UT Press at the San Antonio Book Festival

On Saturday, April 8, the University of Texas Press and seven of our authors will enjoy the 5th annual San Antonio Book Festival at the Central Library and environs in downtown San Antonio. We'll have a booth in the Exhibitor Tent with tons of titles for sale at a great discount. There are a lot of fantastic authors in attendance (Ann Patchett! Lawrence Wright! Laini Taylor!), so we’ve distilled our authors' appearances into a single UT Press schedule.

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Terry Thompson-Anderson

10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Signing at 11:15 AM

Wake up to “Breakfast in Texas!” Terry Thompson-Anderson demos from her new cookbook

Location: Central Market Cooking Tent
Signing Location: Augusta Street

Thompson-Anderson is the author of nine previous cookbooks, including Texas on the Table: People, Places, and Recipes Celebrating the Flavors of the Lone Star State, which was a finalist for the 2015 James Beard Book Award for American Cooking.

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Jarod Neece and Mando Rayo

11:30 AM - 12:30 PM
Signing at 12:45 PM

“The Tacos of Texas” with Mando Rayo and Jarod Neece

Location: Central Market Cooking Tent
Signing Location: Augusta Street

Jarod Neece is the co-founder and editor of the popular Austin food blog, TacoJournalism.com, the Senior Film Programmer at SXSW, co-writer of the Austin bestselling book, Austin Breakfast Tacos: The Story of the Most Important Taco of the Day and co-author of the new book, The Tacos of Texas. 

Mando Rayo is an author, taco expert, blogger and CEO & Engagement Strategist at Mando Rayo + Collective, a multicultural digital agency based in Austin, TX. Mando is the co-author of the new book, The Tacos of Texas, published by The University of Texas Press and Austin Breakfast Tacos: The Story of the Most Important Taco of the Day. Mando’s work has been featured in The New York Times, Bon Appetit Magazine, NPR, Paste Magazine, Texas Standard, Texas Monthly, and the Food Network.

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Frederick Luis Aldama

12:00 PM to 1:00 PM

Signing at 1:15 PM

One Place, Many Voices: New Fiction & Poetry About the Border with Frederick Luis Aldama, Edmundo Paz Soldán, & Emmy Perez

Location: West Terrace
Signing Location: Augusta Street

Frederick Luis Aldama is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English and University Distinguished Scholar at Ohio State University. He is founder and director of LASER, a mentoring and research hub for Latinos (ninth grade through college), selected as a 2015 Bright Spot in Hispanic Education by the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics. An expert on Latino popular culture, Aldama is the author, co-author, and editor of twenty-six books, including Your Brain on Latino Comics: From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez and The Cinema of Robert Rodriguez.

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Maya Perez

1:45 PM - 2:45 PM

Signing at 3:00 PM

The Art of Screenwriting with Maya Perez & Craig Johnson

Location: LaunchSA
Signing Location: Augusta Street

Maya Perez is a writer, a producer/consultant for Austin Film Festival’s On Story, and a board member of the Austin Film Festival, for which she has also served as Conference Director. She holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where she was a James A. Michener Fellow.

Bill Wittliff

3:45 PM - 4:45 PM

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Signing at 5:00 PM

The Old West Made New: Western Fiction Across the Centuries with Jeff Guinn, Bill Wittliff, & Craig Johnson

Location: Swartz Room
Signing Location: Augusta Street

Bill Wittliff is a distinguished screenwriter and producer whose credits include Lonesome Dove, The Perfect Storm, The Black Stallion, and Legends of the Fall, among others. His fine art photography has been published in the books A Book of Photographs from Lonesome Dove, A Book on the Making of Lonesome Dove, La Vida Brinca, and Vaquero: Genesis of the Texas Cowboy.

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Andrea Valdez

4:15 PM - 5:00 PM
Signing at 5:15 PM

Not Our First Rodeo: A Texan-Off with Andrea Valdez

Location: Rogers Hall
Signing Location: Augusta Street

Test your knowledge of all things Texan at this fun event featuring How to Be a Texan author Andrea Valdez, a panel of contestants, and definitely mean judges (the contest goes way beyond the use of “y’all,” y’all).

