Border Matters locates the study of Chicano culture in a broad social context. Jose Saldivar examines issues of representation and expression in a diverse, exciting assortment of textscorridos, novels, poems, short stories, punk and hip-hop music, ethnography, paintings, performance, art, and essays. Saldivar provides a sophisticated model for a new kind of U.S. cultural studies, one that challenges the homogeneity of U.S. nationalism and popular culture by foregrounding the contemporary experiences and historical circumstances facing Chicanos and Chicanas.
This...

This pathbreaking anthology of Chicano literary criticism, with essays on a remarkable range of texts--both old and new--draws on diverse perspectives in contemporary literary and cultural studies: from ethnographic to postmodernist, from Marxist to feminist, from cultural materialist to new historicist.
The editors have organized essays around four board themes: the situation of Chicano literary studies within American literary history and debates about the "canon"; representations of the Chicana/o subject; genre, ideology, and history; and the aesthetics of Chicano literature. The volume...

Joining the current debates in American literary history, JosE David SaldIvar offers a challenging new perspective on what constitutes not only the canon in American literature, but also the notion of America itself. His aim is the articulation of a fresh, transgeographical conception of American culture, one more responsive to the geographical ties and political crosscurrents of the hemisphere than to narrow national ideologies.
SaldIvar pursues this goal through an array of oppositional critical and creative practices. He analyzes a range of North American writers of color (Rolando...

With a Foreword by Jose David Saldivar

Since its first publication in Spanish nearly a decade ago, Julio Ramos's Desenucuentros de la modernidad en America Latina por el siglo XIX has been recognized as one of the most important studies of modernity in the western hemisphere. Available for the first time in English--and now published with new material--Ramos's study not only offers an analysis of the complex relationships between history, literature, and nation-building in the modern Latin American context but also takes crucial steps toward the development of a truly comparative...

Contributors Immanuel Wallerstein, Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, Agustin Lao, Lewis Gordon, James V. Fenelon, Roberto Hernandez, James Cohen, Santiago Slabosky, Susanne Jonas, and Thomas Reifer. By the mid-twenty-first century, white Euro-Americans will be a demographic minority in the United States and Latino/as will be the largest minority (25 percent). These changes bring about important challenges at the heart of the contemporary debates about political transformations in the United States and around the world. Latino/as are multiracial (Afro-latinos, Indo-latinos, Asian-latinos, and...

A founder of U.S.-Mexico border studies, Jose David Saldivar is a leading figure in efforts to expand the scope of American studies. In Trans-Americanity, he advances that critical project by arguing for a transnational, antinational, and "outernational" paradigm for American studies. Saldivar urges Americanists to adopt a world-system scale of analysis. "Americanity as a Concept," an essay by the Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein, the architect of world-systems analysis, serves as a theoretical touchstone for Trans-Americanity. In conversation not...

Entering the debate on American literary history, this study offers a perspective on what constitutes not only the canon of American literature, but also the notion of America itself. The author argues for a conception of American culture which is more responsive to trans-national ideologies.

Addresses the potential of diverse Latino/a spiritualities, origins, and status against the landscape of decolonization of the US economic and cultural empire in the twenty-first century. This book explores the impact of Indo-latinos and Afro-latinos in the United States.