Francisco Robles
Assistant Professor of English
Faculty Affiliate, Institute for Latino Studies
Concurrent Faculty, Gender Studies Program
Specialties: Chicanx Literature, African American Literature, American Literatures, Postcolonial Literature
Degrees: BA, Washington University in St. Louis; MA, PhD, Princeton University
My name is Dr. Francisco E. Robles, and I teach and research in American Literatures of the twentieth century, focusing in particular on Multi-Ethnic American Literature.
My current book project, Migrant Modes: Aesthetics on the Move in Midcentury U.S. Multiethnic Writing, examines literary and musical representations of migrants in the United States, spanning from the 1930s into the 1980s. I assert that the aesthetic and political legacies of the Popular Front transform into the Progressive Party’s coalitional post-war platform, which in turn shifts with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, which has its own resonance and legacy in the 1970s. Insisting on this continuity, I trace a distinctive genealogy of coalitional aesthetics that has not yet received literary theoretical or historical treatment. Some of the texts I look at in Migrant Modes are by Zora Neale Hurston, Muriel Rukeyser, Sanora Babb, Carlos Bulosan, Woody Guthrie, Américo Paredes, Tomás Rivera, Los Lobos, Alice Walker, Odetta, and the authors included in This Bridge Called My Back. I am also a co-convener of the Desert Futures Collective: https://desertfutures.yale.edu/.
Publications:
“Transformation and Generation: Preliminary Notes on Reading the Poetics of the Memphis Sanitation Strike.” Post45: Peer Reviewed Issue 5, Part 1 (Fall 2020), “Formalism Now.” <http://post45.org/2020/12/robles-transformation-and-generation>
“Unsettling Monuments of Chicanx Masculinity in Estela Portillo Trambley’s ‘Rain of Scorpions.’” In Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities, ed. Frederick Luis Aldama and Arturo Aldama. University of Arizona Press (August 2020), Pages 228-247: <https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/decolonizing-latinx-masculinities>
“Jean Toomer’s Cane and the Borderlands of Encounter and Contradiction.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, Volume 45, Issue 1 (Spring 2020), Pages 27–48: <https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlz064>
“Lamentation, Remembrance, the Body.” Post45: Contemporaries (January 2020). <https://post45.org/2020/01/lamentation-remembrance-the-body/>
“Introduction: The Body of Contemporary Latina/o/x Poetry.” With William Orchard. Post45: Contemporaries (January 2020). <https://post45.org/2020/01/the-body-of-contemporary-latina-o-x-poetry/>
“Lamentations.” Killing the Buddha (Summer 2019): <http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/exegesis/lamentations>
“Illuminating Narratives of and by the Undocumented: A Review of Documenting the Undocumented: Latino/a Narratives and Social Justice in the Era of Operation Gatekeeper, by Marta Caminero-Santangelo.” Small Axe: SX Salon 29, Fall 2018: <http://smallaxe.net/sxsalon/reviews/illuminating-narratives-and-undocumented>
“Review of A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture, by Raúl Coronado.” New Mexico Historical Review, Volume 92 Issue 4, Fall 2017: 498-499.
Forthcoming Work:
“Communal Imagination and the Problem of Allegory in Tomás Rivera’s …y no se lo tragó la tierra.” Twentieth-Century Literature. Forthcoming.
“Lydia Mendoza’s Moving Homelands.” Latino Studies. Forthcoming.
“Afrofuturism: Heuristic or Historical Descriptor? And Some Thoughts on Phillis Wheatley.” In Justice in Time: Critical Afrofuturism and the Struggle for Black Freedom, ed. Elizabeth Reich and Ryan Kernan. University of Minnesota Press. Under contract.
Contact Information:
211 Decio Hall
574 631-7479
http://roblesgomez.wixsite.com/francisco-robles
Postal Address:
Department of English
233 Decio Hall
Notre Dame, IN 46556