Key terms in Latino/a cultural and literary studies (original) (raw)
The Routledge Concise History of Latino/a Literature
The Routledge Concise History of Latino/a Literature, 2013
Recommended Citation Recommended Citation Bost S., "Review: the Routledge concise history of Latino/a literature" in New West Indian Guide 88(3-4), 2014.
Lcs 502 Theoretical Approaches to Latin American, Caribbean and US Latino Studies (I) (Spring 2013)
This course provides students with a critical understanding of major theoretical approaches to the study of the political economy and socio-cultural development of Latin America, the Caribbean and US Latinos. Major themes addressed include (1) imperialism and colonialism and their impact on economic outcomes, social structure, politics and the state; (2) theories of development that have shaped debates and the field of Latin American, Caribbean and US Latino Studies; (3) neoliberal restructuring and its consequences for how power is currently being exercised and contested; (4) social movement theory and its application; and (5) contemporary trends in critical political economy and Latin American, Caribbean and US Latino Studies.
Language and Education, 2015
As the editors point out in their introduction, this volume is solidly based on research carried out during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries on Spanishspeaking populations in the United States. It is the case that certain Spanishspeaking communities in the US, particularly in its Southwestern regions, have had an uninterrupted existence here that predates the arrival of English speakers on this continent. However, given recent demographic shifts, other US Spanish-speaking communities are relatively new. The volume's focus is on diaspora, and part 1, ''Established Communities,'' centers on the newer communities. The first two chapters study the dynamics of language contact in Chicago, Illinois, with regard to dialect and identity negotiation. Significant inflows of Mexican and Puerto Ricanorigin Latinos into the area have brought cultural and linguistic norms, mediated through Spanish, crashing together. The studies seek to work toward unravelling the complexities of how the Spanish-speaking Mexican, Puerto Rican and ''MexiRican'' communities interact with and accommodate one another. At the same time, the shared experience of speaking a non-English language results in negotiating a shared identity and strategies to maintain that identity within a larger Englishspeaking context, as discussed in Chapter 3. The linguistic and ideological dynamics among recent arrivals in contact with established Latino communities is further explored in the context of Spanish language use in the media, specifically radio broadcasting. These studies represent well-established research foci in US Spanishlanguage studies. Chapter 4, ''Queer Latin@ Networks: Languages, Identities, and the Ties That Bind,'' contributes to the exploration of language and identity as well, but also represents an innovative trend in the study of US Spanish. LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) Spanish-speaking communities have largely been ignored in the literature, and this chapter not only contributes to the sound
Book Review On Latinidad: US Latino Literature and the Construction of Ethnicity
2008
The most obvious but also the most important question for a field or a journal called Latino Studies is: how best to use the term Latino? Asking this question means considering the ways in which thinking in terms of such a category is both problematic and productive, as well as reflecting on exactly what the use of this label achieves. Marta Caminero-Santangelo’s book On Latinidad speaks to this issue in two fascinating, interlinked ways: first, she examines the identity ‘‘Latino/a’’ and the larger community that term is meant to describe, arguing as her point of departure that it exists only as an imaginary idea, and yet exerts enormous pressure on how people think about themselves and are thought of by others; and second, she considers the role that literature plays in constructing the content and boundaries of that identity. Books such as Suzanne Oboler’s Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives or Juan Flores’ From Bomba to Hip Hop have previously explored how categories like Latino/a are so...
