Trent Masiki, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies, Featured on "New Books Network" Podcast

Dr. Trent Masiki, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies, was interviewed recently by Dr. Reighan Gillam of Darthmouth College on the New Books Network Podcast regarding his book, The Afro-Latino Memoir: Race, Ethnicity, and Literary Interculturalism (UNC Press 2023)  Listen here. 

African American literature, culture, and nationalism shaped Afro-Latino identity formation more profoundly than typically imagined between the post-war and post-soul eras. This is particularly evident in Afro-Latino memoirs. Despite their literary and cultural significance, Afro-Latino memoirs have been marginalized in both Latino and African American studies. Masiki’s new book remedies this problem by bringing critical attention to the understudied African American influences in Afro-Latino memoirs published after the advent of the Black Arts movement. Using interpretive strategies and historical methods from literary and cultural studies, Masiki explores why and how Afro-Latino memoir writers turned to the African American experience as a model for articulating their Afro-Latinidad. 

The Afro-Latino Memoir contributes new insights to both Latino and African American studies by examining how varying types of Black nationalism informed Afro-Latino life writing in the US. Masiki’s scholarly articles appear in the journals Latino Studies, MELUS, African American Review, and College Language Association, among others. In 2022, Masiki co-guest edited “Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades,” a special issue of The Black Scholar 52.1 and served as an AP Visiting Fellow in African American Studies for the College Board.  

https://uncpress.org/book/9781469675275/the-afro-latino-memoir/