Event Details
Victor Valle, Professor Emeritus in Journalism, and now serving in Cal Poly’s Ethnic Studies Department, will discuss his 2018 edited volume, Latinx Writing Los Angeles: Nonfiction Dispatches from a Decolonial Rebellion. His conversational partner will be Dr. José A. Navarro, Associate Professor in the Ethnic Studies Department. The discussion will take place on Friday October 26, from 10 to 11:30 a.m. in the Advanced Technology Lab (ATL). There will be time for audience questions and light refreshments will be served. The event is part of Kennedy Library’s Conversations with Cal Poly Authors series. Listen to podcasts of past conversations on SoundCloud.
About the Book
Latinx Writing Los Angeles offers a critical anthology of Los Angeles’s most significant English-language and Spanish-language (in translation) nonfiction writing from the city’s inception to the present. Contemporary Latinx authors, including three Pulitzer Prize winners and writers such as Harry Gamboa Jr., Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and Rubén Martínez, focus on the ways in which Latinx Los Angeles’s nonfiction narratives record the progressive racialization and subalternization of Latinxs in the southwestern United States.
While notions of racial memory, coloniality, biopolitics, internal colonialism, cultural assimilation, Mexican or pan-Latinx cultural nationalism, and transnationalism permeate this anthology, contributors advocate the idea of a contested modernity that refuses to accept mainstream cultural impositions, proposing instead alternative ways of knowing and understanding. Featuring a wide variety of voices as well as a diversity of subgenres, this collection is the first to illuminate divergent, hybrid Latinx histories and cultures. Redefining Los Angeles’s literary history and providing a new model for English, Spanish, and Latinx studies, Latinx Writing Los Angeles is an essential contribution to southwestern and borderland studies.
About the Editor
Victor Valle’s writing career commenced in the 1970s, publishing poetry, literary translations, and editing literary magazines. In 1981 he joined the Los Angeles Times, where he earned several honors during his eight-year career, including a Pulitzer Prize he shared with fellow Chicano journalists in 1984. His interests include Chicano literature, activism, civil rights history, the Latino city, and a strand of cultural history with an appetizing culinary turn, as evidenced by his book, Recipe of Memory: Five Generations of Mexican Cuisine, which garnered two literary nominations in 1996. Another book, City of Industry: Genealogies of Power in Southern California, was published by Rutgers University Press in 2011. Dr. Valle co-edited Latinx Writing with Dr. Ignacio López-Calvo, Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of California, Merced.
About the Conversational Partner
Dr. José Navarro received his B.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley in 2002, and his Ph.D in English at the University of Southern California in 2012. At Cal Poly, José has taught a variety of courses in both the departments of English and Ethnic Studies, and his research interests include Latina/o literary & cultural studies; Chicano/Latino gang film & other gang narratives; the intersections of race, gender, masculinity, and sexuality studies; and, decolonial theory and politics. José has published articles in the journal Latino Studies, The Journal of Popular Culture, the Oxford University Press Encyclopedia of Latina/o Literature. He has forthcoming book chapters in Left in the West, edited by Gioia Woods, and Hip Hop, Blackness, and Indigeneity from Sense Publishers.