Explores the how, why, and what of contemporary Chicanx
culture, including punk rock, literary fiction, photography, mass graves, and
digital and experimental installation art
Racial Immanence
attempts to unravel a Gordian knot at the center of the study of race and
discourse: it seeks to loosen the constraints that the politics of racial
representation put on interpretive methods and on our understanding of race
itself. Marissa K. L pez argues that reading Chicanx literary and cultural
texts primarily for the ways they represent Chicanxness only reinscribes the
very racial logic that such texts ostensibly set out to undo.
Racial Immanence
proposes to read differently; instead of focusing on representation, it asks what
Chicanx texts do, what they produce in the world, and specifically how they
produce access to the ineffable but material experience of race. Intrigued by
the attention to disease, disability, abjection, and sense experience that she
sees increasing in Chicanx visual, literary, and performing arts in the late-twentieth
century, L pez explores how and why artists use the body in contemporary
Chicanx cultural production. Racial Immanence takes up works by writers
like Dagoberto Gilb, Cecile Pineda, and Gil Cuadros, the photographers Ken
Gonzales Day and Stefan Ruiz, and the band Pi ata Protest to argue that the
body offers a unique site for pushing back against identity politics. In so
doing, the book challenges theoretical conversations around affect and the
post-human and asks what it means to truly consider people of color as writers
and artists. Moving beyond abjection, L pez models Chicanx cultural production
as a way of fostering networks of connection that deepen our attachments to the
material world.