Announcing a New Series—MF! Momentary Futures in Black Studies

Edited by L.H. Stallings

Acquiring Editor Dawn Durante

Committed to the enjoyment of disjointedness and the asynchrony of Black thought experiences, MF! is a series about funky temporalities, adaptation, and mobility. The series encourages the submission of manuscripts whose methods and aesthetics allow us to experience Black pleasure, joy, and futurity. Books in the series are transgressive and experimental while also dealing with the conflicts that arise from the intellectual and artistic boundaries of knowledge production; the defense, surveillance, and policing of Black knowledge; and the political and social constraints of normative and respectable existence as well as aspirational citizenship and humanity. The series fosters projects that center decolonization, Black lives and culture, Black solidarities and relationalities with other communities of color, and other topics within and beyond Black studies to challenge the parameters of current theories, advance new ideas about knowledge production, and speculate about a world without fear of sexual intimacy, without racial capitalism, and without finite approaches to the field of Black studies.

The series is inspired by the irreverent voices of Moms Mabley, Gayl Jones, Nalo Hopkinson, Samuel R. Delany, Paul Beatty, Cheryl Clarke, and Toni Cade Bambara. Its intellectual production is informed by trickster tales, neo-slave narratives, experimental art and theater, Afrofuturism, Afro surrealism, satire, and parody. The series understands irreverence and adaptation as methodology. It facilitates creative collaborations and encourages interactive engagement across fields that intersect with Black studies, including sexuality studies, trans studies, performance studies, film studies, disability studies, environmental studies, critical translation studies, sound studies, and cultural studies, as well as medical and digital humanities. With a particular interest in manuscripts clearly conceived, written in accessible language, and of a reasonable length, the series seeks scholarly nonfiction, creative nonfiction, and co-authored projects as well as works representing genre-blending innovations that disrupt and defy disciplinarity and temporality.

Please contact Dr. Stallings (lh855@georgetown.edu) and Dawn Durante (ddurante@utpress.utexas.edu) for more details about submitting a project for the series.

SERIES ADVISORY BOARD

Marquis Bey, Northwestern University

Darius Bost, University of Utah

Lyndon K. Gill, University of Texas at Austin

Tiffany Lethabo King, University of Virginia

Xavier Livermon, University of California Santa Cruz

Mireille Miller-Young, University of California Santa Barbara

Sami Schalk, University of Wisconsin-Madison

SA Smythe, University of Toronto

Deborah R. Vargas, Rutgers University

www.utexaspress.com

Q&A on Quinceañera Style with Rachel Valentina González

Quinceañera celebrations, which recognize a girl’s transition to young womanhood at age fifteen, are practiced in Latinx communities throughout the Americas. But in the consumer-driven United States, the ritual has evolved from a largely religious ceremony to an elaborate party where social status takes center stage. Examining the many facets of this contemporary debut experience, Quinceañera Style: Social Belonging and Latinx Consumer Identities by Rachel Valentina González reports on ethnographic fieldwork in California, Texas, the Midwest, and Mexico City to reveal a complex, compelling story. Along the way, we meet a self-identified transwoman who uses the quinceañera as an intellectual space in 

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her activist performance art. We explore the economic empowerment of women who own barrio boutiques specializing in the quinceañera’s many accessories and made-in-China gowns. And, of course, we meet teens themselves, including a vlogger whose quince-planning tips have made her an online sensation.

Disrupting assumptions, such as the belief that Latino communities in the United States can’t desire upward mobility without abandoning ethnoracial cultural legacies, Quinceañera Style also underscores the performative nature of class and the process of constructing a self in the public, digital sphere.

Give us the elevator pitch for your research and the resulting book.

Quinceañera Style explores the cultural practices of quinceañera celebrations as unexpected spectacles of luxury in Latinx communities.

How did you get interested in the subject of your book?

I never had a quinceañera, but in graduate school I was asked to present to a group of undergraduates on the significance of dress in the tradition and I realized how little research had been done. I decided I wanted to fill in those gaps.

What kind of expectations are placed on young Latinas for their quinceañeras?

It depends on who asks. Families expect young women to put a good face forward—as young women and as respectable young adults. The church wants them to manifest obedience. I think American society, however, wants Latinas to remember their place; they want to see humility and deference to assumed cultural narratives of poverty, undereducation, and social trauma. Instead, girls defy these expectations and demand to be seen.

Can you establish what you’re looking at when you say quinceañera consumer practice?

