AmEfrica in Letters brings together new research on Black literary history in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries-a period that saw the consolidation of Black power movements and human rights struggles across the Americas. The Black writers examined here have left an enduring legacy on AmEfrica's mainland. Following Brazilian theorist LElia Gonzalez, the volume highlights how their prose and poetry have challenged the overarching theme of mestizo-imagined multiculturalism that endures in the region's mainstream publishing industry.

AmEfrica in Letters brings together new research on Black literary history in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries-a period that saw the consolidation of Black power movements and human rights struggles across the Americas. The Black writers examined here have left an enduring legacy on AmEfrica's mainland. Following Brazilian theorist LElia Gonzalez, the volume highlights how their prose and poetry have challenged the overarching theme of mestizo-imagined multiculturalism that endures in the region's mainstream publishing industry.

Tropical Tongues: Language Ideologies, Endangerment, and Minority Languages in Belize examines the precarious state of languages in coastal Belize. In the period following the country's independence in 1981, Kriol has risen to the level of a national language. While the prestige enjoyed by English and Spanish is indisputable, a range of historical and socio-economic developments has given Kriol an elevated status in the coastal districts at the potential expense of more vulnerable minority languages also spoken there. Using fieldwork, ethnographic observations, interviews, and surveys of language attitudes and use, Gomez Menjivar and Salmon show the attenuation of Mopan and Garifuna alongside the stigmatized yet robust Kriol language. Language endangerment studies generally focus on the loss of a minority language to a European language. Tropical Tongues presents a fresh perspective on language shift and loss by examining how large-scale economic restructuring can unsettle relationships among minority languages.