This seminar proposes a comparative examination of the Latinx novel across national, linguistic, and historical formations. Rather than treating the Latinx novel as a stable or unified literary category, the seminar foregrounds its heterogeneity across Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban, Central American, and other diasporic traditions while considering the shared historical conditions that have shaped its development. Participants will explore how Latinx novels emerge in dialogue with U.S., Latin American, and Caribbean literary traditions, offering new ways of understanding the novel as a hemispheric and transamerican form.

The seminar situates the contemporary visibility of Latinx fiction within a much longer literary history. While writers such as Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez, and Junot Díaz have helped establish Latinx literature as a recognizable category within the U.S. literary marketplace, their success rests on institutional and aesthetic foundations built by earlier generations of writers, activists, and cultural organizers. From nineteenth-century novels responding to independence movements, colonialism, migration, and racialization to the community-based publishing initiatives of the Chicano and Nuyorican movements, the seminar traces the uneven historical processes through which Latinx fiction has achieved literary and institutional recognition.

A central objective is to place distinct Latinx traditions into comparative conversation rather than treating them as isolated national or ethnic literatures. Attention will be given to recurring questions of migration, diaspora, multilingualism, gender, race, political belonging, and coloniality, alongside the diverse formal strategies through which authors have reimagined the novel. Participants will also consider how Latinx fiction has circulated beyond conventional publishing networks in serialized newspapers, small presses, self-publication, archival manuscripts, testimonial writing, journalism, and other hybrid forms that challenge linear models of literary history and conventional definitions of the novel itself.

By emphasizing transhistorical genealogies, comparative methodologies, and hemispheric perspectives, this seminar invites participants to consider the challenges of producing a literary history of the Latinx novel. Rather than assuming a singular or linear tradition, the seminar considers how comparative approaches are essential for tracing the intersecting archives, languages, national formations, and diasporic trajectories that have shaped Latinx fiction across the Americas. Attending to these multiple genealogies reveals the Latinx novel not only as an aesthetic practice but also as a historical agent, one that has continually responded to changing political, cultural, and institutional conditions. The seminar thus seeks to expand our understanding of one of the most dynamic and globally significant novelistic traditions in the Americas.