With Latining America, Claudia Milian proposes that the economies of blackness, brownness, and dark brownness summon a new grammar for Latino/a studies that she names "Latinities." Milian's innovative study argues that this ensnared economy of meaning startles the typical reading practices deployed for brown Latino/a embodiment. Latining America keeps company with and challenges existent models of Latinidad, demanding a distinct paradigm that puts into question what is understood as Latino and Latina today. Milian conceptually considers how underexplored "Latin" participants--the southern, the black, the dark brown, the Central American-have ushered in a new world of "Latined" signification from the 1920s to the present. Examining not who but what constitutes the Latino and Latina, Milian's new critical Latinities disentangle the brown logic that marks "Latino/a" subjects. She expands on and deepens insights in transamerican discourses, narratives of passing, popular culture, and contemporary art. This daring and original project uncovers previously ignored and unremarked upon cultural connections and global crossings whereby African Americans and Latinos traverse and reconfigure their racialised classifications.

Nationality is not enough to understand "Latin"-descended populations in the United States LatinX has neither country nor fixed geography. LatinX, according to Claudia Milian, is the most powerful conceptual tool of the Latino/a present, an itinerary whose analytic routes incorporate the Global South and ecological devastation. Milian's trailblazing study deploys the indeterminate but thunderous "X" as intellectual armor, a speculative springboard, and a question for our times that never stops being asked. LatinX sorts out and addresses issues about the unknowability of social realities that exceed our present knowledge. Forerunners: Ideas First Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

Latining America urges us to consider how easily we consent to the proper homes for people and ideas: in our academic disciplines; as national subjects utilizing ethnic and racial designations; in our narration of migrations, origins, and symbols; in the lines along which we 'naturally' organize for our various struggles; in the way the publishing industry interpellates us as writers and readers. Milian both respects the integrity of these received categories and urges us to rethink them.-Faith Smith, editor of Sex and the Citizen: Interrogating the Caribbean. Latining America will be unquestionably the foundational book about Latino identities in the twenty-first century. Milian complicates simplistic multiculturalism by exploring 'identities-in-the-making' that challenge what a Latino or Latina may be. She argues on behalf of new subjectivities previously uncharted in any form of identity politics, those 'Latinities' identifying elements that may belong to blackness, brownness, or dark brownness. In this way, her book articulates a revolutionary transformation of what have been up to now recognizable U.S. notions of Latinos and Latinas, moving categorically away from ideological notions linked to nationalism. Milian manifests copious and fascinating knowledge about elements that define 'parenthetical bodies' while also writing a dynamic and thoroughly understandable book, one that is impossible to put down. For an academic text, this is a feat in itself.-Arturo Arias, University of Texas at AustinWith probing insight and a deep sense of humanity, Claudia Milian shows us not who but how Latinos are. Reading across an impressive range of twentieth-century literature, she shows how the rhetoric of Latino brownness responds less to white than to black and 'dark-brown' racial imaginaries. Authoritative without being programmatic, finely detailed yet well paced, Latining America is a foundational work that sets a future course for Latina and Latino studies.-Kirsten Silva Gruesz, author of Ambassad