Latino Dreams: Transcultural Traffic and the U.S. National Imaginary
Latino Dreams: Transcultural Traffic and the U.S. National Imaginary (Amsterdam and New York; Rodopi BV, 2002) http://www.rodopi.nl/functions/search.asp?BookId=PORTADA+14 A welcome addition to the fields of Latino and (trans-)American cultural and literary studies, Latino Dreams focuses on a selection of Latino narratives, performances and films, published or produced between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, that may be said to traffic in the U.S.A.’s attendant myths and governing cultural logics. The selection includes novels by authors who have received little academic attention—Abraham Rodriguez, Achy Obejas, and Benjamin Alire Sáenz—along with underattended works from more renowned writers—Rosario Ferré, Coco Fusco, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Latino Dreams takes a transcultural approach in order to raise questions of subaltern subordination and domination, and the resistant capacities of cultural production. The analysis explores how the selected narratives deploy specific narrative tactics, and a range of literary and other cultural capital, in order to question and reform the U.S.A.’s imaginary coordinates. In these texts, moreover, national imperatives are complicated by recourse to feminist, queer, panethnic, postcolonial, or transnational agendas. Yet the analysis also recognizes instances in which the counter-narrative will is frustrated: the narratives may provide signs of the U.S.A.’s hegemonic resilience in the face of imaginary disavowal. Contents: Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1. The transcultural contours of Latino U.S.A. Chapter 2. Rosario Ferré’s trans-“American” fantasy, or subalternizing the self Chapter 3. Abraham Rodriguez’s boy-zone romance of “American” escape Chapter 4. Cuban memory, “American” mobility, and Achy Obejas’s lesbian way Chapter 5. Coming out of the “American” nightmare with Benjamin Alire Sáenz Chapter 6. Coco Fusco, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and “American” cannibal reveries Afterword: Notes on transcultural traffic from across el charco pacífico Bibliography Index Reviews: From Claire Fox, “Review Essay: Comparative Literary Studies in the Americas.” American Literature 76.4 (December 2004): 871-85. “Latino Dreams invokes theoretical concepts from twentieth-century Latin American criticism in order to chart the way in which U.S.-based Latino narratives diversely engage the American Dream. The book thus inverts the common pattern in which metropolitan critics summon U.S. and European theories in order to decode Latin American texts. At the center of Allatson’s methodology is ‘‘transculturation,’’ a concept associated with Cuban ethnographer Fernando Ortiz, who elaborated it as a countertheory to the English-language concepts of acculturation and assimilation. For Ortiz, cultural contact implied not only cultural acquisition but several simultaneous processes, including ‘‘cultural destruction, uprooting, and loss (deculturation), and the productions of ‘new cultural phenomena’ (neoculturation) . . .’’ (32). Subsequent authors and critics, such as José María Arguedas and Angel Rama, recognized the concept’s potential to describe the manner in which Latin American regional literatures channeled the multifocal perspectives and competing signifying systems characteristic of the continent’s interracial and neocolonial societies (33–34). For the purpose of his study, Allatson further submits transculturation to critiques by the U.S.-based Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, which cautions against self-subalternizing maneuvers on the part of national elites (39), and by Marxist critics, who deride transculturation as an accommodating culturalism that depends on dependency, as it were (41). These caveats in place, Allatson’s use of the term transculturation signifies neither seamless hybridization nor textual resistance; rather, the concept’s heuristic value lies in its intrinsic attention to polyvalence and contradiction, which enables the critic to move beyond a hegemonic-resistant binary to distinguish the ‘‘complex, mutable, and often surprising logics of domination, subordination, and resistance’’ that mark Latina(o) literary interactions with the United States (53). ... Latino Dreams is remarkably successful at keeping the myriad identity categories associated with cultural studies in constant play, while pausing frequently to problematize each phase of its own argumentation. Its readings are meticulous yet imaginative. ... Latino Dreams’s brief afterword, about the circulation of Latina(o) texts in the author’s native Australia, is another important critical intervention. Through his discussion of the 1992 Sydney Biennale, in which Gómez-Peña and Fusco staged their well-known performance, ‘‘Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit Sydney, ’’ Allatson highlights several problematic examples of cross-cultural identification between Latinas(os) and Australians. The Biennale’s curator, for example, constructed an analogy between Latina(o) ‘‘border crossers’’ and the historical figure of the Australian boundary rider, ‘‘an icon mythologized from an Australian colonial era and frontier ethos’’ (307) in an apparent effort to claim migrancy as the universal human condition for the postmillennium. Here Allatson is attentive to questions of translation, even in cases where English is the primary language of communication. The afterword further points to an exciting direction for future research inherent in Allatson’s project—if Latino literature somehow exceeds the boundaries of the United States, then it can also be studied from other geographical and national perspectives. ... The work ... under review use[s] race, ethnicity, and aesthetic movements as analytic bridges to link North and South, Europe and the Americas; and in so doing, ... extend[s] the pioneering projects of scholars such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Paul Gilroy, both of whom have had a profound impact on the transnational turn in contemporary U.S.-based American studies.” -------------- From David William Foster, "Review Essay: Recent Latin American Cultural Studies." Chasqui: Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana 33: 2 (November 2004), pp. 157-68. "...this is an important critical contribution to Latino Studies."