UCLA

Arrested Solidarities: Resistance and Racial Contact Zones in the 19th Century U.S. examines how minoritarian writings articulated and imagined resistance during the period from the Mexican American War (1848) to the Spanish-American War (1898). Each chapter settles on a historical and cultural flashpoint, each displaying a different set of literary and political forces. I claim that these writings, which existed in contact zones of race and politics under the encroachments of a growing and expanding U.S. Empire, pushed the political boundaries of their genres as well as the communities in which they participated and intervened. My curated use of underread texts and forms such as newspapers also call attention to the importance of expanding the literary archive and in doing so expanding the lexicon for how humanities understands literary resistance during this period.