and the University of Texas at San Antonio, with visiting appointments in the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Olguín is the author of La Pinta: Chicana/o History, Culture, and Politics (University of Texas Press, 2010).