Paul Allatson - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Paul Allatson

Coco Fusco, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and “American” cannibal reveries

BRILL eBooks, 2002

Coming out of the “American” nightmare with Benjamin Alire Sáenz

BRILL eBooks, 2002

Abraham Rodriguez’s boy-zone romance of “American” escape

BRILL eBooks, 2002

Afterword: Notes on transcultural traffic from across el charco pacífico

BRILL eBooks, 2002

Of Farmworkers and Other Exploitations: The Enduring Relevance of Rius's the Chicanos

In 1972, the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) published a comic by the Mexican co... more In 1972, the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) published a comic by the Mexican comic artist Rius: NACLA Presents Rius: The Chicanos. This was an English-language version of Los Chicanos, which Rius had released in his Los Agachados series in 1971. In US Latino cultural and comic history The Chicanos is an overlooked artefact: it is the first comic book-length treatment of Chicanos and the diverse drives of the Chicano Movement. In this essay I assess The Chicanos as a key example of transborder information exchange about a US population with direct links to Mexico. The Chicanos, I suggest, survives as a cultural artefact—which comes to the discussion with inevitable historical biases and oversights—that illustrates how important historical memory is in a USA in which prevail ephemeral media soundbites and claims of “fake news.” En 1972, el Congreso Norteamericano de América Latina (NACLA) publicó un cómic del dibujante mexicano Rius: NACLA Presents Rius: The Chicanos. Ésta era una versión en inglés de Los Chicanos, que Rius había lanzado en su serie Los Agachados en 1971. En la historia cultural y del cómic latino de los Estados Unidos, The Chicanos es un artefacto pasado por alto: es el primer tratamiento de longitud de un cómic de los chicanos y los diversos impulsos del Movimiento Chicano. En este ensayo, evalúo a The Chicanos como un ejemplo clave de intercambio de información transfronterizo sobre una población estadounidense con vínculos directos con México. The Chicanos, sugiero, sobrevive como un artefacto cultural—que llega a la discusión con inevitables sesgos y descuidos históricos—que ilustra la importancia de la memoria histórica en un EE UU en el que prevalecen fragmentos efímeros de los medios de comunicación de masas y afirmaciones de “noticias falsas.

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Feb 29, 2016

Historia de Mayta: A Fable of Queer Cleansing

Revista De Estudios Hispanicos, 1998

... Historia de Mayta: A Fable of Queer Cleansing. Autores: Paul Allatson; Localización: Revista ... more ... Historia de Mayta: A Fable of Queer Cleansing. Autores: Paul Allatson; Localización: Revista de estudios hispánicos, ISSN 0034-818X, Vol. 32, Nº 3, 1998 , págs. 511-536. Fundación Dialnet. Acceso de usuarios registrados. Acceso ...

Juan Davila: Queering the South

Artlink, Jun 1, 2007

In Juan Davila's world appearances are meant to deceive and provoke. Australia's Saint Ma... more In Juan Davila's world appearances are meant to deceive and provoke. Australia's Saint Mary MacKillop stands calmly, her miraculous phallus erect and glowing against her dark habit. Simon Bolivar, the Creole architect of Latin American independence from Spain, appears transsexualised on his steed, his breasts exposed, a fuck-you finger extended. Images of la Virgen de Guadalupe, the patron saint of the Americas, decorate interiors that evoke the making-do poverty of the continent's sprawling shantytowns. A cur with John Howard's grinning face peers around the legs of Uncle Sam, gazing at a naked Aussie digger poised for an imminent anal probe. Signs of the US military industrial complex bleed into images of colonial-era contact, miscegenation and genocide, and of Mapuche Indian and Stolen Generation resilience and survival. Spanish and English phrases proliferate; no translations are provided for monolingual readers of either tongue. The Andes loom over detention centres in the South Australian desert. The cultural capital represented by Raphael, Courbet, Picasso, Leger, Matisse, Warhol, Christo and Lichtenstein is deformed with citations from Australian painters, the 19th century Peruvian artist Francisco Laso, Colombia's Fernando Botero, the Mexican muralistas, and the iconoclastic gay-porn cartoonist, Tom of Finland. Everywhere, prostheses, pumped breasts, dildos, bared arses and tumescent penises abound.

