Jennifer Ponce de León - Böcker

In Another Aesthetics Is Possible Jennifer Ponce de LeÓn examines the roles that art can play in the collective labor of creating and defending another social reality. Focusing on artists and art collectives in Argentina, Mexico, and the United States, Ponce de LeÓn shows how experimental practices in the visual, literary, and performing arts have been influenced by and articulated with leftist movements and popular uprisings that have repudiated neoliberal capitalism and its violence. Whether enacting solidarity with Zapatista communities through an alternate reality game or using surrealist street theater to amplify the more radical strands of Argentina's human rights movement, these artists fuse their praxis with forms of political mobilization from direct-action tactics to economic resistance. Advancing an innovative transnational and transdisciplinary framework of analysis, Ponce de LeÓn proposes a materialist understanding of art and politics that brings to the fore the power of aesthetics to both compose and make visible a world beyond capitalism.

In Another Aesthetics Is Possible Jennifer Ponce de LeÓn examines the roles that art can play in the collective labor of creating and defending another social reality. Focusing on artists and art collectives in Argentina, Mexico, and the United States, Ponce de LeÓn shows how experimental practices in the visual, literary, and performing arts have been influenced by and articulated with leftist movements and popular uprisings that have repudiated neoliberal capitalism and its violence. Whether enacting solidarity with Zapatista communities through an alternate reality game or using surrealist street theater to amplify the more radical strands of Argentina's human rights movement, these artists fuse their praxis with forms of political mobilization from direct-action tactics to economic resistance. Advancing an innovative transnational and transdisciplinary framework of analysis, Ponce de LeÓn proposes a materialist understanding of art and politics that brings to the fore the power of aesthetics to both compose and make visible a world beyond capitalism.

Ricardo A. Bracho is a queer Chicano Marxist playwright from Los Angeles whose theatrical works dramatize the lives of gay Black and Brown partisans of anti-capitalism and decolonization. Characterized by their playful use of theory, Bracho’s plays utilize the stage as a place for characters to debate questions of sexual and political liberation. Though Bracho’s work has been breaking ground within the experimental Latinx theater and arts community since the 1990s, his plays have not been widely accessible beyond their staging. Driven by passion—for politics, for the dancefloor, for dispossessed bodies, communities, and lands—Bracho’s award-winning plays express a polyphony of outlaw voices and contemporary dramas. With a foreword by Bracho’s teacher and iconic Chicana writer CherrÍe Moraga, an afterword by Juana Maria Rodriguez, as well as critical notes and an introduction by editors Jennifer Ponce de León, Richard T. Rodriguez, and Randall Williams, Puto makes Bracho’s key works available to a broader public for the first time, bringing Bracho’s frank, transgressive, and revolutionary work to the forefront just when the world needs it most.

Ricardo A. Bracho is a queer Chicano Marxist playwright from Los Angeles whose theatrical works dramatize the lives of gay Black and Brown partisans of anti-capitalism and decolonization. Characterized by their playful use of theory, Bracho’s plays utilize the stage as a place for characters to debate questions of sexual and political liberation. Though Bracho’s work has been breaking ground within the experimental Latinx theater and arts community since the 1990s, his plays have not been widely accessible beyond their staging. Driven by passion – for politics, for the dancefloor, for dispossessed bodies, communities, and lands – Bracho’s award-winning plays express a polyphony of outlaw voices and contemporary dramas. With a foreword by Bracho’s teacher and iconic Chicana writer Cherríe Moraga, an afterword by Juana Maria Rodriguez, as well as critical notes and an introduction by editors Jennifer Ponce de León, Richard T. Rodriguez, and Randall Williams, Puto makes Bracho’s key works available to a broader public for the first time, bringing Bracho’s frank, transgressive, and revolutionary work to the forefront just when the world needs it most.

FrenchTheory is due for an insider critique, and in Requiem for French Theory,Aymeric Monville and Gabriel Rockhill do just that. Drawing upon decades ofstudying French philosophy in Paris, they build upon the best Marxistcriticisms of postmodernism, while further developing them by situatingpostmodern theory within the global political economy of knowledge andU.S.-driven intellectual imperialism. The result is a broad dialogue ontopics ranging from international class struggle and the dissemination ofideology, to fascism, identity politics, dialectics, actually existingsocialism, and among others. Requiem for French Theory soundly criticizes this tradition’s chameleonicideological permutations under new names, such as postcolonial thought,decolonial theory, new materialism, and other trendsetting discourses. But italso reveals how these theoretical developments are all part of a broaderanticommunist cultural front. Most importantly, Monville and Rockhill developthe positive project of anti-imperialist Marxism as the ultimate antidote toFrench theoretical sophistry. Far from indulging in the political defeatismcharacteristic of the Western Marxist critiques of postmodernism, thisintellectual exchange issues a clarion call for revitalizing revolutionarytheory and putting it into practice.