Latinx Studies: The Key Concepts is an accessible guide to the central concepts and issues that inform Latinx Studies globally. It summarizes, explains, contextualizes, and assesses key critical concepts, perspectives, developments, and debates in Latinx Studies. At once comprehensive in coverage and detailed and specific in examples analyzed, it provides over 25 key concepts to the field of Latinx Studies as shaped within historical, social, cultural, regional, and global contexts, including: * Body * Border Theory * Digital Era * Familia * Immigration * Intersectionality * Language * Latinidad/es * Latinofuturism * Narco Cultura * Popular Culture * Sports Fully cross-referenced and complete with suggestions for further reading, Latinx Studies: The Key Concepts is an essential guide for anyone studying race, ethnicity, gender, class, education, culture, and globalism.

Latinx Studies: The Key Concepts is an accessible guide to the central concepts and issues that inform Latinx Studies globally. It summarizes, explains, contextualizes, and assesses key critical concepts, perspectives, developments, and debates in Latinx Studies. At once comprehensive in coverage and detailed and specific in examples analyzed, it provides over 25 key concepts to the field of Latinx Studies as shaped within historical, social, cultural, regional, and global contexts, including: * Body * Border Theory * Digital Era * Familia * Immigration * Intersectionality * Language * Latinidad/es * Latinofuturism * Narco Cultura * Popular Culture * Sports Fully cross-referenced and complete with suggestions for further reading, Latinx Studies: The Key Concepts is an essential guide for anyone studying race, ethnicity, gender, class, education, culture, and globalism.

This first critical biography of Arturo Islas (1938 1991) brings to life the complex and overlapping worlds inhabited by the gay Chicano poet, novelist, scholar, and professor. Gracefully written and deeply researched, "Dancing with Ghosts "considers both the larger questions of Islas's lifeOCohis sexuality, racial identification, and political personalityOCoand the events of his everyday existence, from his childhood in the borderlands of El Paso to his adulthood in San Francisco and at Stanford University. Frederick Aldama portrays the many facets of Islas's engaging and often contradictory personality. He also explores Islas's coming into the craft of poetry and fictionOCohis extraordinary struggle to publish his novels, "The Rain God, La Mollie and the King of Tears, "and "Migrant Souls"OCoas well as his pivotal role in paving the way for a new generation of Chicano/a scholars and writers. Through a skillful interweaving of life history, criticism, and literary theory, Aldama paints an unusually rich and wide-ranging portrait of both the man and the eventful times in which he lived. He describes Islas's struggle with polio as a child, his near-death experience and ileostomy as a thirty-year-old beginning to explore his queer sexuality in San Francisco in the 1970s, and his fatal struggle with AIDS in the late 1980s. Drawing from hundreds of unpublished letters, lecture notes, drafts of essays, novels, and poetry archived at Stanford University, Aldama also deals frankly with the controversies that swirled around Islas's impassioned love life, his drug addictions, and his scholarly and professional career as one of the first Chicano/a professors in the United States. He discusses the importance of Islas's pioneering role in bridging Anglo, Latin American, Chicano/a, and European storytelling styles and voices. "Dancing with Ghosts "succeeds brilliantly both as an account of a fascinating life that embraced many different worlds and as a chronicle of the grand historical shifts that transformed the late-twentieth-century American cultural landscape."

Through a series of provocative conversations, Frederick Luis Aldama and Herbert Lindenberger, who have written widely on literature, film, music, and art, locate a place for the discomforting and the often painfully unpleasant within aesthetics. The conversational format allows them to travel informally across many centuries and many art forms. They have much to tell one another about the arts since the advent of modernism soon after 1900-the nontonal music, for example, of the Second Vienna School, the chance-directed music and dance of John Cage and Merce Cunningham, the in-your-faceness of such diverse visual artists as Francis Bacon, Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning, Egon Schiele, Otto Dix, and Damien Hirst. They demonstrate as well a long tradition of discomforting art stretching back many centuries, for example, in the Last Judgments of innumerable Renaissance painters, in Goya's so-called "black" paintings, in Wagner's Tristan chord, and in the subtexts of Shakespearean works such as King Lear and Othelloe. This book is addressed at once to scholars of literature, art history, musicology, and cinema. Although its conversational format eschews the standard conventions of scholarly argument, it provides original insights both into particular art forms and into individual works within these forms. Among other matters, it demonstrates how recent work in neuroscience may provide insights in the ways that consumers process difficult and discomforting works of art. The book also contributes to current aesthetic theory by charting the dialogue that goes on-especially in aesthetically challenging works- between creator, artifact, and consumer.