Description
Book SynopsisColonial discourse in the United States has tended to criminalise, pathologise, and depict as savage not only Native Americans but Mexican immigrants, indigenous peoples in Mexico, and Chicanas/os as well. This book reveals how each group, has actively attempted to create for itself a social and textual space.
Trade Review“
Disrupting Savagism offers a theoretically nuanced reading of the struggles over representation that have been waged by marginalized inhabitants of the United States-Mexican border zone. With its remarkable breadth of examples, the book carefully unfolds the thoroughgoing legacy of racial violence in the colonized Southwest.”—Carl Gutiérrez-Jones, author of
Rethinking the Borderlands: Between Chicano Culture and Legal Discourse“The ‘savage’ speaks, gains voice, and articulates resistance to the forces of oppression in Aldama’s
Disrupting Savagism. It is relentless in its rigor and perspicacious in its investigation as it dismantles the social discourses that ascribe Native Americans and mixed bloods ‘savage.’ Aldama’s efforts allow the Mestizo and Native American to take hold of the apparatus of representation and affirm self-identity.
Disrupting Savagism is an important work, long needed to fill the gap in our collective understanding, a work that will have broad and long-lasting impact. I can think of no other work that addresses this material so capably and so thoroughly. An intelligent and powerful work.”—Alfred Arteaga, author of
Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities"
Disrupting Savagism provides a fresh analysis of the ways in which the subaltern speaks and in so doing attempts to unravel the binding structures of nation and empire." -- Ernesto Chávez * American Studies *
"[Aldama] manages to directly engage the reader, and refocus the discussion on the intersection between the articulation of body and strategies of resistance." -- Claudia Aburto Guzman * MELUS *
"Thorough and nuanced. . . . Ambitious in its theoretical rigor and historical scope,
Disrupting Savagism will make a lasting contribution to Chicana/o studies, American Indian studies, and the postcolonial studies of the Americas." -- Monica Brown * Aztlán *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Preface
Part I: Mapping Subalternity in the U.S./Mexico Borderlands
1. The Chiana/o and the Native American “Other” Talk Back: Theories of the Speaking Subject in a (Post?) Colonial Context
2. When the Mexicans Talk, Who Listens? The Crisis of Ethnography in Situating Early Voices from the U.S./Mexico Borderlands
Part II: Narrative Disruptions: Decolonization, Dangerous Bodies, and the Politics of Space
3. Counting Coup: Narrative Acts of (Re)Claiming Identity in
Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
4. Toward a Hermeneutics of Decolonization: Reading Radical Subjectivities in
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldua
5. A Border Coda: Dangerous Bodies, Liminality, and the Reclamation of Space in
Star Maps by Miguel Arteta
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
