Announcement: Dr. Nicole Guidotti-Hernández Wins MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies

We have the most incredible news to share today! Our very own Dr. Nicole Guidotti-Hernández has been awarded the prestigious Modern Language Association Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies for her book Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries (Duke University Press, 2011). Dr. Guidotti-Hernández is an Associate Professor of American Studies and Associate Director of the Center for Mexican American Studies here at UT Austin.

Unspeakable Violence addresses the epistemic and physical violence inflicted on racialized and gendered subjects in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands from the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth. Arguing that this violence was fundamental to U.S., Mexican, and Chicana/o nationalisms, Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández examines the lynching of a Mexican woman in California in 1851, the Camp Grant Indian Massacre of 1871, the racism evident in the work of the anthropologist Jovita González, and the attempted genocide, between 1876 and 1907, of the Yaqui Indians in the Arizona–Sonora borderlands. Guidotti-Hernández shows that these events have been told and retold in ways that have produced particular versions of nationhood and effaced other issues. Scrutinizing stories of victimization and resistance, and celebratory narratives of mestizaje and hybridity in Chicana/o, Latina/o, and borderlands studies, she contends that by not acknowledging the racialized violence perpetrated by Mexicans, Chicanas/os, and indigenous peoples, as well as Anglos, narratives of mestizaje and resistance inadvertently privilege certain brown bodies over others. Unspeakable Violence calls for a new, transnational feminist approach to violence, gender, sexuality, race, and citizenship in the borderlands.

Way to go, Dr. Guidotti-Hernández!