A native Houstonian who has worked for Texas Monthly since 2006, Andrea Valdez is the editor of TexasMonthly.com. She has written on a wide range of subjects, including more than forty columns on activities every Texan should be able to do, which provided the inspiration for this book. She also helped Texas Monthly launch The Daily Post and TMBBQ.com.

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Latino Comic Books Past, Present, and Future

There are no limits to the ways in which Latinos can be represented and imagined in the world of comics. However, until now this area has been relatively understudied. Graphic Borders: Latino Comic Books Past, Present, and Future presents the most thorough exploration of comics by and about Latinos currently available. This exciting graphic genre conveys the distinctive and wide-ranging experiences of Latinos in the United States, from Latino superheroes in mainstream comics to subcultures on the indie spectrum like Love & Rockets. 

The World Comics and Graphic Nonfiction series includes monographs and edited volumes that focus on the analysis and interpretation of comic books and graphic nonfiction from around the world. The books published in the series will bring analytical approaches from such fields as literature, art history, cultural studies, communication studies, media studies, and film studies, among others to help define the comic book studies field at a time of great vitality and growth. To celebrate Graphic Borders as the first book in the World Comics and Graphic Nonfiction series, we asked co-editors Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González a few questions about their new book. 

What drew you both to pursue this project?

While scholarship on comics has come into its own of late, it’s largely been focused on white (usually male) creators and creations—and this in all the different styles, from the superhero to those of the Underground and Alternative scenes. Of course, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with this. And, we completely understand the scholarly compulsion; this has been the reading diet of most scholars working on comics in this country. And, we understand the significance of this work: to move forcefully comic book studies into centers of Ivory Tower knowledge making.

However, there’s much more to this story. There’s much more that needs our scholarly excavation and attention. Comic books by and about Latinos is a vital living, breathing archive of extraordinary creativity in need of our careful scholarly attention. It demands this.

Today, we as Latinos in the US are the majority minority. We’re seeing more and more Latinos pushing through the gates—and this in spite of the persistence of a push-out/lock-out education system. With pencil and paper and access to comics and any other cultural art forms, Latino comic book creators have been using this format to tell our stories and histories—and also to take us to places as yet unimagined. With access to the Internet with its funding and distribution platforms, these creators have been creating comics that reach readers across the country—the planet.

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Of course, we love these Latino comics so it doesn’t take any arm-twisting to get us to put to together a volume like this; or, in the case of Aldama, to write the first book on Latino comics (Your Brain on Latino Comics) and edit one of the first volumes on multicultural comics (Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle); it’s why Aldama’s about to publish Latino Comic Book Storytelling: An Odyssey by Interview—a project González contributes too as well. It’s why González edited a special issue of ImageText on Los Bros Hernandez and is finishing up his book on Gilbert Hernandez.

For us, to bring together these extraordinary scholars to enrich our understanding of comics by key shapers in our planetary republic of comics is a no brainer. It’s this sense of inclusivity and attention to the verbal-visual storytelling margins that led us to undertake the herculean work to edit the 350,000 double volume, Encyclopedia of World Comics.

At one point, it was Shakespeare’s moment and at another, Gabriel García Márquez. Today, it’s our moment. It’s the moment of extraordinary creation of comics by and about Latinos—and we’re here along with our scholarly hermanos and hermanas to shout this from rooftops.

What makes Latina/o-created comics unique?

There are two levels of comics creation to keep in mind here: the content and the form. Not surprisingly, some (most) Latino comic book creators have chosen to recreate experiences, stories, histories that have otherwise been swept to the side in mainstream culture. But the shape given to this content—this very varied Latino-ness, if you will—is extraordinarily diverse. Someone like Lalo Alcaraz (the subject of Juan Poblete’s work in this volume) chooses to reproduce our experience, giving it the form of satirical political cartoon; others like Los Bros Hernandez choose to recreate our experience by fleshing out huge storyworlds overflowing with an abundance of characters from all walks of life—and each (Gilbert and Jaime) with their own unique aesthetic style. Those like Wilfred Santiago (the subject of González’s scholarship herein) gravitate toward biography: Robeto Clemente’s breaking of color and linguistic barriers as one of the first Afrolatino players to make it in baseball’s major leagues. Yet others like Javier Hernandez (El Muerto) and Rafa Navarro (Sonambulo) breath new life into Marvel/DC narrative conventions with their creation of ancestrally rooted Latino superheroes.

