During early modern European expansion, America emerged as dynamic meeting ground, continuously forging multidirectional global encounters. Relating Continents dismisses the semantics of ‘encounter’ which, in the politics of naming, euphemistically substitutes invasive violence, but invests in the notion’s dimension as an enactment of literary, cultural, and social relations, fusing people, goods, texts, artifacts, ideas, and senses of belonging. Understanding the practice of relating as both connecting and narrating, this anthology investigates the linking of continents in Romance literary and cultural history, as well as the tales of entanglement produced in the process. The contributors revisit the worldwide impact of distant or in-person negotiations between conquerors and local actors; they assess how colonial interventions shift hemispheric native networks, and they examine the ties between America, Africa, and Asia. By doing so, they prove the global constitution of early modern Spanish and Portuguese American literatures, their historical and cultural contexts, and their long-lasting legacies.

This Palgrave Pivot offers new insights into leading Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa, investigating the dynamic composition of her texts, and situating her work in a larger hemispheric tendency of performativity emerging at the turn of the millennium. Presenting Anzaldúa as a quintessential figure of feminist and decolonial theory-making in the Americas, this book argues that the Chicana writer articulated her notions on fluctuations through “performative concepts� which did not respect the borders of single texts or editions, but organically grew through them. The offered close readings of Anzaldúa’s published works, drafts, and archive material demonstrate the constant changes and intertwined phases of her literary and conceptual production.