About the Journal

Journal History

Periphērica is a journal devoted to publishing in-depth research on the literary and cultural histories of Latino-América and the Iberian peninsula. Latino-América is here understood from a hemispheric perspective seeking to defy and question the disciplinary barriers imposed both by modern nation-states, their borders and cultural mappings, and the competing categories of Latin American and Latino Studies, which are increasingly obsolete. Similarly, our journal questions the nation-based disciplinary categories of Hispanisms and Cold War Latin Americanisms with their entrenched imperial designs over the American hemisphere. Its title, in Latinized Greek, seeks to evoke both the origin of Latinitas as a violent expansive cultural construct with its center as well as its barbaric others - its imagined peripheries. It is from the contentious, marginal, peripheral spaces of critical questioning of the hegemonic impulse of empire at work within culture that this journal seeks to operate and carry out its generation of new knowledges. The Pacific Northwest where the journal is incepted was once conceived as the last and ultimate periphery of several empires, including the British, Russian, Spanish, and of course the U.S. continental empire, all of which sought to locate their colonial enclaves, over-impose their cartographies and toponymies over indigenous territories as they encroached onto their lands, and over time exterminated hundreds of thousands of human beings, erasing their languages and cultural traditions. In recognition of the sheer colonial savagery at the points of origin of Latin/Hispanic/Iberian cultures, but also of all forms of "Americanism", in as much as the term echoes the exploratory, cartographic impulse of empire, still latent within all these labels, that our journal seeks to explore peripheral modes of looking at and thinking about literary and cultural histories. Periphērica is born as a result of the increased collaboration between researchers and institutions throughout the Pacific Northwest working on Latino-América and the cultures of Iberia.

Focus and Scope

Periphērica focuses on the liminal spaces of cultural production. We seek to publish articles in English, Spanish, or Portuguese, that deal with the intersection of society, culture, and literature in Latino-América, the Iberian peninsula, and Lusophone and Hispanophone areas of Africa and Asia.

Peer Review Policy

Our double-blind peer review process typically takes six to eight weeks and we aim to pair each submission with two peer reviewers based in the U.S. or abroad. Reviewers are asked to judge the merits of the article and its contribution to the field(s).

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.