Padrino

Springer eBooks, 2012

Cuban memory, “American” mobility, and Achy Obejas’s lesbian way

BRILL eBooks, 2002

Portal: journal of multidisciplinary international studies, Feb 6, 2008

Rosario Ferré’s trans-“American” fantasy, or subalternizing the self

Latino Dreams, 2002

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, Feb 25, 2019

Emerging in Los Angeles in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a queer Chicano performance artist, ... more Emerging in Los Angeles in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a queer Chicano performance artist, playwright, and writer, Luis Alfaro quickly established himself as an influential contributor to wider cultural debates about the intersections between gender, sexual, ethnoracial, class, religious, and national affiliations in the United States. In his early career Alfaro was a key player in the solo performance movement, in which performance artists used their own bodies and lives as self performance: that is, as primary physical and lived matter for interrogating their identities within a broader political questioning of US multicultural discourses. That questioning coincided with the prominence of Chicana feminist, queer, and AIDS activisms in California, all of which framed Alfaro's early performances. Much of Alfaro's work from the 1990s thus survives as historically significant chronicles of Chicana/o queer lives on the US West Coast. Alfaro consolidated his reputation in that decade with such classic solo performances as Downtown and Cuerpo Politizado, in which his body functioned as the prop onto and over which he articulated his queer memory work in relation to the Chicana/o neighborhoods of Central and East Los Angeles in which he grew up. Those neighborhoods anchor Alfaro's career-long engagements with the US national imaginary as a Chicano queer cultural producer committed to community engagement and service and to telling the stories of Los Angeles' heterogeneous Chicana/o communities. Since the 1990s Alfaro has refined his creative and critical praxis in solo performance work and plays that raise broader questions about national identity and belonging in the United States. Many of these plays have written back to and adapted works from Western theatrical and literary traditions-for example, Greek tragedies, Aesop, Spanish Golden Age theater, and Strindberg. The process of adaptation allows Alfaro to celebrate Chicanas/os and Latinas/os, and non-Latina/o immigrant communities, as cultural and ethno-racial epicenters of US national identity in the 21st century. Alfaro's post-2000 interventions into Western theatrical and literary traditions recast those traditions so that they register meaningfully, in audience terms, for Chicana/o and other communities of color grappling inevitably with historical discourses that demean immigrant and minority populations.

With his first short-story collection, The Boy without a Flag: Tales of the South Bronx (1992), A... more With his first short-story collection, The Boy without a Flag: Tales of the South Bronx (1992), Abraham Rodriguez established himself as one of the leading Latino writers of his generation, part of a wave of successful authors who emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s that includes the Dominican Junot Díaz, the Cuban American Achy Obejas, the Chicanos Diego Vázquez Jr, Yxta Maya Murray, and Dagoberto Gilb, and the Nuyorican Ernesto Quiñones. Rodriguez’s reputation was consolidated by the publication of the novels Spidertown (1993) and The Buddha Book (2001). Both texts confirmed Rodriguez as an uncompromising and decidedly unromantic chronicler of the disenfranchised Nuyorican youth of New York’s South Bronx, or El Bronx, and a gifted transmitter of Nuyorican English. Mainstream publishing success and laudatory book reviews in major U.S. newspapers and magazines, and the inclusion of his fiction in Puerto Rican, Latino, and American literature courses in schools and universities across the United States, and beyond, also attest to Rodriguez’s reputation. Alongside these achievements, however, Rodriguez’s confrontational representations of El Bronx, and his public comments on his literary elders, have embroiled him in a highly charged debate about the sociocultural validity and political impact of Nuyorican literary and cultural productions. Despite the significance of that debate, Rodriguez’s writing has to date attracted surprisingly little academic attention, perhaps a reflection of a general critical resistance to the author’s outspoken public persona and his unapologetic characterizations of an embattled and violence-prone inner city.

