Syllabi February 6, 2020

In books on the borderlands, the white gaze abounds: Latinx authors are told there’s just no budget for our stories, while seven-figure advances are granted to establishment writers who consider the border from a distance. Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt, a book about a woman and her son fleeing Mexico for the United States, was quickly anointed by Oprah Winfrey as a must-read. The fact that it was written by a white, nonmigrant novelist at first failed to register. (Soon after, nearly one hundred authors asked Winfrey to reconsider.) The controversy was the latest illustration of how literature suffers when writers