Clemente experiences racism in the American South,
from 21: The Story of Roberto Clemente by Wilfred Santiago

To put it simply, there are no limits to the imagination when it comes to Latino comic book creators and their choices in terms of content and form. What we see today is that most (and to varying degrees) tend to choose to fill out their content with ingredients that speak to the Latino identity and experience. What we see today is that most take from and make their own (and make new) all those shaping devices and styles that make up our planetary republic of comics. 

Censorship in Comics for Banned Books Week

Banned Books Week (September 27 through October 3, 2015) is the book community’s annual opportunity to celebrate the freedom to read, and draw attention to those who hinder that right. Intellectual freedom is a core value of our mission; and the freedom to read is as integral to that value as the freedom to publish. 

This year's theme is Young Adult fiction—one of the most regularly challenged categories of books in libraries and schools across the country. We don't publish young adult fiction, but we are launching a new comic book studies series called World Comics and Graphic Nonfiction Series with Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González as series editors. The series will include monographs and edited volumes that focus on the analysis and interpretation of comic books and graphic nonfiction from around the world. Books published in the series will bring analytical approaches from such fields as literature, art history, cultural studies, communication studies, media studies, and film studies, among others to help define the comic book studies field at a time of great vitality and growth.

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The Association of American University Presses is an official sponsor of Banned Books Week. To join the conversation, we're posting an excerpt from a recent issue of The Velvet Light Trap dealing with censorship in the comic book industry. To read Shawna Kidman's piece in full, you can access it through Project Muse, visit your local library, or purchase a single issue of The Velvet Light Trap on our website.

Contribute to the banned books conversation on social media with the hashtags #bannedbooks and #bannedbooksweek.

"Self-Regulation through Distribution: Censorship and the Comic Book Industry in 1954"
By Shawna Kidman

In the early 1950s, comic books boasted a readership of over seventy million Americans, each of whom consumed an average of six comics a month. There were two comic books published for every one book, with each copy likely passed on to more than three readers. And then, quite suddenly, the market crashed. Between 1954 and 1955, sales plummeted by 50 percent, from eighty million copies each month to just forty million. By 1956 more than half of the extant publishers had closed their doors, and two-thirds of the six hundred titles appearing monthly on newsstands had vanished.1 Just like that, comic books went from being one of the most popular forms of entertainment in America to a medium struggling for its survival.2

At the very same moment, as the comic book market was beginning its dramatic decline, the medium was undergoing a crisis in the political sphere. Psychiatrists, church officials, members of PTAs, and local politicians had for years been trying to link comic books to juvenile delinquency, illiteracy, and moral corruption. Finally, in the spring of 1954, the government got involved, and the Senate Judiciary Committee held televised hearings on the comic book industry and its alleged corruption of America’s youth. Pressured by this public relations disaster and the threat of local and state censorship, the major comic book publishers joined forces to form the Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA). This trade organization drafted a code of self-censorship and created an administrative body to enforce it known as the Comics Code Authority (CCA). Like the Production Code Administration (PCA) created by Hollywood twenty years earlier, the CCA would issue a seal of approval to those titles it deemed morally appropriate. Heavily promoted by the industry, this response seemed to satisfy government officials and consumers alike; within the year, interest in the controversy had faded almost entirely from public view.3 But the dramatic decline in sales was already well under way.

Most writers have characterized the anti-comics crusade and the simultaneous market crash in primarily cultural terms, drawing a causal link between these two events. The episode has been sensationalized in many journalistic accounts, which create a hero and villain respectively in the figures of EC Comics publisher Bill Gaines, an innovator responsible for “some of the best comic books ever published,” and Fredric Wertham, an “insane” psychiatrist who told “apocalyptic” lies about the dangers of mass media.4 In this version of the story, the Senate or “EC hearings” are recast as a trial on taste, Bill Gaines is understood as their “principal target,” and Wertham is accused of censoring Gaines right “out of existence.”5 Scholars meanwhile tend to point to social trends, blaming the controversy on McCarthyism; seething generational battles; culture wars rooted in class, money, religion, and politics; and fundamental struggles over “who had the right and the responsibility to shape American culture.”6 With a focus on comic book content or the cultural milieu, many of these descriptions marginalize the market crash itself, which is depicted as merely a side effect of censorship. Some have even argued that the anti-comics crusade was “almost solely responsible for the drastic decline in sales and the near death of the industry during the 1950s.”7

Figure 1. Comics Code Authority Seal, 1954. For more than three decades, this seal from the CCA would grace the cover of the majority of comic books sold in America.

