Jonathan Blitzer’s well-written and evocative book, Everyone Who is Gone is Here, has been hailed as a must-read on the U.S. current immigration emergency. In my opinion, it’s not.
In fact, it’s more about the emergency that occurred a generation or more ago, when civil wars across Central America dominated Cold War news coverage and spilled over into bitter battles between Democrats and Republicans in Congress. That war still exists, and polemics about immigration and an “unsecure” border are among the weaponry.

Fresh insight into seemingly exhausted topics often comes from unexpected places. Luís Cláudio Villafañe’s biographical account of Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (1867-1916), one of Latin America’s most influential and well-known artists, may serve as an illuminating case in point.
Instead of enlarging the already incommensurable literature on the subject with a specialized monograph or yet another mythologizing account, Villafañe chose to gather, digest and put in order all the existing material on the so-called “Prince of Spanish Letters” and produce a concise, much-needed retelling of his extraordinary life and times.

With this fascinating and theoretically sound study, Rosario Hubert has produced a key text not only in Asia-Latin American studies, but also in Latin American studies and Asian studies. In Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature, she explores, from the theoretical perspectives of world literature and cosmopolitanism, not so much how Latin American authors have mimetically represented China in their works but, rather, how their own misreadings (hence, the “disoriented” in the title of the book) of Chinese culture allowed them to reconsider world literature and join global cross-cultural debates.