Frontiers: The interdisciplinary journal of study abroad, Aug 31, 2022

Research into university study abroad programs suggests that while students may have some experie... more Research into university study abroad programs suggests that while students may have some experience of local culture(s) and practices, they may be achieving no more than a superficial understanding of the host society. Alternatives to the standard study abroad models are thus essential to encourage students to engage more deeply with the host society. Research on study abroad programs argues for additional interventions and the provision of close supervision and mentoring to students. Given these arguments, this paper examines a scaffolded assessment model, designed for students at an Australian university in an international studies program established 26 years ago, and intended to enhance their learning during their compulsory year of study abroad. Through ongoing academic supervision and the design of a scaffolded fieldwork research project on aspects of the host society, we argue, the students have the potential to develop key skills such as transcultural awareness, engagement and capacity for working with diversity.

Griffith Review Online, 2023

Why do certain animals seem to magically capture the zeitgeist, invading our dreams and animating... more Why do certain animals seem to magically capture the zeitgeist, invading our dreams and animating our fears and anxieties? Animals have always played a part in the myths and stories that help us make sense of and order the world around us. But some animals push the boundaries and unsettle this order. They sit on the fence, offering a strange combination of delight and disturbance, anxiety and wonder. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss famously wrote that animals become totemic not because they’re ‘good to eat’ but because they’re ‘good to think’. Few animals have captured the popular imagination quite like the Australian white ibis, aka the bin chicken, a species that is not only good to think (about and with) but that also has something to say to us. In March 2021, the Macquarie dictionary selected ‘bin chicken’ as its Aussie Word of the Week, noting, ‘The bin chicken has pecked and scavenged its way into Australian culture.’ The dictionary even dared to suggest that the bin chicken might surpass the kangaroo as Australia’s most iconic animal. It was recognition of the urban journey of the ibis, a native species that in a few short years has gained a highly visible and permanent presence in many Australian cities and in the cultural landscape.

Camino Real, v13, n16, 2021

In 1972, the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) published a comic by the Mexican co... more In 1972, the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) published a comic by the Mexican comic artist Rius: NACLA Presents Rius: The Chicanos. This was an English-language version of Los Chicanos, which Rius had released in his Los Agachados series in 1972. In US Latino cultural and comic history The Chicanos is an overlooked artefact: it is the first comic book-length treatment of Chicanos and the diverse drives of the Chicano Movement. In this essay I assess The Chicanos as a key example of transborder information exchange about a US population with direct links to Mexico. The Chicanos, I suggest, survives as a cultural artefact—which comes to the discussion with inevitable historical biases and oversights—that illustrates how important historical memory is in a USA in which prevail ephemeral media soundbites and claims of “fake news.”

Celebrity Philanthropy

Intellect Books, Dec 1, 2015

The University of Chicago Press eBooks, Dec 15, 2015

Cultural Studies has not devoted much notice to one of the keynote developments in modern culture... more Cultural Studies has not devoted much notice to one of the keynote developments in modern culture over the last 30 years: namely, the rise of various charity projects fronted and, in the public mind, defined by celebrities. (Rojek 2014: 127) In the very noisy and complicated world that we have, people that reach large numbers of people, like Madonna does, have an extraordinarily important role to play [in promoting philanthropy]. When they're devoting their time, their money, their name, a lot of effort, a lot of organization skill to all of this, it makes a huge difference. (Jeffrey Sachs cited in Luscombe 2006). [C]elebrity humanitarianism […] is most often self-serving […] it advances consumerism and corporate capitalism, and rationalizes the very global inequality it seeks to redress; it is fundamentally depoliticizing, despite its pretensions to 'activism'; and it contributes to a 'postdemocratic' political landscape, which appears outwardly open and consensual, but is in fact managed by unaccountable elites. (Kapoor 2013: 1) Celebrity philanthropy is a visible and controversial phenomenon, as the opening quotations suggest. According to the 'Look to the Stars: The World of Celebrity Giving' website, which is advertised as 'the web's number one source of celebrity charity news and information' since 2006, there are now more than 3,400 [Hollywood-branded] celebrities involved with over 2,000 charities that aim to 'make a positive difference in the world' ('Look to the stars' 2006-15). Besides the apparent upsurge of commentary on celebrity and charity in tabloids, gossip magazines, business and news magazines, and social networking sites, there are a