Too often left out of these historical accounts is the way in which both censorship and shrinking audiences are fundamentally also industrial, economic, and political occurrences. Censorship in particular often seems like an issue that is primarily value-based and culturally contingent. However, in the context of mass media, the regulation of content necessarily involves vast and powerful infrastructures of enforcement capable of containing the inherent disorderliness of popular culture. So while we should not give up on analyzing the texts and ideologies at the center of media censorship, it is equally important to consider the material foundations that support systems of both restriction and circulation. More broadly, as Philip Napoli has noted, it is possible to use the political economy of media as a useful “foundation of knowledge for a wide range of important scholarly inquiries into the behaviors of media industries, as well as the broader political and cultural ramifications of these behaviors.”8 A better understanding of the industrial context in which most media is produced and initially circulated can lead to a more profound insight into all aspects of culture, including its active consumption, transformation, and recirculation by audiences and fans, the latter of which has been a particular interest of comic book studies.9

Frederick Aldama on Meeting Robert Rodriguez

Part of the fun of Halloween is the opportunity to embody favorite characters from film and pop culture. For most of us, that's the closest we'll get to experiencing the fictional worlds that have inspired and entertained us, but for scholar Frederick Luis Aldama, meeting and interviewing filmmaker Robert Rodriguez for his latest book immersed him in the movie magic he'd admired for decades. We asked him what that was like. Enjoy his guest blog post and some bonus Halloween costume ideas inspired by the cinema of Robert Rodriguez:

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Meeting Robert Rodriguez
By Frederick Luis Aldama

Like all the books I’ve written, The Cinema of Robert Rodriguez had its fair share of scary and even physically painful twists and turns. Like those rollercoaster rides of my younger days, there was a lot of joyful exhilaration thrown into the mix.

Ever since watching El Mariachi and then his short “Bedhead” and then writing a review of Rebel Without a Crew way back when still wet behind the ears, I’ve been fascinated with Rodriguez: his just-do-it approach and his comic-book (or more specifically, his Tex-Avery Cartoon) worldview. He would get the film done, often learning new film techniques in the process and he would go to places that straight-up realist films didn’t. Social mores went out the window and, like the wolf in Tex-Avery’s Droopy cartoons, his characters often defied all natural laws. He was hands-down the most exciting and productive Latino filmmaker out there.

As I wove my way through undergrad and grad school then became a college professor, he was churning out films of all sorts and that had us going to places never before imagined. To date, he’s made over 18 feature films, published a comic book, and runs a Latino-content cable network (El Rey).

LGBT Pride Reading List

June is Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month! We've got a diverse round up of titles spanning the LGBT experience from the colonial Andes to prehistoric Greece, from revolutionary Mexico to modern Lebanon, and from queer representations in film to defining the Chicana lesbian identity in literature. So let's celebrate all the recent victories that have affirmed freedom and fairness, and continue the fight for acceptance that remains.

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Browse more in queer studies on our website!

Queer Beirut
By Sofian Merabet

Going beyond notions of identity that have been defined exclusively on the basis of sectarian and religious affiliation, this book explores the performative practices of gendering by young Lebanese gays as they formulate their sense of what it means to “exist.”

What Makes a Man?
Sex Talk in Beirut and Berlin

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Rashid al-Daif and Joachim Helfer
Translated by Ken Seigneurie and Gary Schmidt

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This “novelized biography” by Lebanese novelist Rashid al-Daif and pointed riposte by German novelist Joachim Helfer demonstrate how attitudes toward sex and masculinity across cultural contexts are intertwined with the work of fiction, thereby highlighting the importance of fantasy in understanding the Other.

