Describing the cultural, social, and historical context of Fornés’s first artistic home, the Judson Memorial Church, and its radical arts ministry led by associate pastor (and Fornés’s future collaborator) Al Carmines, which gave dancers, musicians, visual artists, and performance makers the freedom to experiment in their work without fear of censorship while also making space available for the development, rehearsal, and presentation of their work. This contribution will explicate how Judson’s community of interdisciplinary artistic experimentation activated the foundational aesthetic (and ethic) that would guide Fornés in significant ways for the rest of her career.

For more than a decade, filmmaker Michelle Memran worked creatively with Fornés on what would become the award-winning 2018 documentary The Rest I Make Up. The celebrated and widely screened film distilled some 400 hours of footage into a 79-minute exploration of a friendship and creative collaboration that began during the period when Fornés had “stopped writing” but had not yet received an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Pearl and Memran’s co-written piece continues the collaborative process of critical reflection and creative compilation that guided the post-production phase of the film, when Katie Pearl joined the project as producer. Interweaving unused scenes from the film – transcribed from the original footage and presented here in “screenplay” form – with their own experiential observations, Pearl and Memran’s experimental memoir “documents” the complexity of María Irene Fornés’s role as “elder” during the last two decades of her life, a period beginning in 2000 and continuing through to Fornés’s death from dementia-related causes in 2018.

Alisa Solomon excavates the fragmented evidence of María Irene Fornés’s intimate relationship with noted public intellectual Susan Sontag. Arguing that the two came together at a pivotal time in their lives, Solomon demonstrates how Fornés and Sontag galvanized each other as they embarked on their disparate professional careers as writers, producing a persistent synergy in spite of their radically different backgrounds and career trajectories. Carefully charting how Fornés and Sontag cryptically acknowledged and deliberately effaced their history as romantic and creative partners, Solomon argues the relationship was foundational to both writers as not so much a matter of mutual influence as confluence rippled through both of their careers long after their romantic relationship ended.

Playwright, publisher, and teacher Caridad Svich was among the first participants in María Irene Fornés’s Hispanic Playwrights in Residence Laboratory at INTAR in the 1980s. In the decades since, Svich has become not only one of the most influential and widely produced Latina playwrights in the United States but also a central figure in documenting and preserving the Fornés legacy. Here, Svich offers a summary history of INTAR that considers how Fornés and INTAR have shaped the trajectory of Latiné theatre in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Svich’s account is also animated by her own memoiristic reflections on the experience of learning with and from Fornés at INTAR.

Christina León explicates the consequential reverberations of María Irene Fornés’s period of studying Abstract Expressionist painting with Hans Hofmann. León argues that Fornés’s work creating plays and inspiring playwrights crystallized lessons learned from studying painting with Hofmann. León also explores how her time as a painter informed Fornés’s choice of theater as her creative medium and how it activated her interest in limited space in ways that profoundly shifted what could be done on stage. Comparing Fornés to Allan Kaprow (also a Hofmann student who upended the art world away from the canvas and the stage by creating “happenings”), León evinces a genealogical overlap among Hofmann, Kaprow, and Fornés as influential figures forged from crucial milieus of artists who also created matrixial sites for other artists to create their own visions.

This essay details selected experiences from Fornés’s early life that were formative to her philosophy of life and art in order to highlight how her theatremaking relates to and extends from Havana’s vanguard movements of the 1920s–1940s. Considering Fornés’s migration alongside the trajectories of transnational movement of artists like director Francisco Morín and composer Mario Bauzá, Mayer-García evinces how this experience disposed her to approaching the world through “errant thinking” wherein one comes to know oneself through an immersion in foreign lands and cultures. By highlighting connections with some of Cuba’s most notable artists, the author argues that shared mobility, portable affects of place, and errant thinking all implicate Fornés as a displaced artist from Havana’s avant-garde circles.

Considering the life and influence of María Irene Fornés’s mother on her development, education, and theatrical career. This chapter follows the life of Cuban teacher, mother, and widow, Carmen Collado Fornés, who moved with her two daughters, María Irene and Margarita, to New York City in 1945, and lived with María Irene until her death in 1996. Key aspects of this chapter include Carmen Fornés’s vocation as a teacher, her influence on her daughter, and how María Irene’s role as caretaker informed her work as a theater artist and teacher.

This chapter locates an important constellation of Latinx literary modernities in the editorial offices and print shops of New York City’s late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spanish-language press. In contrast to familiar expressions of literary modernity in Spanish and English centered on literary autonomy, those of interest in this chapter pursued the possibilities of an expanding and increasingly interconnected world of print for achieving democracy and social justice. In New York City, that pursuit began in the context of Cuba’s and Puerto Rico’s anticolonial struggle against Spain – in the form it took in the 1880s and 1890s as José Martí built the coalition that organized Cuba’s final independence war with Spain. Some of his collaborators, including Rafael Serra and Sotero Figueroa, made Cuba’s revolutionary movement a source of ambitious thinking about the interrelationship of modern media, democracy, and social justice. Their ideas help to reveal continuities that run through early twentieth-century Spanish-language periodicals in New York City and their late nineteenth-century predecessors – including those associated with the literary movement of modernismo. Across those periods, Latinx editors and writers launched visionary and largely understudied innovations designed to make modern media a means of enabling participation in creating just democracies.

