They Marched Under the Sun
My English translation of Brazilian novel They Marched Under the Sun by Cris Judar is currently under contract with Fonograf Editions.Ana and Joan will turn eighteen in twelve months. Their voices and experiences run in parallel across a narrative that explores gendered violence and persecution as well as liberatory power of dreams and rituals, and the way language can resignify bodies and sexuality. Torn between the contemporary world of advertisements, consumption, and the aesthetic and behavioral pressures of the societal mainstream and a nocturnal world of memory, death, the unconscious, and the non-binary, Ana and Joan's coming of age is a lyrical reckoning with gender politics today, in Brazil and beyond.“A poetic and incisive narrative written in cutting language that undoes and restructures everything. There is no way to escape or leave unscathed. A stunning novel, the kind readers dream of.”— Carola Saavedra“In her fiction, Cristina Judar carries out what philosopher Paul Preciado suggests in his reflections on artistic production: that it is necessary to view works of art as counter-narratives, ones that throw into question the dominant ways in which we perceive norms and deviations from the norm.”-- Raimundo Neto, São Paulo Review
Forthcoming Mar 2026
“Between Bandung and Havana: Emergent Solidarities and the Forgotten Poetry of Viva Cuba.”
In 1963, a group of prominent Indonesian writers contributed to a poetry pamphlet entitled Viva Cuba. This collection was published at a critical historical juncture: it was released after the 1955 Asia Africa Conference in Bandung, prior to the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, and before the Indonesian left was eliminated in a 1965 anticommunist coup d’état. By analyzing the now-forgotten poetry of Viva Cuba and other contextualizing texts and translations from the period, this article identifies the poetic tools Indonesian writers employed to imagine possible forms of solidarity with leftist Latin America in the early 1960s. Viva Cuba reflects cultural relationships and solidarity networks in formation—what this article coins emergent world literary circulation, drawing on concepts from Raymond Williams (1977). Indonesian poets Sitor Situmorang and H. R. Bandaharo set Latin American politics as a horizon of potential anti-imperialist alliances and proleptically frame the region as already part of the Indonesian political and cultural body. Though Cuban writers do not show reciprocal attention to Indonesia, poets such as Nicolás Guillén craft solidarity poems with China that overlap with the geopolitical and aesthetic priorities of their Indonesian counterparts.
This essay is forthcoming in Comparative Literature Studies and was awarded the 2024 American Comparative Literature Association's A. Owen Aldridge Prize for Best Graduate Student Essay.Forthcoming Dec 2025
"The Task of the Editor: Conceptual Mapping, Conquest, and Information Management in the Araucana"
This scholarly essay, forthcoming in Hispanic Review, addresses the relationship between information practices, literary texts, and empire in the Early Modern period by analyzing an unusual glossary included in early editions of Alonso de Ercilla’s epic poem the Araucana (1569–1589). Existing research has focused principally on the poem itself, only considering Ercilla’s glossary, entitled the “Declaración de cosas notables,” as a supplementary repository of information, and overlooking that it serves a rhetorical function. An analysis of the relationship between the “Declaración” and the epic demonstrates that the glossary elaborates upon aspects of the poem that align with Spanish imperial goals. Acting as a guide for readers, the “Declaración” directs attention away from more ideologically ambiguous and testimonial moments in the text, augmenting instead a top-down, retrospective narration of conquest and territorial expansion. This glossary thus gestures to a symbiotic relationship between editorial strategies of information management in the metropole and eyewitness testimony in the Americas.
Forthcoming Nov 2025
