Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st Century [Paperback]

The interdisciplinary essays in Decolonial Voices discuss racialized, subaltern, feminist, and diasporic identities and the aesthetic politics of hybrid and mestiza/o cultural productions. This collection represents several key directions in the field: First, it charts how subaltern cultural productions of the US/ Mexico borderlands speak to the intersections of local, hemispheric, and globalized power relations of the border imaginary. Second, it recovers the Mexican women's and Chicana literary and cultural heritages that have been ignored by Euro-American canons and patriarchal exclusionary practices. It also expands the field in postnationalist directions by creating an interethnic, comparative, and transnational dialogue between Chicana and Chicano, African American, Mexican feminist, and U.S. Native American cultural vocabularies.

Contributors include Norma Alarc?n, Arturo J. Aldama, Frederick Luis Aldama, Cordelia Ch?vez Candelaria, Alejandra Elenes, Ram?n Garcia, Mar?a Herrera-Sobek, Patricia Penn Hilden, Gaye T. M. Johnson, Alberto Ledesma, Pancho McFarland, Amelia Mar?a de la Luz Montes, Laura Elisa P?rez, Naomi Qui?onez, Sarah Ramirez, Rolando J. Romero, Delberto Dario Ruiz, Vicki Ruiz, Jos? David Sald?var, Anna Sandoval, and Jonathan Xavier Inda.

Aldama (Arizona State Univ.) and Qui?ones (Quinones) (California State Univ., Fullerton) have assembled a remarkable range of essays on topics ranging from dresses and body art, film, popular music (including Chicano rap), and literary works to race, nationalism, and gender. The situation of undocumented workers gets full attention. The collection is especially strong on Chicana issues, redressing the male-centered atmosphere of the early Chicano movement. The level of the writing is high, though a few of the essays are sodden with jargon. The editors provide no overall bibliography, but most of the essays have lengthy bibliographies of their own. The index is unusually detailed, which is lch