The Latino Body: 06/27/08

Friday, June 27, 2008

Junot Díaz, Courtesy of Nikki López

"Cane fields are scary. Any time you drive by them they're like triffids. They crack in the wind." Junot Díaz

Through an American Street Vernacular (ASV) unburdened by protocol there emerges a beautifully nuanced new "American" language with this guy. Why didn't Colbert rile him for more?

Book Description

The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory (NYU Press, 2007) tells the story of the United States Latino body politic and its relation to the state: how the state configures Latino subjects and how Latino subjects have in turn altered the state. This interactive blog continues some of the discussions initiated in the book and, in the process, expands the book’s obsessions by further interrogating national conceptions of Latina and Latino forms of personhood and how these have been written on the Latino body. (The book was published by NYU Press' Sexual Cultures Series.) Irreverent, polemical, visually provocative, and hopefully fun to peruse, the interactive blog is meant to persuade and influence conversations on and about the Latino body politic. Send related images, videos, art and text to me at lazlima@gmail.com. You can get the book directly from NYU Press and Amazon.

Book Blurbs

"Through a bricolage of carefully crafted textual readings, Lima has produced a text that traces the relationship between corporeality and citizenship by marking the process by which the Latino body has become historical. Situated in moments of national and bodily crisis, his archive is decidedly precise and imaginatively expansive, metaphorically rich and politically dynamic. Drawing on texts central to third world feminism, queer studies, and Latin and Latino American literatures, this work is as central to rethinking the American literary canon as it is to an invigorating remapping of Latino Studies."
—Juana María Rodríguez, University of California, Berkeley, author of Queer Latinidad

The Latino Body

Friday, June 27, 2008

Junot Díaz, Courtesy of Nikki López

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