![]() Subsequent authors and critics, such as José María Arguedas and Angel Rama, recognized the concept’s potential to describe the manner in which Latin American regional literatures channeled the multifocal perspectives and competing signifying systems characteristic of the continent’s interracial and neocolonial societies (33–34). For Ortiz, cultural contact implied not only cultural acquisition but several simultaneous processes, including ‘‘cultural destruction, uprooting, and loss (deculturation), and the productions of ‘new cultural phenomena’ (neoculturation). At the center of Allatson’s methodology is ‘‘transculturation,’’ a concept associated with Cuban ethnographer Fernando Ortiz, who elaborated it as a countertheory to the English-language concepts of acculturation and assimilation. and European theories in order to decode Latin American texts. The book thus inverts the common pattern in which metropolitan critics summon U.S. ![]() ![]() “Latino Dreams invokes theoretical concepts from twentieth-century Latin American criticism in order to chart the way in which U.S.-based Latino narratives diversely engage the American Dream. Coco Fusco, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and “American” cannibal reveries Afterword: Notes on transcultural traffic from across el charco pacífico Bibliography Index Reviews: From Claire Fox, “Review Essay: Comparative Literary Studies in the Americas.” American Literature 76.4 (December 2004): 871-85. Coming out of the “American” nightmare with Benjamin Alire Sáenz Chapter 6. Cuban memory, “American” mobility, and Achy Obejas’s lesbian way Chapter 5. Abraham Rodriguez’s boy-zone romance of “American” escape Chapter 4. Rosario Ferré’s trans-“American” fantasy, or subalternizing the self Chapter 3. The transcultural contours of Latino U.S.A. Contents: Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1. Yet the analysis also recognizes instances in which the counter-narrative will is frustrated: the narratives may provide signs of the U.S.A.’s hegemonic resilience in the face of imaginary disavowal. In these texts, moreover, national imperatives are complicated by recourse to feminist, queer, panethnic, postcolonial, or transnational agendas. The analysis explores how the selected narratives deploy specific narrative tactics, and a range of literary and other cultural capital, in order to question and reform the U.S.A.’s imaginary coordinates. Latino Dreams takes a transcultural approach in order to raise questions of subaltern subordination and domination, and the resistant capacities of cultural production. The selection includes novels by authors who have received little academic attention-Abraham Rodriguez, Achy Obejas, and Benjamin Alire Sáenz-along with underattended works from more renowned writers-Rosario Ferré, Coco Fusco, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña. National Imaginary (Amsterdam and New York Rodopi BV, 2002) A welcome addition to the fields of Latino and (trans-)American cultural and literary studies, Latino Dreams focuses on a selection of Latino narratives, performances and films, published or produced between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, that may be said to traffic in the U.S.A.’s attendant myths and governing cultural logics. ![]() Latino Dreams: Transcultural Traffic and the U.S. In response to the shortcomings in trans/national criticism, the final chapter initiates a theoretical consideration of a postgeographic and postcultural form of community (and of cultural analysis). The book makes important points about the limits of transnationalism as a paradigm, evidencing how such approaches often reiterate presumptive and essentialized notions of identity that function as new dimensions of exceptionalism. Using reports in multicultural psychology and cultural neuroscience to interpret an array of cultural forms-including literature, art, film, advertising, search engines, urban planning, museum artifacts, visa policy, public education, and ostensibly non-state media-the argument fills a gap in contemporary criticism by a focus on what makes cultural canons symbolically effective (or not) for an individual exposed to them. After American Studies is a timely critique of national and transnational approaches to community, and their forms of belonging and trans/ patriotisms.
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