The title of this book presents the reader with a double challenge. The first is related to the expanded meaning of “poetics,” a concept that originated even before the Greeks, and evolved over the centuries, traversing diverse historical, literary and philosophical territories. In so doing, the notion of poetics absorbed a variety of connotations from numerous rhetorical schools and incorporated perspectives and debates around both the nature of literary discourse and the uses of literature. Aristotle's Poetics (c. 335 BCE) is the first study concerned with the properties of literary works and not just with their meanings; in other words, it deals with literature as an artifact created according to certain organizing principles in the pursuit of a specific resonance. In this sense, literature is subject to disciplinary knowledge and not only to hermeneutic analysis. The questions posed from the perspective of poetics are, then, how texts reach the capacity to create and communicate meaning, what procedures are used to achieve this goal, what the effects are of the literary work and how they come to fruition as the unique and distinguishing features of a specific work.

As for the notion of race, its meaning is no less complex and intricate, particularly taking into consideration the current acknowledgment of race as a social and political construction, closely related to the practice of colonialism, and perpetuated in national environments. Historically, race functioned as the ideological/discursive mechanism that supposedly legitimized the exploitative distribution of labor and the hierarchical organization of societies. In the nineteenth century, the elaboration of the concept of collective identity closely associated nation, race and ethnicity as the pillars of the “imagined communities” (Anderson 2016). Models of nationhood included racialization as one of the main strategies of Creole domination, thus perpetuating colonial power relations in the civic fabric of the new Latin American republics, and as an integral part of the projects of modernization.

Poetics is understood, in the context of this book, as the ensemble of discursive strategies displayed in literary writing to convey certain approaches to the issue of racial and ethnic representation. Every poetics is organized around an established but flexible set of principles, both aesthetic and ideological, related to different conceptions of subject/object dynamics, the connections between language, experience and affect, the nature of the human and its inscription in nature and culture, and so on.