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Although I have been engaged by the issues raised in this book for a long time, the idea for the book got consolidated at a conference held at the University of Zagreb, Croatia in 2018. I presented there a paper titled “Towards a Decolonial Aesthetics of the Global South” and thought of the parallels between the two peripheries, the one where I was born and raised, and the one I chose to study. I would like to thank Ignacio López-Calvo for organizing the 10th Conference on East-West Cross-cultural Relations: East-West and Transpacific Studies in Zagreb and Ignacio Sánchez Prado for a keynote. This event has been an endless source of intellectual stimulation and inspiration.

I presented selections of this book at conferences hosted by the Modern Language Association (2017 and 2018), the Latin American Studies Association (2018), the American Comparative Literature Association (2017), the CUNU Graduate Center (2016), and the Society for Comparative Literature and the Arts (2017). I would like to thank the organizers, my co-panelists, and colleagues in the audience who engaged my work with constructive feedback. I sharpened my ideas on Latin America and the Global South in conversations that took place at the 3rd International Summer School of Latin American Studies at the University of Novi Sad, Serbia in 2019. I am particularly indebted to Bojana Kovačević-Petrović, Dejan Mihailović, Andreas Merck, Alexis Toribio Dantas, and Carlos Juárez Centeno for their incisive comments following my presentation on the literary effects and the global circulation of Mexican Muralism.

I would also like to acknowledge the colleagues who invited me to address some of the topics discussed in the book: Roberto Cantú at California State University–Los Angeles, Svetlana Tyutina at California State University–Northridge, César Domínguez at Universidad Complutense in Spain, and Lori Cole at Global Modernisms: A research collaborative of the NYU Center for the Humanities. I am particularly grateful to Robert Higney, Thomas Kitson, and Matt Eatough for the incisive comments on the paper I presented at Global Modernisms. I am deeply indebted to these colleagues and friends for their support: Carolina Rocha, Ian Almond, Axel Gasquet, Jelena Filipović, Odile Cisneros, Anne Pomeroy, Janice Joseph, Jacqueline Loss, Robert McKee Irwin, Adela Pineda-Franco, Juan de Castro, Jorge Coronado, Juan Ramos, Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola, María Montt-Strabucchi, Héctor Jaimes, Antonio Isea, Dubravka Sužnjević, Mirjana Djorojević, Benita Sampedro, Natalia Brizuela, Araceli Tinajero, Paola Park, Shigeko Mato, Kerstin Behnke, Francisco Hernández-Adrián, Hakim Abderezzak, Anne Burke, Jelena Predović, and Maria Eugenia Mudrovcic.

While on sabbatical, I spent the Spring 2018 semester at New York University where I worked as FRN-NYU Scholar-in-Residence. I am grateful to Jens Andermann for his support from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and to the librarians at the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library for their help while I conducted research for this book.

My thanks go to Thomas Ward, the editor of the Latin American Decolonial and Postcolonial Literature series at Lexington Books, for his insight and guidance; to Holly Buchanan for stewarding this book through its late stages with great patience and professionalism; to the anonymous reviewers who have offered invaluable and generous advice on shaping the book’s main premise.

Earlier versions of pieces of two chapters appeared in journals. I thank Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, Viaggiatori Journal, and Iberoamericana. América Latina-España-Portugal for permission to reprint these. I also thank Stockton University for awarding me a research grant which enabled me to complete this book. Conversations with M.A. in American Studies students during the course on Literature of the Americas I taught in Fall 2019 shaped my thoughts on various points in the book.

As always, Moez and Justin do much to remind me what really matters, and for that I am ever grateful. Jovo and Mane are a constant source of love and support from Los Angeles, CA. Finally, I dedicate this book to my parents Marija and Božidar-Božo Majstorović in Belgrade, Serbia. This is for them.