I am very aware that I have not publish one of my notes recently. I have one on teaching poetry on the works, and another one on being binational, which will be come soon, once the syllabus writing and beginning of the semester rush is over! I was in Mexico and Denver and there are a few fun things I could have written about, but for now I will just leave you with one of my favorite discoveries, the work of Justin Favela, a Guatemalan-Mexican-American mixed-media artists who works with piñata materials to make truly wonderful work. Here is part of Favela’s “Vistas in Color” from the Denver botanical garden.
In the meantime, because of the many social medias out there, I want to thank you for subscribing to my Substack. I have been active in the summer with conversations about the state of the humanities, not only because of my desire to fight for my fields but also because of alarming developments, most recently the cutting of there whole department of World Languages and the gutting of other fields at West Virginia University.
If you are interested in these conversations, here are some links.
This is my essay “The Humanities are Worth Fighting For” at the Los Angeles Review of Books
I am also part of the Criticism LTD season at the “American Vandal” podcast from the Center of Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College. You can listen in the website or your favorite podcast platform.
The indefatigable and brilliant host, Matt Seybold, has put together a veritable who’s who in literary studies of which I am honored to be included. So far, I am part of episodes 1 and 4, and will show up in a couple more, I think. I do want to point you particularly to 4, in which both my comrade in arms Jeffrey Herlihy Mera and I speak about how to move beyond the politics of monolingualism in universities, something that turned out to be darkly prescient when WVU’s hatchet job against languages and literatures became public.
Finally, I want to also let you know about my three most recent academic publications:
An essay on Edmundo O’ Gorman entitled “Decolonization Degree Zero,” published by the Journal of Mexican Philosophy.
An essay entitled “Citational Gothic” on the ways in which we can think about Silvia Moreno-García’s use of Mexican Culture, published in College Literature.
An essay reading John Guillory’s classic Cultural Capital from a very critical Latin Americanist perspective, published in Genre (and written before what is now called “Guillory-gate” after his new book and the debate that ensued).
Thank you for subscribing to this newsletter, and I promise new writing, and hopefully more regularity, once the semester starts!