Race and Cultural Practice in Popular Culture

DOMINO PEREZ is an associate professor of English at the University of Texas in Austin. She is the author of There Was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture. RACHEL GONZÁLEZ-MARTIN is an assistant professor of Mexican American and Latina/o studies at the University of Texas.

"The ugly eruptions of racism and resurgent white supremacy in this 'post-racial' time are grim reminders of just how vital it is that we understand and engage the complex and contested logics of race in the United States and other settler states. This volume is an impressive and indeed essential tool for that purpose. The editors have brought together a community of thoughtful, provocative thinkers in conversation at the crossroads of folklore, popular culture, critical theory, political action, and lived experience. Collectively and individually the contributors take race and (self-) representation seriously, in often unexpected, sometimes playful, occasionally fierce, but always compelling ways; they challenge readers to reconsider our own biases and boundaries around knowledge and cultural production, and extend the horizon of what is and can be possible in our critical conversations and embodied understandings. Race and Cultural Practice in Popular Culture offers vital, nourishing intellectual sustenance in these cruel and incurious times."— Daniel Heath Justice, author of Why Indigenous Literatures Matter"Domino Perez and Rachel González-Martin have assembled a dynamic and eclectic collection that urges us to see, hear, and place race and racialized representations beyond stereotypical, silenced, and sedentary subjectivities. Engaging the contemporary social politics of race in television, film, music, and other performative sites, Race and Cultural Practice in Popular Culture deftly reframes, remixes, and resituates discourse on folklore and pop culture to usher in nuanced understandings and challenging conversations befitting who we are and where we may be going as local and global creators, consumers, and critics of the popular."— Dustin Tahmahkera, author of Tribal Television: Viewing Native People in Sitcoms

• ContentsList of Illustrations"Assembling an Intersectional Pop Cultura Analytical Lens: A Foreword"Introduction: Re-imagining Critical Approaches to Folklore and Popular CultureDomino Renee Perez and Rachel González-MartinPart I: Visualizing Race"A Thousand 'Lines of Flight': Collective Individuation and Racial Identity in Netflix's Orange Is the New Black and Sense8"Ruth Y. Hsu"Performing Cherokee Masculinity in The Doe Boy"Channette Romero"Truth, Justice, and the Mexican Way: Lucha Libre, Film, and Nationalism in Mexico"James Wilkey"Native American Irony: Survivance and the Subversion of Ethnography"Gerald VizenorPart II: Sounding Race"(Re)imagining Indigenous Popular Culture"Mintzi Auanda Martínez-Rivera"My Tongue is Divided into Two"Olivia Cadaval"Performing Nation Diva Style in Lila Downs and Astrid Hadad's La Tequilera"K. Angelique Dwyer"(Dis)identifying with Shakira's 'Global Body': A Path Towards Rhythmic Affiliations Beyond the Dichotomous Nation/Diaspora"Daniela Gutiérrez López"Voicing the Occult in Chicana/o Culture and Hybridity: Prayers and the Cholo-Goth Aesthetic"José G. AnguianoPart III: Racialization in Place"Ugly Brown Bodies: Queering Desire in Machete"Nicole Guidotti-Hernández"Bitch, how'd you make it this far?": Strategic Enactments of White Femininity in The Walking Dead"Jaime Guzmán and Raisa Alvarado Uchima"Bridge and Tunnel: Transcultural Border Crossings in The Bridge and Sicario"Marcel Brousseau"Red Land, White Power, Blue Sky: Settler Colonialism and Indigeneity in Breaking Bad"James H. CoxAcknowledgmentsNotes on ContributorsIndex