Latinofuturism

Author(s):  
Cathryn Merla-Watson

Latinofuturism describes a broad range of Latina/o speculative aesthetics and an emerging field of study. In addition to referencing a broad spectrum of speculative texts produced by Chicana/os, Puerto Ricans, Dominican Americans, Cuban Americans, and other Latin American immigrant populations, Latinofuturism also includes innovative cultural productions stemming from hybrid and fluid borderlands spaces such as the US–Mexico border. The umbrella genre of speculative fiction (SF), moreover, indexes the companion genres of science fiction (sci-fi), horror, and fantasy. Instead of approaching these genres separately, SF recognizes the ways in which these genres overlap, blend, and mutually inform one another. As Shelley Streeby notes, the umbrella genre of the speculative is especially useful in analyzing Latinofuturist texts that self-consciously appropriate and blend genres in a manner evocative of the mestizaje animating Latina/o culture. The broader category of SF further enables us to unearth, remap, and focalize how Latina/os have contributed to sci-fi, fantasy, and horror, as well as related subgenres. Through employing the speculative, Latinofuturist texts articulate a grammar of the subjunctive, daring to ask and imagine, “what if?” Latinofuturism builds upon Catherine Ramírez’s foundational prism of Chicanafuturism, which denotes cultural production that redeploys the technological in relation to cultural identity, and, in doing so, interrogates and effaces boundaries between primitive and modern, the past, present, and future, as well as the human and non-human. Propelling Latinofuturism is the disordering aesthetic of rasquachismo, a working-class Chicana/o sensibility of creative recycling or making do. Latinofuturist writers and artists do not passively consume received forms of the speculative, but instead creatively repurpose them toward emancipatory ends. In addition, Latinofuturism draws inspiration from Afrofuturism, as articulated by scholars such as Mark Dery, Alondra Nelson, and Ytasha Womack. Whereas Afrofuturism foregrounds the African diaspora and the legacy of slavery in regard to new media and the technological, Latinofuturism focuses on migrations within and across the Americas and beyond. Prevalent themes in Latinofuturism include indigenismo, mestizaje, and coloniality, which operate to question narratives of progress and technological advancement as well as to render more radical visions of the future. However, as Isabel Millán argues, Afrofuturism and Latinofuturism become tightly knit when considering Afro-Latina/o speculative productions. More broadly, Latinofuturism must be also situated within US ethnic and global subaltern futurisms as the experiences of people of color in the United States and throughout the world are interwoven through histories of bodily and epistemological violences systematically omitted from narratives of progress and technological advancement. Importantly, Latinofuturism, along with other ethnic futurisms, share a radical reimagining of a collective future that blurs colonial binaries, making collective space to imagine and enact otherwise.

Queer media is not one thing but an ensemble of at least four moving variables: history, gender and sexuality, geography, and medium. Although many scholars would pinpoint the early 1990s as marking the emergence of a cinematic movement in the United States (dubbed by B. Ruby Rich the “new queer cinema”), films and television programs that clearly spoke to LGBTQ themes and viewers existed at many different historical moments and in many different forms: cross-dressing, same-sex attraction, comedic drag performance; at some points, for example, in 1950s television, these were not undercurrents but very prominent aspects of mainstream cultural production. Addressing “history” not as dots on a progressive spectrum but as an uneven story of struggle, the writers in this volume stress that queer cinema did not appear miraculously at one moment but arrived on currents throughout the century-long history of the medium. Likewise, while queer is an Anglophone term that has been widely circulated, it by no means names a unified or complete spectrum of sexuality and gender identity, just as the LGBTQ+ alphabet soup struggles to contain the distinctive histories, politics, and cultural productions of trans artists and genderqueer practices. Across the globe, media-makers have interrogated identity and desire through the medium of cinema through rubrics that sometimes vigorously oppose the Western embrace of the pejorative term queer, foregrounding instead indigenous genders and sexualities or those forged in the Global South or those seeking alternative epistemologies. Finally, though “cinema” is in our title, many scholars in this collection see this term as an encompassing one, referencing cinema and media in a convergent digital environment. The lively and dynamic conversations introduced here aspire to sustain further reflection as “queer cinema” shifts into new configurations.


