Focusing on the often unrecognized role race plays in expressions of Chicano culture, "Mestizaje" is a provocative exploration of the volatility and mutability of racial identities. In this important moment in Chicano studies, Rafael Perez-Torres reveals how the concepts and realities of race, historical memory, the body, and community have both constrained and opened possibilities for forging new and potentially liberating multiracial identities.
Informed by a broad-ranging theoretical investigation of identity politics and race and incorporating feminist and queer critiques, Perez-Torres skillfully analyzes Chicano cultural production. Contextualizing the history of mestizaje, he shows how the concept of mixed race has been used to engage issues of hybridity and voice and examines the dynamics that make mestizo and mestiza identities resistant to, as well as affirmative of, dominant forms of power. He also addresses the role that mestizaje has played in expressive culture, including the hip-hop music of Cypress Hill and the vibrancy of Chicano poster art. Turning to issues of mestizaje in literary creation, Perez-Torres offers critical readings of the works of Emma Perez, Gil Cuadros, and Sandra Cisneros, among others. This book concludes with a consideration of the role that the mestizo body plays as a site of elusive or displaced knowledge.
Moving beyond the oppositions--nationalism versus assimilation, men versus women, Texans versus Californians--that have characterized much of Chicano studies, "Mestizaje" synthesizes and assesses twenty-five years of pathbreaking thinking to make a case for the core components, sensibilities, and concerns of the discipline.
RafaelPerez-Torres is professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is author of "Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against Margins," coauthor of "To Alcatraz, Death Row, and Back: Memories of an East LA Outlaw," and coeditor of "The Chicano Studies Reader: An Anthology of Aztlan, 1970-2000."

Interpreting specific poems by some of the best known Chicano writers, this book studies the central aesthetic and thematic concerns recent Chicano poetry addresses. Drawing on current theories of postmodernity and postcoloniality, it places a "minority" literature within the central concerns of contemporary literary and cultural studies. The book addresses the most important issues related to Chicano identity, especially focusing on the contribution women writers and thinkers have made in articulating this identity.

Interpreting specific poems by some of the best known Chicano writers, this book studies the central aesthetic and thematic concerns recent Chicano poetry addresses. Drawing on current theories of postmodernity and postcoloniality, it places a "minority" literature within the central concerns of contemporary literary and cultural studies. The book addresses the most important issues related to Chicano identity, especially focusing on the contribution women writers and thinkers have made in articulating this identity.

Recent debates about globalism have usefully transformed the positioning and the cultural geography of studies of the American South. Once marked by tensions between the national and the regional, southern studies is now increasingly characterized by tensions between the local and the global. This special issue of American Literature features interdisciplinary and comparative work that focuses on the U.S. South in global contexts and attempts to reconceptualize the South from various theoretical, literary, and cultural perspectives. The new southern studies promises to be less preoccupied with patriarchal whiteness and rural idyll and more concerned with understanding the U.S. South as a construction of border crossings of every sort. Featured essays examine the political, economic, and social effects of globalization on the geopolitical locale and literary productions of the region. Each seeks to redefine the geographic and epistemological boundaries of the U.S. South by linking it to other "Souths" globally. The issue opens with a collection of manifestos given at the recent conference "The U.S. South in Global Context." These unique pieces offer variant perspectives on a common theme. Touching on history, community, migration, globalizing modernization, and even Wal-Mart, these sixteen briefs remind the reader that the American South is somewhere between the modern cosmopolitan and the historical rural spheres. One contributor examines how modernization has spread unevenly throughout the region and how it has affected recent immigrants to southern hybrid culture. Another engages in a comparative exercise between the U.S. South and Latin America, addressing questions of postcolonialism. Other contributors reflect on southern distinctiveness, southern literature, and southern colonial life. Included in the issue is a collection of original and review essays focused geographically on still lower latitudes: investigations of the Deep South and certain Caribbean cultures, and comparisons of the U.S. South to the underprivileged global South.