Pillar of Salt
An Autobiography, with 19 Erotic Sonnets
By Salvador Novo, Translated by Marguerite Feitlowitz

Written with exquisite sensitivity and wit, this memoir by one of Mexico’s foremost men of letters describes coming of age during the violence of the Mexican Revolution and “living dangerously” as an openly homosexual man in a brutally machista society.

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Wicked Cinema
Sex and Religion on Screen
By Daniel Cutrara

With close readings of films such as The Last Temptation of Christ, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and Closed Doors, this book investigates cinematic representations of transgressive sexuality within Christianity, Judaism, and Islam to argue that religious believers have become the new “Other”.

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Queer Bergman
Sexuality, Gender, and the European Art Cinema
By Daniel Humphrey

Foregrounding a fundamental aspect of the Swedish auteur’s work that has been routinely ignored, as well as the vibrant connection between postwar American queer culture and European art cinema, this book offers a pioneering reading of Bergman’s films as profoundly queer work.

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Psycho-Sexual
Male Desire in Hitchcock, De Palma, Scorsese, and Friedkin
By David Greven


Examining the intertextual reverberations between canonical Hitchcock films and the New Hollywood of the 1970s, this revisionist reading challenges the received opinion of misogyny, racism, and homophobia presented in male desire featured in works by Hitchcock, De Palma, Scorsese, and Friedkin.


Filming Difference
Actors, Directors, Producers, and Writers on Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Film
Edited by Daniel Bernardi

Reflecting diverse voices in film and television, more than a dozen industry professionals explore how their works represent complex identities.

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The Lieutenant Nun
Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire, and Catalina de Erauso
By Sherry Velasco

Catalina de Erauso (1592–1650) was a Basque noblewoman who, just before taking final vows to become a nun, escaped from the convent at San Sebastián, dressed as a man, and, in her own words, "went hither and thither, embarked, went into port, took to roving, slew, wounded, embezzled, and roamed about."

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Whatever Happened to Dulce Veiga?
A B-Novel
By Caio Fernando Abreu

Translated from the Portuguese with a Glossary and Afterword by Adria Frizzi

Whatever Happened to Dulce Veiga? is a descent into the underworld of contemporary megalopolises where, like the inside of a huge TV, life intermingles with bits of music, film clips, and soap opera characters in a crazy and macabre dance, moving toward a possible catharsis.

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Bridging
How Gloria Anzaldúa's Life and Work Transformed Our Own
Edited by AnaLouise Keating and Gloria González-López

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Thirty-two wide-ranging voices pay tribute to the late Gloria Anzaldúa, the beloved poet and fiction writer who redefined lesbian and Chicana/o identities for thousands of readers.

Reading Chican@ Like a Queer
The De-Mastery of Desire
By Sandra K. Soto

The first full-length study to treat racialized sexuality as a necessary category of analysis for understanding any aspect of Mexican American culture.

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Queer Issues in Contemporary Latin American Cinema
By David William Foster

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Highly perceptive queer readings of fourteen key films to demonstrate how these cultural products promote the principles of an antiheterosexist stance while they simultaneously disclose how homophobia enforces the norms of heterosexuality.

Brown on Brown
Chicano/a Representations of Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity
By Frederick Luis Aldama

An investigation of the ways in which race and sexuality intersect and function in Chicano/a literature and film.

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Men as Women, Women as Men
Changing Gender in Native American Cultures
By Sabine Lang

Translated by John L. Vantine

As contemporary Native and non-Native Americans explore various forms of "gender bending" and gay and lesbian identities, interest has grown in "berdaches," the womanly men and manly women who existed in many Native American tribal cultures.

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Decolonizing the Sodomite
Queer Tropes of Sexuality in Colonial Andean Culture
By Michael J. Horswell

Early Andean historiography reveals a subaltern history of indigenous gender and sexuality that saw masculinity and femininity not as essential absolutes. Third-gender ritualists, Ipas, mediated between the masculine and feminine spheres of culture in important ceremonies. These values traveled to the Andes and were used as powerful rhetorical weapons in the struggle to justify the conquest of the Incas.

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Among Women
From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World
Edited by Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Lisa Auanger

This book explores a wide variety of textual and archaeological evidence for women's homosocial and homoerotic relationships from prehistoric Greece to fifth-century CE Egypt.

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