Coco Fusco, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and “American” cannibal reveries

BRILL eBooks, 2002

Coming out of the “American” nightmare with Benjamin Alire Sáenz

BRILL eBooks, 2002

Abraham Rodriguez’s boy-zone romance of “American” escape

BRILL eBooks, 2002

Afterword: Notes on transcultural traffic from across el charco pacífico

BRILL eBooks, 2002

Of Farmworkers and Other Exploitations: The Enduring Relevance of Rius's the Chicanos

In 1972, the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) published a comic by the Mexican co... more In 1972, the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) published a comic by the Mexican comic artist Rius: NACLA Presents Rius: The Chicanos. This was an English-language version of Los Chicanos, which Rius had released in his Los Agachados series in 1971. In US Latino cultural and comic history The Chicanos is an overlooked artefact: it is the first comic book-length treatment of Chicanos and the diverse drives of the Chicano Movement. In this essay I assess The Chicanos as a key example of transborder information exchange about a US population with direct links to Mexico. The Chicanos, I suggest, survives as a cultural artefact—which comes to the discussion with inevitable historical biases and oversights—that illustrates how important historical memory is in a USA in which prevail ephemeral media soundbites and claims of “fake news.” En 1972, el Congreso Norteamericano de América Latina (NACLA) publicó un cómic del dibujante mexicano Rius: NACLA Presents Rius: The Chicanos. Ésta era una versión en inglés de Los Chicanos, que Rius había lanzado en su serie Los Agachados en 1971. En la historia cultural y del cómic latino de los Estados Unidos, The Chicanos es un artefacto pasado por alto: es el primer tratamiento de longitud de un cómic de los chicanos y los diversos impulsos del Movimiento Chicano. En este ensayo, evalúo a The Chicanos como un ejemplo clave de intercambio de información transfronterizo sobre una población estadounidense con vínculos directos con México. The Chicanos, sugiero, sobrevive como un artefacto cultural—que llega a la discusión con inevitables sesgos y descuidos históricos—que ilustra la importancia de la memoria histórica en un EE UU en el que prevalecen fragmentos efímeros de los medios de comunicación de masas y afirmaciones de “noticias falsas.

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Feb 29, 2016

Historia de Mayta: A Fable of Queer Cleansing

Revista De Estudios Hispanicos, 1998

... Historia de Mayta: A Fable of Queer Cleansing. Autores: Paul Allatson; Localización: Revista ... more ... Historia de Mayta: A Fable of Queer Cleansing. Autores: Paul Allatson; Localización: Revista de estudios hispánicos, ISSN 0034-818X, Vol. 32, Nº 3, 1998 , págs. 511-536. Fundación Dialnet. Acceso de usuarios registrados. Acceso ...

Juan Davila: Queering the South

Artlink, Jun 1, 2007

In Juan Davila's world appearances are meant to deceive and provoke. Australia's Saint Ma... more In Juan Davila's world appearances are meant to deceive and provoke. Australia's Saint Mary MacKillop stands calmly, her miraculous phallus erect and glowing against her dark habit. Simon Bolivar, the Creole architect of Latin American independence from Spain, appears transsexualised on his steed, his breasts exposed, a fuck-you finger extended. Images of la Virgen de Guadalupe, the patron saint of the Americas, decorate interiors that evoke the making-do poverty of the continent's sprawling shantytowns. A cur with John Howard's grinning face peers around the legs of Uncle Sam, gazing at a naked Aussie digger poised for an imminent anal probe. Signs of the US military industrial complex bleed into images of colonial-era contact, miscegenation and genocide, and of Mapuche Indian and Stolen Generation resilience and survival. Spanish and English phrases proliferate; no translations are provided for monolingual readers of either tongue. The Andes loom over detention centres in the South Australian desert. The cultural capital represented by Raphael, Courbet, Picasso, Leger, Matisse, Warhol, Christo and Lichtenstein is deformed with citations from Australian painters, the 19th century Peruvian artist Francisco Laso, Colombia's Fernando Botero, the Mexican muralistas, and the iconoclastic gay-porn cartoonist, Tom of Finland. Everywhere, prostheses, pumped breasts, dildos, bared arses and tumescent penises abound.

