This special issue investigates the intersections among Latinx, Chicanx, ethnic, and hemispheric American Studies, mapping the history of Latinx and Latin American literary and cultural production as it has circulated through the United States and the Americas. The issue comprises original archival research on Latinx print culture, modernismo, and land grabs, as well as short position pieces on the relevance of "Latinx" both as a term and as a field category for historical scholarship, representational politics, and critical intervention. Taken as a whole, the issue interrogates how Latinx literary, cultural, and scholarly productions circulate across the Americas in the same ways as the lives and bodies of Latinx peoples have moved, migrated, or mobilized throughout history. Contributors: Elise Bartosik-Velez, Ralph Bauer, Rachel Conrad Bracken, Anna Brickhouse, John Alba Cutler, Kenya C. Dworkin y Mendez, Joshua Javier Guzman, Anita Huizar-Hernandez, Kelley Kreitz, Rodrigo Lazo, Marissa K. Lopez, Claudia Milian, Yolanda Padilla, Juan Poblete, David Sartorius, Alberto Varon

Sentimentalism is usually studied through US-British relations after the American Revolution or in connection to national reforms like the abolitionist movement. Transamerican Sentimentalism and Nineteenth-Century US Literary History instead argues that African American, Native American, Latinx, and Anglo American women writers also used sentimentalism to construct narratives that reframed or countered the violence dominating the nineteenth-century Americas, including the Haitian Revolution, Indian Removal, the US-Mexican War, and Cuba's independence wars. By tracking the transformation of sentimentalism as the US reacted to, enacted, and intervened in conflict Transamerican Sentimentalism and Nineteenth-Century US Literary History demonstrates how marginalized writers negotiated hemispheric encounters amidst the gendered, racialized, and cultural violence of the nineteenth-century Americas. It remaps sentiment's familiar transatlantic and national scholarly frameworks through authors such as Leonora Sansay and Mary Peabody Mann, and considers how authors including John Rollin Ridge, John S. and Harriet Jacobs, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Victor Sejour, and Martin R. Delany adapted the mode. Transamerican sentimentalism cannot unseat the violence of the nineteenth-century Americas, but it does produce other potential outcomes-including new paradigms for understanding the coquette, a locally successful informal diplomacy, and motivations for violent slave revolt. Such transformations mark not sentiment's failures or distortions, but its adaptive attempts to survive and thrive.