Invisibility and Influence

Know about the book -

Invisibility and Influence is written by Regina Marie Mills and published by University of Texas Press. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 1477329145 (ISBN 10) and 9781477329146 (ISBN 13).

""Invisibility and Influence" is the first study of writings depicting Afro-Latinx life in the US and the Hispanophone Caribbean. It demonstrates how a century's worth of Afro-Latinx writers in both places helped shape life-writing, including autobiography, memoir, collective autobiography, and other formats. Mills's work explores the tensions these writers experienced in being viewed by others as only either Latinx or Black, not as a distinctive community that embodies both and should not be seen as simply a "bridge" between them. This is not only a story of this specific and overlooked community, but is also a history of how its work shaped and complicated discourses on race and colorism in the western hemisphere. In doing so, these writers created a literary history of themselves within the broader literary history of the Americas. The first chapter looks at the life writings of Arturo (Arthur) Schomburg, a writer who collected and recovered the voices of lost writers of the African Diaspora such as Phyllis Wheatley. His collections of papers and art eventually created the core archive for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Mills elucidates his own writings of his life in Harlem and shows how they were in deeper conversation with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle's writings that had shaped a white American tradition of autobiography as well as with Black autobiographical writers such as W.E.B. DuBois. She extends the ties of Schomburg's Afro-Puerto Rican background and life writings to Jesus Colón's "sketches" in the 1920s, and even further to self-depictions by members of The Young Lords through multiple medias such as photography, film, and poetry. She is particularly interested in the ways that The Young Lords created a model of "observe and participate" that permeates all of their activities, from recruitment to writing, among others. She uses the work of Afro-Cuban and Puerto Rican writer Piri Thomas to think about the crucial role that violence against minority communities plays in the creation of self-identity. Her final chapter considers the place of secrecy and spirituality in the work of mostly (but not solely) Afro-Latina writers to re-center how the valuing of domesticity and spirituality can push back against the way their lives are marginalized to create their own Afro-Latina feminisms"--