Introduction: Bridging African American and Latina/o/x Studies

I n his memoir Black Cuban/Black American, Evelio Grillo insists that Afro-Latinos and African Americans are “coconspirators in the struggle to bring the walls of racial injustice and discrimination down.” We, the co-guest editors of this special issue, could not agree more. As emblematized by the Black nationalist organizations to which Arturo A. Schomburg and John Edward Bruce both belonged and cofounded, the social bonds between AfroLatinos and African Americans have existed since the nineteenth century. Mindful of this history as we entered the last five years of the International Decade for People of African Descent, we proposed this special issue to respond to the increasing interest in and need for critical discussions of Afro-Latino and African American interculturalism in the post-segregation era. Motivated by Agustín Laó-Montes’s call for interdisciplinary collaboration between Black studies and Latina/o/x studies and byVeraM.Kutzkinski’s contention that the “authenticating rhetoric” of “Afro-Hispanic American” literary criticism is shaped by the Black Power, Black Arts, and Négritude movements, we put out a call for papers to investigate the relationship between Afro-Latinidad and the post-soul aesthetic. The term post-soul describes the socioeconomic conditions, cultural changes, and aesthetic sensibilities that characterize Black experiences in the US after the mid-1970s, after soul music lost its mass popularity. The post-soul generation is Black Generation X. Raised on the tenets of civil rights integrationism, the post-soul generation eschews, by and large, essentialist concepts of Black subjectivity, chauvinist notions of Black authenticity, and aesthetic preoccupations with Black political revolution. The post-soul aesthetic values experimentation, cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, social inclusion, liberal individualism, and ideological freedom. One of the faults of the post-soul aesthetic is its centering of the African American experience as the Black experience, its reluctance to engage with Black ethnic diversity in America and the Western hemisphere. Given that the post-soul condition and the mid-1970s boom in the scholarly study of Afro-Latinidad are coterminous, we think it is high time that the two concepts be put in dialogue with each other. In the spirit of rigorous intellectual exchange, this special issue includes articles that variously accept, reject, and expand the post-soul aesthetic as they engage with Afro-Latinidad. Ranging from New York to Atlanta and from Panama to Brazil, the collection of interviews, scholarly articles, and personal essays in this issue discuss Afro-Latina literary fiction, Latino anti-blackness, Afro-Latina feminist epistemologies, and Latino/African American interculturalism in popular music and video games. Regina Marie Mills and Trent Masiki begin the issue with “Naming Loss: An Interview with Naima Coster.” A proud New Yorker of Caribbean heritage, novelist Naima Coster was born and raised in Fort Greene, Brooklyn to parents who