Chapter 1 sets up the founding of the 11th New York and the heightened expectations put upon them from the start. It introduces their famed colonel, Elmer E. Ellsworth, who had dreams of reinventing the citizen soldiery with his Zouave drill. But he found that converting boisterous firemen into disciplined soldiers was not quite as easy as he had anticipated. Ellsworth struggled with challenges to his authority and harsh public scrutiny. The chapter ends just as the Fire Zouaves receive orders to embark for Alexandria, confident that success on the battlefield beckoned.

The fragile alliance has held, and the Modern Language Association (MLA) approved Lomax’s proposal that he unveil Ledbetter at the annual meeting. Joined by Alan Lomax, the trio continue to head north in early December, continuing to collect songs along the way in Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. They spend Christmas in Washington, D.C. and then head to the MLA gathering, where Lomax insists that Ledbetter be presented not in the suit and bowtie he prefers, but in the outfit of a prisoner: dungaree overalls, a work shirt, and a straw hat. “Lead Belly” is thus introduced to his largest audience ever, and a storm of sensational and racist publicity follows.

Black literature of the 1980s grew in conjunction with the multifaceted cultural phenomenon known as Hip-Hop. A key aspect of this growth was the subversion of Eurocentric rules and expectations. This mindset connected to deep African American traditions on multiple levels. First, in rejecting the general belief that art should be made in accordance with Eurocentric aesthetic principles, Hip-Hop took its place in a long line of African American literary and artistic forms that took that position either as an explicitly political statement, as a reflection of respect toward African American audiences, or as some combination.Second, Hip-Hop also questioned specific tenets of Eurocentric art, such as the idea that written literature was more sophisticated than oral literature, or that linear development was inherently superior to cyclical forms. Third, Hip-Hop developed aesthetic and pragmatic strategies for making art outside of a Eurocentric framework. Fourth, Hip-Hop drew upon Afro-Diasporic conceptual frameworks and traditions as the foundation of those strategies. Finally, it used artistic debates around all of these questions as part of the art itself.

This chapter traces the ways in which, in the early 1960s, the Society of Umbra, an informal community of African American writers, artists, musicians, and activists, combined elements of bohemianism and Black cultural self-determination to lay the groundwork for the Black Arts Movement. It chronicles the emergence of the group from various activist and artist organizations of the Lower East Side of New York City as these African Americans became discontent with the political limitations of bohemian nonconformity and the artistry committed only to anti-bourgeois self-cultivation. Analyzing the poetry of Lorenzo Thomas, David Henderson, and Calvin Hernton, it clarifies how these poets pursued a shared attempt to reveal how bohemian libidinal energies could be transformed from personal artistry and individual redemption into a revolutionary Black nationalist consciousness that could, in turn, lead to collective action.

The many ingredients that fed Mass Incarceration, including racism, populism, media sensationalism, and political opportunism, are long-standing features of the American landscape. What changed that made these factors particularly salient and channeled them into a transformation of the criminal justice (and legal) system? The best answer is a crime surge.

Afro-Latin American newspapers included extensive coverage of Black populations in other countries.Articles on Black populations and race relations in Latin America, the United States, and Europe and Africa are examples of “practices of diaspora,” international communication and engagement among Black peoples that grew out of, and helped to forge, feelings of connectedness and racial solidarity.The Black press also reported on, or offered commentary on, more formal political movements promoting Black internationalism, such as Garveyism.Black papers in Argentina and Uruguay reported regularly on their northern neighbor, Brazil. Cuban papers included Puerto Rican and Dominican writers and discussions of Haiti. Throughout Latin America, writers and intellectuals of all races watched with mixed horror and fascination the workings of racial segregation and anti-Blackness in the United States.Diasporic ties were further thickened by travel, migration, and personal connections and friendships among African American and Afro-Latin American writers and intellectuals.

States make decisions to allocate resilience to (or withhold resilience from) stakeholders across these networked interests through the lens of the state’s own vulnerability and resilience needs. We have revealed how the state’s “other-regarding” responsibility to govern in the “collective interest” – allocating resilience to shore up particular (competing) individual, aggregated and/or institutional claims – and the state’s own “self-regarding” need to shore up its resilience vis-à-vis citizens, markets, and society – interact to produce and provoke state responses to squatting. Finally, because Resilient Property analyses seek to explore as much as possible of the “problem space,” we have looked beyond the horizontal scale of national legislation or litigation to investigate how multi-scalar states craft complex solutions to complex problems. This includes tailoring responses to the specific needs and priorities, pressures and strains, commitments and constraints, that come to fore at the local, regional, national or supra-national level. Multilayered responses to squatting allow scope for normative hybridity within state responses to “wicked” property problems, in ways that can support systemic equilibrium. In the first part of this chapter, we reflect on three types of state responses to squatting: (1) property/private law responses; (2) criminal justice/law-and-order responses; and (3) responses deploying other administrative functions of the state. We consider how state responses reflect alignments between state self-interest and selected aspects of the state’s other-regarding responsibilities; and how they contribute (or not) to restoring equilibrium and shoring up the authority and legitimacy of the state in moments of crisis. These national-jurisdiction level legal responses are embedded within a polycentric, multimodal, and multi-scalar matrix. In the second part of the chapter, we examine two city-level case studies: New York City and Barcelona – to reflect on moments in which local- or city-level responses were key to restoring equilibrium, or triggering tipping-points for change.