Violentologies: Violence, Identity, and Ideology in Latina/o Literature, explores how various forms of violence undergird a wide range of Latina/o subjectivities, or Latinidades, from 1835 to the present. Drawing upon the Colombian interdisciplinary field of violence studies known as violentología, which examines the transformation of Colombian society during a century of political and interpersonal violence, this book adapts the neologism “violentology” as a heuristic device and epistemic category to map the salience of violence in Latina/o history, life, and culture in the U.S. and globally.

Based on one hundred primary texts and archival documents from an expansive range of Latina/o communities – Chicana/o, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, Dominican American, Salvadoran American, Guatemalan American, and various mixed-heritages and transversal hybridities throughout the world – Violentologies features multiple generations of Latinx combatants, wartime non-combatants, and “peacetime” civilians whose identities and ideologies extend through, and also far beyond, familiar Latinidades. Based on this discrepant archive, Violentologies articulates a contrapuntal assessment of the inchoate, contradictory, and complex range of violence-based Latina/o ontologies and epistemologies, and corresponding negotiations of power, or ideologies, pursuant to an expansive and meta-critical Pan-Latina/o methodology and, ultimately, an anti-identitarian Post-Latina/o paradigm.