Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture

"Across the books we’ve shortlisted this year runs the theme of the everyday, which always crosses and rubs up against the categorical and the ascribed, which is always a bit of an enclosure. So it is with Latinx by Ed Morales. He calls it Latinx because he wants to user a gender-neutral term to describe Latinos and Latinas in North America. Yes, he says in the introduction that it is a much-contested term and that people have criticised it from all sorts of different angles, but he still wants to cleave to it. What the book does—again with a lot of rich historical material—is question the staple of thinking in America: thinking through the filter of white and black. The book does that by delving into the identity formations and the cultural quest of the 17 per cent of America’s population that comes from Hispanic backgrounds. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Morales traces the history of their migration from different central and Latin American countries and views the resulting cultural practices and subject positions as one of ‘ mestizaje ’ or mixedness and hybridity. It mixes; it brings together and straddles numerous ethnic and linguistic distinctions—black and white, English and Spanish, and so on. By considering the mixedness of nearly 20% of the American population, he makes the very interesting and original claim that Latinx both challenges the nation’s racial regime and suggests a new form of border thinking exceeding the racialisations of black and white. It helps to define belonging in the US in a different way—an important idea given the animosities of identity and belonging drummed up by Trump and the resurgent Right. He goes back to the origins of Latinx, but the real power of the book stems from his coverage of the cultural turns and details of different post-war decades. As a cultural thinker, he gives us lots of vignettes—of rap, of art, of cultural practices, of culture-inflected political leanings. For example, for the 1960s we understand some of the proximities with black struggle for autonomy. There is a textured richness to the account. So one way or another we have, this year, six very carefully researched, eloquently argued and highly readable books that disclose the world, that disclose us, that disclose nation, as so much more than a clash of closed cultures. This is why all of us on the jury felt that these six books absolutely deserve prominence in the public arena. By reading them, we can build on our belief that culture is ultimately engagement and not difference and separation. For us at the British Academy, we are so delighted to have this prize; it speaks to all our values. These are six fantastic books, they really are."