5 Questions with Affiliate Faculty Member Dr. Coleman Hutchison

Happy Monday! Today we bring you an interview with associate professor of English Coleman Hutchison, an affiliate faculty member of the American Studies department.What has been your favorite project to work on and why?I have a healthy dose of the presentist in me: I really like whatever I'm working on right now. For instance, I'm really excited about a collection I’m pulling together for Cambridge University Press, the first omnibus history of American Civil War literature. As editor I've been able to draw on a number of disciplines—literary studies, yes, but also, history, cultural studies, musicology, art and art history—and draw together a truly international roster of scholars. Together we’ll be addressing a literature that emerges in response to a very specific historical drama and then continues to develop across both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Needless to say, this is a much more collaborative project than my first book, and it’s been hugely gratifying.Of course intellectual pleasure can also come from unexpected and somewhat awkward sources. My first book offered a literary history of the Confederate States of America. It may have been about the "bad guys," but there was immense pleasure in getting to work with archival material that people either didn't know existed or didn't want to deal with. The extraordinary historical interest and extraordinary political problems of that material were really exciting and daunting and uncomfortable for me. That project pushed me to the edge of my comfort zone, the edge of what I thought I could do as a responsible critic. There was, then, a strange intellectual pleasure in that sort of “recovery work.”How do you see your work fitting in with broader conversations within academia or within society as a whole?Because I'm a first-generation college student—because this life was never a given for me—it’s always been important for me to make my writing and research available to as many people as possible. Part of that has to do with style—with writing in a clear, cogent, and concise way that doesn't involve a lot of jargon. The work may be theoretically rich and complex, but it is, I hope, delivered in a way that’s accessible. I think that scholarly knowledge production is increasingly important in a moment of intense information overload. Just because everyone has a blog or a Tumblr or a Twitter feed doesn't mean that the knowledge we produce in the academy is less necessary, less urgent.  The glacial pace of academic publishing and knowledge production is in some ways an advantage, because we can take a more considered, more careful argumentative tacks and engage in longer, older, maybe even slower critical conversations. This is not to say that we should return to a closed circuit wherein academics produce work only for other academics, but we should continue to do what we do best, which is produce careful, well-researched critiques, and then put those critiques into new and interesting forms. For instance, I've done a good bit of work for Southern Spaces online, and I love the idea that careful, considered scholarship can engage a broader, open source community.What projects or people have inspired your work?I take a somewhat longue durée approach to criticism. Some of the foundational works in American Studies remain ever present in my thinking and writing—people like F. O. Matthiessen and Vernon Parrington, for instance. I was sort of a theory-head in graduate school, and that was also immensely important to me. I still teach a great deal of theory, though I now marshal less of it in my writing. (I think I've now digested the stuff a bit better?) Foucault was foundational for me, Derrida was foundational for me…..I continue to read a lot of criticism—maybe too much criticism—both new and old; as a result, there are fewer individual figures that loom large for me, but there are certainly critical conversations that have helped to inspire my work. I return again and again to old school back-and-forths like the Douglas-Tompkins debates about domestic fiction, as well as to latter day interlocutors like the late, great Lora Romero. I like to think generationally about issues like women's agency, politics, and genre; I'm interested in intellectual debates that spread not over years but decades.What is your background as a scholar and how does it inform and motivate your current teaching and research?I think the biggest influence has been my personal background—my dad was on food stamps when I applied to college, I was never supposed to be an academic, &c. &c.. It wasn't until my senior year at Vanderbilt (where I was an education major who planned to teach high school) that I had a couple of professors who, intervention-style, said, "Why don't you go to graduate school, where you can teach and also have some of the policy and social justice stuff be more explicitly part of your work." I said, "That sounds great…How does one do that?" My professors’ encouragement really helped me to imagine another, alternative route for my life. I then went to Northwestern for my M.A. and Ph.D., where I planned to work with Betsy Erkkilä on Walt Whitman. Betsy is also a first-generation college student, and she helped me to imagine a life in this profession that was both fulfilling and of use, a life where I was not merely enjoying the benefits of “summers off” and tenure but also getting to do something with my criticism and teaching that was socially-engaged.What projects are you excited about working on in the future?Two projects—the first of which is a clear response to having spent several years reading really bad Confederate poetry. I'm working on a small book on the relationship between race and place in American poetry. It begins in 1863, with the Emancipation Proclamation, and goes up to 2009, with Elizabeth Alexander reading "Praise Song for the Day" at the inauguration for President Obama. The project puts poets in conversation around the specific locations where race takes place, where race happens. The theoretical framework is broad: it brings together work from cultural sociology and critical geography to tell a story about a red thread in American poetry that people haven't spent a lot of time talking about. Selfishly, it also finds me writing about people like Natasha Trethewey, Li-Young Lee, Garret Hongo, C. S. Giscombe, Effie Waller Smith, Walt Whitman, and Edgar Lee Masters—folks that I really admire and whose work I find endlessly compelling. (That’s not something I can say about the Confederate poets.)The second project is a cultural biography of Dixie. Here I’ll tell a broad story about both the nineteenth-century song and what happens to the word “Dixie” in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the past couple of years I've gotten really interested in naming, in particular how place-names work. I've also begun collecting the innumerable products that the word “Dixie” helps to sell—everything from baby bonnets to mortuary services, from botanicals to beer. It's an immensely promiscuous word, and I think it does some important and problematic work in defining the South both to itself and to other regions. So I will deal with the Dixie Cup and the Dixie Chicks, the Dixiecrats and the Dixie Highway, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “If Heaven Ain't’Ain't a Lot Like Dixie.”  I suppose it's a classic American Studies project—big and messy and protean, just like American Studies itself.If you had to describe American Studies in one sentence, what would you say?One of the things I love about American Studies is its relentless self-interrogation: this is a discipline that is always, for better or worse, re-imagining its objects of study and methodologies with a critical eye toward telling better, more effective stories about this extraordinary and extraordinarily complex country.

Announcement: Happy Thanksgiving!

As faculty and students depart campus for the [long] weekend, we'd like to wish you all a very happy Thanksgiving. We hope your holiday is peaceful and relaxing.

“I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual." - Henry David Thoreau

We'll be back next week with more content, so stay tuned! 

