Latino Dreams: Transcultural Traffic and the U.S. National Imaginary (Portada Hispánica 14) (Portada Hispanica) [Paperback]

Paul Allatson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2002 | Series: Portada Hispanica

A welcome addition to the fields of Latino and (trans-)American cultural and literary studies, Latino Dreams focuses on a selection of Latino narratives, published 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. The selection includes novels by authors who have received little academic attention—Abraham Rodriguez, Achy Obejas, and Benjamin Alire Sáenz—along with underattended texts from more renowned writers—Rosario Ferré, Coco Fusco, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Latino Dreams takes a transcultural approach in order to raise questions of subaltern subordination and domination, and the resistant capacities of cultural production. 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. In these texts, moreover, national imperatives are complicated by recourse to feminist, queer, panethnic, postcolonial, or transnational agendas. 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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

The book ... inverts the common pattern in which metropolitan critics summon U.S. and European theories in order to decode Latin American texts.

--American Literature, Volume 76, Number 4, December 2004

All in all, this is an important critical contribution to Latino Studies. --Chasqui: Revista de literatura latinoamericana 33.2 (Nov. 2004)

Product Details

• Paperback: 367 pages
• Publisher: Rodopi Bv Editions; First Edition edition (November 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9042008040
• ISBN-13: 978-9042008045
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,399,499 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Paul Allatson is an academic and cultural critic based in Sydney, Australia, where he works in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences in the University of Technology, Sydney. His current research interests emerge in the intersections of Latino/a cultural studies, US cultural studies, and Transamerican studies. Paul is also interested in postcolonial, transcultural, and queer theoretical traditions. Paul has published widely in the areas of Latino/a culture, transamerican cultural and literary studies, postcolonial theory, sexuality studies, and, film, media and popular culture studies. Paul is the author of "Latino Dreams: Transcultural Traffic and the U.S. National Imaginary" (Rodopi, 2002), and "Key Terms in Latino/a Cultural and Literary Studies" (Blackwell, 2007), and co-editor (with Jo McCormack) of "Exile Cultures, Misplaced Identities" (Rodopi, 2008). Paul is the founding editor of the multilingual "PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies." He is also on the international editorial advisory boards of the journals Latino Studies (Palgrave Macmillan) and Nebula (University of Western Sydney), and the "Writing in Latinidad: Autobiographical Voices of U.S. Latinos/as Series" (University of Wisconsin Press).