Quinceañeras are a cultural practice, but dependent on consumer practices like shopping for goods and services. I am invested in how Latina/os spend their money, and how it reflects what's valuable in their lives.

Did the regions and communities you studied differ in surprising ways?

Not really. What I found most interesting is how consumer practices, especially those circulating through deterritorial forms like internet ads and online shopping, create communities through a shared practice of consumption. While each region has its own identity, overall the styles of dresses vary because individual designers are eager to set themselves apart in a national and international versus regional fashion scene.

Briefly position your research and book in the context of other studies on quinceañeras.

My book examines US Latinx contexts of cultural production and is also interested in the church as a major framing discourse. This is not a religious history of the sacramental or even a study of ethno-racial identities, but instead is examining secular quinceañera practice through a lens of consumer citizenship.

How does your background as a folklorist make your book unique?

Being a folklorist means my primary goal is to look at the creative acts of everyday people. And in working with Latinx communities, that means that my perspective is one of examining art as a form of social resistance and place making for people who have been historically, socially, and economically marginalized in the narratives of ideal Americanness. But it also means that the primary interlocutor in this study is the practice itself—and being open to following the practice and its variations into a variety of different ideological and physical places.

Rachel Valentina González is an assistant professor of Mexican American and Latina/o studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She was a Woodrow Wilson Early Career Fellow and is the coeditor of Race and Cultural Practice in Popular Culture.

www.utexaspress.com

CBS News :: History of the Inca Empire

History of the Inca Empire

By Bernabe Cobo
Buy It Now

Incan fortresses reveal evidence of ancient war

Findings point to Inca war just prior to arrival of Spanish conquistadors in the Andes

June 1, 2011

(Livescience.com) Incan fortresses built some 500 years ago have been discovered along an extinct volcano in northern Ecuador, revealing evidence of a war fought by the Inca just before the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the Andes.

"We're seeing evidence for a pre-Columbian frontier, or borderline, that we think existed between Inca fortresses and Ecuadorian people's fortresses," project director Samuel Connell, of Foothill College in California, told LiveScience.

The team has identified what they think are 20 fortresses built by the Inca and two forts that were built by a people from Ecuador known as the Cayambe. The volcano is called Pambamarca. (Photos of the Inca fortress site)

The team's research was presented in March at the 76th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA), in Sacramento, Calif.

"We know that there are many, many fortresses throughout northern Ecuador that haven't been identified one way or the other," said Chad Gifford, of Columbia University, who is also a project director.

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Photo District News :: Image and Memory

Image and Memory:
Photography from Latin America, 1866-1994

Edited By
Wendy Watriss & Lois Parkinson Zamora
Buy It Now

FotoFest’s latest exhibition Faces of History – Latin America, organized in conjunction with arts>Brookfield Properties , highlights important late 19th and early 20th Century photographers from five Latin American countries – Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico and Peru. Their works are a profile of change – the mass availability of photography as an instrument for personal portraiture and collective communication and the emergence of new social classes created by the industrial growth of the late 1800s and early 1900s in Latin America. The photographers and their studios were important institutions in their time, recording life across economic and social lines, from native laborers to the wealthy and politically powerful, in these bustling, turn of the century, Latin American cities.

“As photographers ourselves and later founders of FotoFest, we had over 25 years working with photography in Latin America. Its photographic heritage is immensely rich,” says curator and FotoFest co-founder Wendy Watriss. FotoFest did a ground-breaking series of exhibitions on photography by Latin America photographers at the FotoFest 1992 Biennial in Houston. The exhibitions became the basis for a national traveling show and an award-winning bi-lingual book, Photography from Latin America, 1865-1992 published by University of Texas Press (1998).

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The New York Times :: Where Heaven and Earth Meet

Where Heaven and Earth Meet

by Oleg Grabar &
Benjamin Z. Kedar

Buy It Now

Unusual Partners Study Divisive Jerusalem Site
By Isabel Kershner

JERUSALEM — At the heart of this contested city, the holy site known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary, has become, for many, the epicenter of the conflict between Israel, the Palestinians and the wider Muslim world.

The mere mention of the place stirs passions and memories of centuries of bloodshed. Its alternative names evoke the depth of religious devotion and the competing claims.

Many of those contradictions are encapsulated in a new book, “Where Heaven and Earth Meet: Jerusalem’s Sacred Esplanade,” to be published here on Monday. The book is a collection of essays by renowned scholars on the history, archaeology, aesthetics and politics of the place that Jews revere as the location of their two ancient temples, and that now houses the Al Aksa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam.

Read the full New York Times article  »