5 Questions with Dr. Cary Cordova

We return today to one of our favorite blog series: 5 questions with members of the American Studies core and affiliate faculties. Below, we feature a conversation with Dr. Cary Cordova, assistant professor of American Studies and graduate of our program (Ph.D. 2005).What has been your favorite project to work on and why?I would turn to the projects that have helped me work with people, the projects in which I am engaging with others, whether it is students or other colleagues or professionals out in the world; these projects have probably netted me the most personal satisfaction. Specifically, i am drawn to doing oral history. When I initially approached oral history, I viewed it as a way to source information, as a way to get data that otherwise wasn't available. But then in doing interviews, I learned a lot more about myself and about other people, and oral history became a significant amplification of my education, it became a way of expanding my universe well beyond the world that I thought I was in. For instance, one of the artists I interviewed passed away, and I went to his funeral, and it was striking to see the numbers of people that were there. And I did not expect this, but his family had decided to play the interview that I had recorded with him there at the funeral for everyone to hear, and it was so moving and so powerful to suddenly have everyone in that room listening to an interview that had just been me and him, and it helped me see the ways in which the work I was doing had a greater relevance than just me and him sitting in that room.How do you see your work fitting in with broader conversations in academia and contemporary society?Academically, it's pretty easy to see where I have come to be, because it has been pretty consistent. I have always been trying to negotiate this world between American Studies and Latino Studies, and I came to graduate school specifically to study Latina literature. I didn't end up focusing on Latina literature, but disciplinarily that has been a continuous framework. Then through graduate school and a lot of other things I came to realize I was doing a lot with Art History and with Urban Studies, but those are just the disciplines, and per my previous answer, my academic engagement has always been tied to thinking about others and thinking about my community and thinking about people that make the world matter to me.What people, projects, art, etc. have inspired your work the most?How long a list can I give you? It's a really hard question, because there are so many people that have inspired me and have trained me to think about the world. The way I work and the way I do my writing is a product of my education, and for me education does not happen simply in a classroom, it has come from a lot of the people I have come into contact with who I didn't even know were educating me at the time. I was raised in San Francisco and there's no way on earth I would have predicted I would be writing about the history of San Francisco and the way Latino artists produced their art in San Francisco at the time when I was a kid. And yet I know that I study it because somehow over the process of living there a lot of that art and a lot of those people reached out to me, maybe not directly, but it was there, and it had a dramatic impact. For example, I just came back from San Francisco and attended an event that was really one of the more powerful events in my life. It was a fundraiser for Yolanda Lopez and René Yañez who are being evicted from their home. They are two artists I have written about and who I think have done amazing work. Of course it’s this incredibly bittersweet event to see so many people coming together in the community, performing, from Cherríe Moraga, to Culture Clash, to Marga Gomez, all these different performers and speakers, all of them there because they care so much about these two people who are part of a larger problem of evictions in San Francisco. And Yolanda Lopez, someone I consider my mentor and who has been so meaningful to me in terms of the way she thinks, the way she creates art, told me that this is my family too, and that blew my mind, having these incredibly strong women, who in spite of their own struggles, have reached out to help me.Why are these evictions taking place?It's a difficult answer and it's not. Property values have been escalating to such a degree that it has propelled the use of an ordinance called the Ellis Act, which landlords are using to evict a lot of people that have been in rent-controlled situations. So what we are seeing is unprecedented numbers of people being evicted from their homes, especially in the area that I study, the Mission, because it has become such a bohemian enclave, owing largely to the work of the artists that are there.What is your background as a scholar and how does that motivate your current research and teaching?My background as a scholar is that I never thought I could be a scholar. My background as a scholar is that it is not a world that I ever could have imagined myself to inhabit as a kid or even as a young teenager. I really only attended graduate school because a couple of professors reached out to me at the very end of my undergraduate career, and that information has helped me register the enormous power that professors can have in their students lives, both good and bad, and made me very sensitive to the ways my words can have more meaning than I can dream. It also helped me recognize that many of my students may not know their own capacity for what they can accomplish, and that unless you help them see that, they may not ever be able to tap that capacity.What projects are you excited about working on in the future?I have a project that I'm trying to figure out on Latino landmarks in the United States. What are the physical places where Latinos appear in the nation and what kind of public image does this create or not create. I am especially interested in the ways that Latinos are portrayed politically, so I am thinking about issues of conservative Latinos versus radical Latinos, thinking about the Latino vote which is so incredibly emphasized but which never actually seems to recognize the heterogeneity of the population. So I'm toying with this notion of Latino landmarks.If you had to describe American Studies in one sentence, what would you say?I tend to look at American Studies as looking at the world with a kaleidoscope and embracing the different representations of the image that can appear through that kaleidoscope, but then being very careful not to say that all perspectives are equal.