Author(s):  
Jessica Stites Mor ◽  
Nicolas Poppe

The field of Argentine cinema studies can be said to have begun in earnest with the publication of film journalist Domingo Di Núbila’s landmark two-volume history of Argentina’s film history in 1959 and 1960, Historia del cine argentino (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Cruz de Malta). A work of tremendous range and scope, Di Núbila’s history not only provided a synopsis and critique of an abundance of individual films but also examined the influence of professional associations and industry, more broadly speaking. Perhaps due to the comprehensiveness of these volumes, minimal scholarly publishing on Argentine cinema followed until the 1970s, when interest in political cinema propelled Argentine cinema into the global spotlight. Scholarly writing about Argentine film in Europe, the United States, and, to a certain extent, Cuba during this period of heightened Cold War tensions tended to focus on questions of the political and the techniques of radical cinema. Writers from outside Argentina focused predominantly on films being made contemporaneously that engaged questions of colonialism, violence, social movements, and revolution. However, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, filmmakers themselves took on the task of building a new media studies that centered on Latin American cinema with interests in questions of industry, cultural imperialism, and consumption at the core of their inquiry. By the 1980s and early 1990s, growing interest in Argentine filmmaking among academic audiences both at home and abroad culminated in the emergence of a local film studies culture in Argentina that was finally dominated by scholars rather than biographers or filmmakers. This wave of scholarship converged around questions related to the 1976–1983 dictatorship and the subsequent democratic opening. Since 2001, a new wave of interest in Argentine film following the financial crisis has pushed scholarship beyond political questions to engage more seriously with aesthetic and conceptual aspects of national films. However, booming grassroots documentary production in the new digital era captured the interest of nontraditional film scholars interested in media politics, social movements, gender and sexuality, and film as a mode of communication more broadly.


2020 ◽  
pp. 0192513X2094855
Author(s):  
Karen Z. Kramer ◽  
Esra Şahin ◽  
Qiujie Gong

Immigration to a host culture often involves significant changes in parenting norms and behaviors. The authors take an acculturation lens to explore parental involvement among different generations of Latin American immigrant families. It compares the quantity and type of parental involvement of first- and second-generation Latin American immigrants to that of parents who are at least a third generation in the United States while examining whether differences exist between mothers and fathers. Data from the 2003–2013 American Time Use Survey are used for our analyses, which finds differences between parenting behaviors of first-generation immigrants from Latin America and third-generation parents. Second-generation mothers were also found to be significantly different from third-generation mothers in almost every type of parental involvement, while second-generation Latin American fathers were similar to third-generation fathers in quantity and type of parental involvement.


Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human curates an important series of case studies of the posthuman imaginaries and nonhuman tropes employed in a broad range of Latin American cultural texts, from the narratives of Las Casas to new media and installation art in contemporary Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina. The book’s introduction highlights the ways the figure of the “limit” has functioned as an important site of aesthetic, ontological, and political experimentation and reworking in Latin American cultural production, and underlines the potentialities and possible risks associated with the use of posthuman frameworks in the region. The different chapters examine the ways human borders and boundaries have been tested, undermined, and reformulated in relation to issues including dictatorial violence and drug war necropolitics, ecological storytelling, indigenous thought systems, gender, race, history, and new materialism. The book as a whole marshals a wide range of theoretical frameworks and points to the complex ways Latin American culture intersects with and departs from global formulations of humanism and the posthuman.


Author(s):  
Millicent Webber ◽  
◽  
Rebecca Giblin ◽  
Yanfang Ding ◽  
François Petitjean-Hèche ◽  
...  

Introduction. We investigated patterns in digital audiobook and e-book circulation through Australian libraries to identify and analyse trends in audiobook publishing and reading. Method. In partnership with four Australian library services we collated a dataset of 555,618 audiobook checkouts and 3,475,188 e-book checkouts, representing all OverDrive checkouts through these services from 2006 until July 2017. Analysis. We examined the availability and popularity of audiobook and e-book titles over time. We used bibliographic metadata and manual and automated coding to examine major publishers, sex and nationality of authors, and popular titles and genres. Results. Audiobooks and e-books have experienced substantial growth since 2006. Major publishers including the Big Five, Amazon, and Bolinda have historically been less important in audiobook publishing than in print or e-book markets, with numerous specialist audio publishers and producers prominent in the field. Audiobooks and e-books show disparities in the sex of authors. Crime, science fiction, and fantasy are the most popular audiobook genres. Conclusion. Library checkout data confirm audiobook publishing’s recent volatility. Libraries are the keepers of valuable information about new media forms like audiobooks, and collaboration between libraries, publishers, and researchers directly supports understanding of this important new space of cultural production and consumption.


