Category: publications

CFP: Art of the Latinx Diaspora @ Journal of Latino-Latin American Studies (JOLLAS)

CFP: Art of the Latinx Diaspora

Journal of Latino-Latin American Studies, University of Nebraska at Omaha, 2018

The Journal of Latino-Latin American Studies (JOLLAS) seeks contributions for a special issue on the Art of the Latinx Diaspora. All media, periods and geographies are eligible, and contributors are encouraged to think broadly and innovatively about the ways in which the Latinx diaspora and its cultural production are framed. Scholarship from all art-related disciplines, including Art History, Curatorial Studies, Art Education, etc. is welcome. Technical and quantitative methodologies are invited.

Interested parties are asked to submit a full draft manuscript (10-20 pages in length, notes and images included), in MSWord compatible and PDF format to arduran[at]unomaha.edu by 15 March 2017. Submissions will be peer-reviewed.

For more information, please visit:
http://jollas.org
http://www.unomaha.edu/college-of-arts-and-sciences/ollas/index.php

About JOLLAS:
The Journal of Latino-Latin American Studies (JOLLAS) is an interdisciplinary, international, and peer reviewed on-line journal housed at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. The journal seeks to be reflective of the shifting demographics, geographic dispersion, and new community formations occurring among Latino populations across borders and throughout the Americas. The journal emphasizes the collective understanding of Latino issues in the U.S. while recognizing the growing importance of transnationalism and the porous borders of Latino/Latin American identities.
The Journal of Latino-Latin American Studies welcomes quality scholarship from relevant academic disciplines as well as from practitioners in the private and public sectors. JOLLAS is receptive to scholarship coming from a variety of theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches. All research should be understood and examined from a transnational perspective.

JOLLAS’ Mission:
To publish academically rigorous scholarship with real-world applicability to the understanding of Latino/Latin American peoples and critical issues.

All inquiries should be directed to Adrian R. Duran, Associate Professor, Art & Art History, University of Nebraska at Omaha, arduran@unomaha.edu

The Sounds of Ethncity, Race and Region

how-to-speak-midwesternIn today’s New York Times, Jennifer Schuessler reviewed a new book, How to Speak Midwestern. Interestingly, the headline in the print edition is:  “Midwesterner, Yes, You Do Have an Accent”. This phrasing is a gentle nudge to rethink what might be perceived as a norm, which, of course, is actually as inflected as anything else. Apparently, this truth is one of author Edward McClelland’s motivations for writing this book.

In the review, Schuessler comes out from behind the curtain of reviewer neutrality. She pronounces, self-deprecatingly: “Full disclosure: Like Mrs. Clinton, I’m a white woman who grew up in the Chicago suburbs. When it comes to pinched nasal vowels and strongly pronounced r’s (a phenomenon linguists call rhoticity), I’m With Her.”

Schuessler also notes: “The heavily industrialized (and segregated) Inland North–as dialectologists call the region stretching from roughly from central New York across the Great Lakes–‘has a wider divergence between white and black speech than anywhere in the country,’ Mr. McClleland writes, with African-Americans largely maintaining speech patterns brought from the South. (Mr. McClelland notes the existence of various Midwestern ‘blacaccents,’ though he doesn’t explore them.)”

Such “blaccents” are not the only subjects deserving of further study by critical race scholars. So is the consideration of the visual. Tellingly, the designers for McClelland’s book eschew figures for its cover, as if to acknowledge the demographic diversity of the region’s populace. Smart move.

Consider the ideology of an earlier publication (1960) with almost the same title:

thomas-how-to-speak-midwestern

This book is a “humor” offering. See Google Books for a brief excerpt:

“To speak good Midwestern you need to: Get gear’d up by studyin’ this book. Before you know it you’ll be speaking Midwestern Pertnear as good as Everybody.”

Thomas’s cover design is serious in its invocation, i.e., the Midwest is American Gothic (1930). It is a move to use the authority of the original painting, without any awareness of its intended satire.

 

 

Marvel celebrates fifty years of Black Panther at NYCC — Dark Matters

LINK: “I can’t believe we were publishing this in 1973!”

via Marvel celebrates fifty years of Black Panther at NYCC — Dark Matters

Color portraits of immigrants at Ellis Island – in pictures | Culture | The Guardian

Immigrants as types — Ellis Island arrivals

PUB: Saucier and Woods on Maroonage,  Antiblackness, and Black Studies — African Diaspora, Ph.D.

“On Marronage: Ethical Confrontations with Antiblackness” is a collective intervention into the discursive formation of black studies at the outset of the twenty-first century.”

via EDITED: Saucier and Woods on Maroonage,  Antiblackness, and Black Studies — African Diaspora, Ph.D.

The world of “Tarzan” and ours

In a searching review from yesterday’s The New York Times, critic Manohla Darghis writes in the concluding paragraph:

“Part of Tarzan’s appeal–at least to some–is that he inhabits a world that resembles ours, but without the unsettling distractions of real suffering. It’s become trickier for pop entertainments to gloss over historical traumas, which may be why so many modern colonial struggles involve deep space or an alien invasion. Perhaps it’s easier to rewrite history through futuristic fictions, where worlds can collide before everyone moves on. . .”

I wish Dargis had written more about the intersection of contemporary Hollywood’s vision with Tarzan’s creator Edgar Rice Burroughs’, and about why the blond, muddied, bare chested Alexander Skarsgard (in the role of Tarzan), is a called-for element of our twenty-first century visual culture. Utterly fictive images of transcendent white masculinity have to written, consumed, and rewritten, I guess. . .

tarzan-trailer-features-lots-of-shirtless-alexander-skarsgard-01

“Tarzan has always had bad optics–white hero, black land–to state the excessively, obvious,” quips Dargis.

No kidding, and suddenly Hollywood gets it, too!

If only this was a case of better late than never. . .

 

Divided cities: South Africa’s apartheid legacy photographed by drone

See Johnny Miller’s photos in THE GUARDIAN, Jun. 23, 2016

Unequal scenes offers interpretations of inequality in contemporary South Africa

A Davila, “Latino/a Art: Race and the Illusion of Equality”

http://blog.art21.org/2016/06/20/latinoa-art-race-and-the-illusion-of-equality/#.V2omxstlBnE

Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant

Terra Foundation grant info 2016

Inge Hardison’s Realist Sculpture– ” more in-depth scholarship needed”

37343216_1_x“A Sculptor of Black Heroes Leaves a Legacy”