Lexington Books Technofuturos: Critical Interventions in Latina/o Studies

Technofuturos offers a critical and innovative exploration of the forms of representation found in Latina/o studies. The editors, Nancy Raquel Mirabal and Agustin Laó-Montes, challenge conventional notions of Latina/o identities, histories, and cultures by historicizing and differentiating the multiple discourses of Latinidad. The essays examine the temporality and spatiality of socio-historical processes, the multiple and varied constellations of power, and the complicated geographies of desire. By analyzing the discursive, performative, and aesthetic dimensions of knowledge, this book contests and reconstructs Latina/o studies. Technofuturos is a captivating and sophisticated read that will appeal to scholars of Latina/o studies and those interested in postcolonial critique. Review Charted through encounters with familiar and unseen histories, technologies, diasporas, sexualities, geographies, and intimacies, Technofuturos redefines how Latin@ studies is imagined. These writers are reconceptualizing latinidad as a theoretical method for digging into the cracks between disciplines, temporalities and geographies to unsettle staid discourses of identity, ethnicity and nation. This text, itself an act of producing 'historical futures' represents the fullest potential of what Latin@ studies can become, and all that it has been.--Juana María Rodríguez, author of Queer Latinidad and associate professor in the Department of Women Studies at U.C. Berkeley This thoughtful and exciting collection of essays provides a terrific place to explore the multiplicities and complexities of Latina/o Studies. Through sharp, insightful analysis, the essays actively destabilize even as they help to redefine our understandings of critical issues in Latinidades including the workings of silence, the politics of possibility, and the historical geographies of location and self, Reflecting impressive intellectual dexterity, they are able to capture variability and the ever-changing cartographies of this field while effectively situating these technologies of knowledge historically. This volume captures the best of the state-of-the field today.--Gabriela F. Arredondo, oeditor of Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader and author of Mexican Chicago: Race, Identity and Nation: 1916-1939 About the Author Nancy Raquel Mirabal is associate professor for the Raza Studies Department at San Francisco State University. Agustin Laó-Montes is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.