Can(n)on Fodder: Afro-Hispanic Literature, Heretical Texts, and the Polemics of Canon-Formation

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The recent publication of Edward J. Mullen's Afro-Cuban Literature: Critical Junctures and of Richard Jackson's Black Writers and the Hispanic Canon has brought the question of canon-formation, however belatedly, into the area of Afro-Hispanic Studies. Although the word "canon" comes from the Greek kanon, which means a measuring rod or rule, and although early church fathers appropriated the term to refer to a body of sacred texts, the concept of a literary canon gained currency in the 1930s with the emergence of the New Critics, a group of White, Southern men who defined Literature (with a capital "L") within a very narrow and restrictive aesthetic context The emergence of Black, …