NYU Press Racial Immanence: Chicanx Bodies beyond Representation

Explores the how, why, and what of contemporary Chicanxculture, including punk rock, literary fiction, photography, mass graves, anddigital and experimental installation art   Racial Immanenceattempts to unravel a Gordian knot at the center of the study of race anddiscourse: it seeks to loosen the constraints that the politics of racialrepresentation put on interpretive methods and on our understanding of raceitself. Marissa K. López argues that reading Chicanx literary and culturaltexts primarily for the ways they represent Chicanxness only reinscribes thevery racial logic that such texts ostensibly set out to undo.   Racial Immanenceproposes to read differently; instead of focusing on representation, it asks whatChicanx texts do, what they produce in the world, and specifically how theyproduce access to the ineffable but material experience of race. Intrigued bythe attention to disease, disability, abjection, and sense experience that shesees increasing in Chicanx visual, literary, and performing arts in the late-twentiethcentury, López explores how and why artists use the body in contemporaryChicanx cultural production. Racial Immanence takes up works by writerslike Dagoberto Gilb, Cecile Pineda, and Gil Cuadros, the photographers KenGonzales Day and Stefan Ruiz, and the band Piñata Protest to argue that thebody offers a unique site for pushing back against identity politics. In sodoing, the book challenges theoretical conversations around affect and thepost-human and asks what it means to truly consider people of color as writersand artists. Moving beyond abjection, López models Chicanx cultural productionas a way of fostering networks of connection that deepen our attachments to thematerial world. Review Racial Immanence sets out to tackle a seemingly intractable problem for the study of race and literature: the constraints that racial representation puts on both interpretive methods and our understanding of race itself . In expanding our horizon of Chicanx cultural production beyond literary works to such objects as the Aztec "sun stone," contemporary art photography, and Latinx punk music, López proposes a new way to read this body of work, asking what Chicanx texts do, what they produce in the world, and how they access the ineffable yet material experience of race. An urgent and necessary book.--John Alba Cutler, author of Ends of Assimilation: The Formation of Chicano Literature López advocates for reconsidering space and time through reading and writing in order to reimagine the social and to create a place of radical hope.-- "Choice" López staunchly debunks the idea that Chicanx identity can be thoroughly known or interpreted. Rather, she demonstrates why literature for and by people of color matters: they eschew the neoliberal argument for multicultural representation, instead questioning structural violence, shared precarity, and human imbrication within the more-than-human world. This is a bold, refreshing book that demonstrates the urgency and importance of Chicanx literature while simultaneously challenging the reasons why we read it.--Julie A. Minich, author of Accessible Citizenships: Disability, Nation, and the Cultural Politics of Greater Mexico About the Author Marissa K. López is Associate Professor of English and Chicana/o Studies at UCLA. She is the author of Chicano Nations: The Hemispheric Origins of Mexican American Literature (NYU Press, 2011) and the Vice President of the Latina/o Studies Association.