Sarah Quesada, Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Romance Studies and Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies is the recipient of a 2023 Honorable Mention for a First Book from The Modern Language Association of America (MLA) for The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature, published by Cambridge University Press.
The award committee stated:
"Sarah M. Quesada’s The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature is a groundbreaking work in world literature and transatlantic studies that fundamentally reorients discussions of race, cultural memory, and decolonialization in the Global South. Combining detailed literary analysis of major writers with the exploration of historical lieux de mémoire represented by sites on the UNESCO slave route, Quesada develops an illuminating method of 'visiting text while reading sites' to exhume a Latin Africa that has been largely overlooked in Eurocentric accounts of world literature."
The MLA Prize for a First Book, first established in 1993, is one of twenty-two awards that will be presented at the association’s annual convention in Philadelphia on January 5, 2024.
