Racial Immanence ― Chicanx Bodies Beyond Representation

 

Racial Immanenceattempts to unravel a Gordian knot at the center of the study of race anddiscourse: it seeks to loosen the constraints that the politics of racialrepresentation put on interpretive methods and on our understanding of raceitself. Marissa K. López argues that reading Chicanx literary and culturaltexts primarily for the ways they represent Chicanxness only reinscribes thevery racial logic that such texts ostensibly set out to undo.

 

Racial Immanenceproposes to read differently; instead of focusing on representation, it asks whatChicanx texts do, what they produce in the world, and specifically how theyproduce access to the ineffable but material experience of race. Intrigued bythe attention to disease, disability, abjection, and sense experience that shesees increasing in Chicanx visual, literary, and performing arts in the late-twentiethcentury, López explores how and why artists use the body in contemporaryChicanx cultural production. Racial Immanence takes up works by writerslike Dagoberto Gilb, Cecile Pineda, and Gil Cuadros, the photographers KenGonzales Day and Stefan Ruiz, and the band Piñata Protest to argue that thebody offers a unique site for pushing back against identity politics. In sodoing, the book challenges theoretical conversations around affect and thepost-human and asks what it means to truly consider people of color as writersand artists. Moving beyond abjection, López models Chicanx cultural productionas a way of fostering networks of connection that deepen our attachments to thematerial world.