Padrino

Springer eBooks, 2012

Cuban memory, “American” mobility, and Achy Obejas’s lesbian way

BRILL eBooks, 2002

Portal: journal of multidisciplinary international studies, Feb 6, 2008

Rosario Ferré’s trans-“American” fantasy, or subalternizing the self

Latino Dreams, 2002

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, Feb 25, 2019

Emerging in Los Angeles in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a queer Chicano performance artist, ... more Emerging in Los Angeles in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a queer Chicano performance artist, playwright, and writer, Luis Alfaro quickly established himself as an influential contributor to wider cultural debates about the intersections between gender, sexual, ethnoracial, class, religious, and national affiliations in the United States. In his early career Alfaro was a key player in the solo performance movement, in which performance artists used their own bodies and lives as self performance: that is, as primary physical and lived matter for interrogating their identities within a broader political questioning of US multicultural discourses. That questioning coincided with the prominence of Chicana feminist, queer, and AIDS activisms in California, all of which framed Alfaro's early performances. Much of Alfaro's work from the 1990s thus survives as historically significant chronicles of Chicana/o queer lives on the US West Coast. Alfaro consolidated his reputation in that decade with such classic solo performances as Downtown and Cuerpo Politizado, in which his body functioned as the prop onto and over which he articulated his queer memory work in relation to the Chicana/o neighborhoods of Central and East Los Angeles in which he grew up. Those neighborhoods anchor Alfaro's career-long engagements with the US national imaginary as a Chicano queer cultural producer committed to community engagement and service and to telling the stories of Los Angeles' heterogeneous Chicana/o communities. Since the 1990s Alfaro has refined his creative and critical praxis in solo performance work and plays that raise broader questions about national identity and belonging in the United States. Many of these plays have written back to and adapted works from Western theatrical and literary traditions-for example, Greek tragedies, Aesop, Spanish Golden Age theater, and Strindberg. The process of adaptation allows Alfaro to celebrate Chicanas/os and Latinas/os, and non-Latina/o immigrant communities, as cultural and ethno-racial epicenters of US national identity in the 21st century. Alfaro's post-2000 interventions into Western theatrical and literary traditions recast those traditions so that they register meaningfully, in audience terms, for Chicana/o and other communities of color grappling inevitably with historical discourses that demean immigrant and minority populations.

With his first short-story collection, The Boy without a Flag: Tales of the South Bronx (1992), A... more With his first short-story collection, The Boy without a Flag: Tales of the South Bronx (1992), Abraham Rodriguez established himself as one of the leading Latino writers of his generation, part of a wave of successful authors who emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s that includes the Dominican Junot Díaz, the Cuban American Achy Obejas, the Chicanos Diego Vázquez Jr, Yxta Maya Murray, and Dagoberto Gilb, and the Nuyorican Ernesto Quiñones. Rodriguez’s reputation was consolidated by the publication of the novels Spidertown (1993) and The Buddha Book (2001). Both texts confirmed Rodriguez as an uncompromising and decidedly unromantic chronicler of the disenfranchised Nuyorican youth of New York’s South Bronx, or El Bronx, and a gifted transmitter of Nuyorican English. Mainstream publishing success and laudatory book reviews in major U.S. newspapers and magazines, and the inclusion of his fiction in Puerto Rican, Latino, and American literature courses in schools and universities across the United States, and beyond, also attest to Rodriguez’s reputation. Alongside these achievements, however, Rodriguez’s confrontational representations of El Bronx, and his public comments on his literary elders, have embroiled him in a highly charged debate about the sociocultural validity and political impact of Nuyorican literary and cultural productions. Despite the significance of that debate, Rodriguez’s writing has to date attracted surprisingly little academic attention, perhaps a reflection of a general critical resistance to the author’s outspoken public persona and his unapologetic characterizations of an embattled and violence-prone inner city.

