Writing published by Frederick Luis Aldama http://www.humanitiesretooled.org Sat, 24 Apr 2004 02:07:28 +0000 FeedCreator 1.4 http://www.humanitiesretooled.org/index.php?sm=hrt_review.php&modCMS_cidd=73 The proverbial tortilla curtain is that very real boundary etched across lands that divide North American and Mexican peoples. It is also a place of complex experience and multiform cultural expression. The dozens of photo-journalistic, investigative, and personal essays along with testimonials and fictional vignettes that make up Puro Border reflect such a lived borderland space. Frederick Luis Aldama Thu, 26 Feb 2004 19:13:41 +0000 http://www.humanitiesretooled.org/index.php?sm=hrt_review.php&modCMS_cidd=74 The 2002 census proved without a doubt that Latinos have become the largest minority group in the U.S. It proved that for our public policy and legislations to ignore the thirty-eight-plus million documented Latinos (Chicanos, Mexicanos, Latin Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cuban, and Dominicans) would be akin to grand-scale social suicide. Frederick Luis Aldama Mon, 23 Feb 2004 12:50:19 +0000 http://www.humanitiesretooled.org/index.php?sm=hrt_review.php&modCMS_cidd=75 Arnold Krupat's Red Matters and Chris LaLonde's Grave Concerns, Trickster Turns: The Novels of Louis Owens seek to emplace centrally Native Indian literature and cultural production within American studies. While Krupat addresses a variety of Native texts--from the narratives of Sherman Alexie, Charles Easton, and Mourning Dove to oral histories, and translation theory--and LaLonde focuses exclusively on the novels of mixed-blood author, Louis Owens, their goal is the same: To use a variety of theoretical methods from Derridean informed poststructuralism to formulations of trickster metafictional techniques to enrich and complicate our understanding of Native identity and experience. Frederick Luis Aldama Mon, 23 Feb 2004 12:51:51 +0000 http://www.humanitiesretooled.org/index.php?sm=hrt_review.php&modCMS_cidd=76 Monica Brown's Gang Nation powerfully explores novels, autobiography, and drama by and about Chicano and Puerto Rican gangs to expand the range of U.S. ethnic scholarly criticism and to complicate the mainstream's misconceptions of the young and disenfranchised urban dweller. Frederick Luis Aldama Fri, 5 Mar 2004 05:56:56 +0000 http://www.humanitiesretooled.org/index.php?sm=hrt_review.php&modCMS_cidd=89 Tectonic shifts are fracturing old models of literary analysis and pushing forward approaches anew. Lacanian psychoanalysis, post-Marxist Marxism, Foucaultian new historicism, and Derridean deconstructionism are being radically revised--or discarded all together. Frederick Luis Aldama Sat, 6 Mar 2004 00:33:50 +0000