Author(s):  
Bernadine Marie Hernández

Since the early 21st century, there has been an emergence of scholarship and theorizing of Latina sexualities within the social sciences, humanities, and interdisciplinary programs, such as Chicanx studies, Latinx studies, American studies, and feminist studies. However, cultural production has long been interrogating the way that Latina sexuality has been represented, as well as pathologized and racialized. While there is a plethora of information regarding sexuality of women in Latin America, this article deals with the discursive and material construction of Latina sexuality for US Latinas and Chicanas who were born in the United States or migrated to the United States. At the foundation, sexuality and sexuality studies has been a subcategory of LGBT studies and later queer theory. Mainly used as a signifier for identity categories, sexuality is predicated on sexual preference and romantic desires; however, it is also used to refer to identities that exceed heteronormative, homosexual, bisexual, or asexual identities. However, Latina sexuality intersects with not only race but also modes of power and control that situate it within a larger context of technologies of power. Sexuality is tied to larger power structures; therefore, Latina sexuality takes sex and sexuality out of the private sphere to help us understand the intersectional relations of race, gender, and class. Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga brought together feminists of color to explore sexuality, gender, and class in their foundational collection This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color (1981) and Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) in the context of interlocking and co-constitutive systems of oppression. Inspired by this collection of women of color writing, tatiana de la tierra, a Latina lesbian born in Colombia, published the first international Latina lesbian magazine: Esto no tiene nombre. It was distributed in the United States and Latin American and explored excessive Latina sexuality by theorizing eroticism; the magazine challenged the “Latina lesbian” stereotype. The Sexuality of Latinas (1993), edited by Norma Alarcón, Ana Castillo, and Cherríe Moraga, looks at the self-examination of five hundred years of hidden sexuality and sexual violence. In “Sexuality and Discourse: Notes From a Chicana Survivor” in Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About (1991), Emma Pérez takes sexuality as the marker of many of the problems Chicanas face. The racism and sexism Chicanas face is not the only problem, however: the racism Chicanos face adds layers of struggle to an already hostile situation. She utilizes a “conquest triangle” that builds off the Oedipus complex but adds that in addition to the white father (the colonizer) and the India mother who is imbricated in the violence of miscegenation, there is a castrated mestizo Chicano son who will never be able to be as superior as the white man. In 1987, Juanita Diaz-Coto edited and published one of the first edited collections through the Latina Lesbian History Project on Latina sexuality titled Compañeras: Latina Lesbians: An Anthology, which she published under her pseudonym Juanita Ramos. This collection featured oral histories, essays, poetry, short stories, and art by and about Latina lesbians in both Spanish and English, featuring the work of forty-seven women born in ten different Latin American countries that addressed Latina sexuality and lesbianism and also confronted the ways that culture and migration informed the enunciation of sexuality for Latinas. The foundational and early writings of Latina and Chicana feminists laid the groundwork for our ability to contemplate and discuss Latina sexuality as racialized, gendered, transnational, and diasporic sexualities. It also sets the stage to think historically about Latinas and their bodies in relations to cultural representation, borders and migration, the family, reproductive health, and transness.


2009 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-241
Author(s):  
ADAM LIFSHEY

How does the music of Bruce Springsteen interrogate prevailing constructs of the U.S.-Mexico border region? In his folk masterpiece The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995) and other works that feature Spanish-speaking protagonists, Springsteen implicitly reconceptualizes the Americas as an unbordered and fluid space. His performances enact Mexico and the United States as transamerican ideations rather than discrete nations. Although the booming academic field of border studies reframes static images of both Latin America and the United States in favor of malleable transnational paradigms, it still tends to privilege cultural production emanating from the borders themselves. This propensity does not leave much space for an engagement with canonical figures of U.S. culture such as Springsteen, a singer/songwriter who theorizes the borderlands in ways that at first may seem at odds with his career-long, conscious associations with red, white, and blue semiotics. This article examines the Hispanic presences in Springsteen's oeuvre from his debut 1973 albums onward and contrasts them with the relatively fixed representations of the borderlands in the lifework of Bob Dylan.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gustavo Aviña Cerecer

This article presents results of a first-hand investigation that took a year of ethnographic work (methods of observation and interviews) during 2016–2017, with the post-structural theoretical framework of Gilles Deleuze, on the United States–Mexico border, in the San Diego-Tijuana corridor. The Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies of the University of California San Diego, PREVENCASA A. C., and Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosi supported this research. In this research, statistical data, observations, and synthesis of in-depth interviews were utilized about those defined as the ‘dispossessed’: users of hard drugs, and/or in homelessness conditions of discrimination in a highly contrasting border such as that of the United States and Mexico. Among the main results are the relations between mental and embodiment limits, necropolitics and territory, as well as the approach of post-structural political discourses about the body and mind that allow us to understand the subjectivities in question, proposing two types of homelessness.


Author(s):  
Tore C. Olsson

This introductory chapter sets out the book's two primary arguments, both of which take aim at artificial but widely accepted geographic dichotomies mapped onto the US–Mexico border. First, the book argues that the disciplinary distinction between “American” and “Latin American” history has obscured the confluence and interaction between US and Mexican state-led rural reform along with its attendant social upheaval during the radical 1930s. The border between the United States and Mexico not only separates “American” from “Latin American” history, it also marks where the Global North meets the Global South, or as was once popular, where the First World meets the Third World. The book's second major argument concerns that planetary dichotomy, and how it has warped scholarly understandings of a vast campaign that would remake countless human societies during the twentieth century: development.


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