Frontiers: The interdisciplinary journal of study abroad, Aug 31, 2022

Research into university study abroad programs suggests that while students may have some experie... more Research into university study abroad programs suggests that while students may have some experience of local culture(s) and practices, they may be achieving no more than a superficial understanding of the host society. Alternatives to the standard study abroad models are thus essential to encourage students to engage more deeply with the host society. Research on study abroad programs argues for additional interventions and the provision of close supervision and mentoring to students. Given these arguments, this paper examines a scaffolded assessment model, designed for students at an Australian university in an international studies program established 26 years ago, and intended to enhance their learning during their compulsory year of study abroad. Through ongoing academic supervision and the design of a scaffolded fieldwork research project on aspects of the host society, we argue, the students have the potential to develop key skills such as transcultural awareness, engagement and capacity for working with diversity.

Griffith Review Online, 2023

Why do certain animals seem to magically capture the zeitgeist, invading our dreams and animating... more Why do certain animals seem to magically capture the zeitgeist, invading our dreams and animating our fears and anxieties? Animals have always played a part in the myths and stories that help us make sense of and order the world around us. But some animals push the boundaries and unsettle this order. They sit on the fence, offering a strange combination of delight and disturbance, anxiety and wonder. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss famously wrote that animals become totemic not because they’re ‘good to eat’ but because they’re ‘good to think’. Few animals have captured the popular imagination quite like the Australian white ibis, aka the bin chicken, a species that is not only good to think (about and with) but that also has something to say to us. In March 2021, the Macquarie dictionary selected ‘bin chicken’ as its Aussie Word of the Week, noting, ‘The bin chicken has pecked and scavenged its way into Australian culture.’ The dictionary even dared to suggest that the bin chicken might surpass the kangaroo as Australia’s most iconic animal. It was recognition of the urban journey of the ibis, a native species that in a few short years has gained a highly visible and permanent presence in many Australian cities and in the cultural landscape.

Camino Real, v13, n16, 2021

In 1972, the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) published a comic by the Mexican co... more In 1972, the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) published a comic by the Mexican comic artist Rius: NACLA Presents Rius: The Chicanos. This was an English-language version of Los Chicanos, which Rius had released in his Los Agachados series in 1972. In US Latino cultural and comic history The Chicanos is an overlooked artefact: it is the first comic book-length treatment of Chicanos and the diverse drives of the Chicano Movement. In this essay I assess The Chicanos as a key example of transborder information exchange about a US population with direct links to Mexico. The Chicanos, I suggest, survives as a cultural artefact—which comes to the discussion with inevitable historical biases and oversights—that illustrates how important historical memory is in a USA in which prevail ephemeral media soundbites and claims of “fake news.”

Celebrity Philanthropy

Intellect Books, Dec 1, 2015

The University of Chicago Press eBooks, Dec 15, 2015

Cultural Studies has not devoted much notice to one of the keynote developments in modern culture... more Cultural Studies has not devoted much notice to one of the keynote developments in modern culture over the last 30 years: namely, the rise of various charity projects fronted and, in the public mind, defined by celebrities. (Rojek 2014: 127) In the very noisy and complicated world that we have, people that reach large numbers of people, like Madonna does, have an extraordinarily important role to play [in promoting philanthropy]. When they're devoting their time, their money, their name, a lot of effort, a lot of organization skill to all of this, it makes a huge difference. (Jeffrey Sachs cited in Luscombe 2006). [C]elebrity humanitarianism […] is most often self-serving […] it advances consumerism and corporate capitalism, and rationalizes the very global inequality it seeks to redress; it is fundamentally depoliticizing, despite its pretensions to 'activism'; and it contributes to a 'postdemocratic' political landscape, which appears outwardly open and consensual, but is in fact managed by unaccountable elites. (Kapoor 2013: 1) Celebrity philanthropy is a visible and controversial phenomenon, as the opening quotations suggest. According to the 'Look to the Stars: The World of Celebrity Giving' website, which is advertised as 'the web's number one source of celebrity charity news and information' since 2006, there are now more than 3,400 [Hollywood-branded] celebrities involved with over 2,000 charities that aim to 'make a positive difference in the world' ('Look to the stars' 2006-15). Besides the apparent upsurge of commentary on celebrity and charity in tabloids, gossip magazines, business and news magazines, and social networking sites, there are a