Description
Book SynopsisHow Latinx artists engage in sonic subcultures to reject neoliberal definitions of belonging
What is the connection between the British rock star Morrissey and the Latinx culture of transnational unbelonging? What is the relevance of dyke chords in Chicana feminist punk and lesbian dissolution? In what ways can dissonant sounds challenge systems of dominance?
Unbelonging answers these questions and more through an exploration into Mexican and US-based Latinx artists', writers', and creators' use of the discordant sounds of punk, metal, and rock to give voice to the aesthetic of unbelonging, a rejection of consumerist and nationalist mentalities. Iván A. Ramos argues that racial identity and belonging have historically required legible forms of performance. Sound has been the primary medium that amplifies and is used to assign cultural citizenship and, for Latinx individuals, legibility is essential to music perceived as traditional and authentic to their nati
Trade Review
Sound is the ground for Iván Ramos’s brilliant writing on visual art, performance, and subcultures that radiate out from Mexico, Los Angeles, and through the rest of Latina/o America. Ramos’s sonic grounding, actual and conceptual, is far from stable. Records melt, checkpoints are refused, the inauthentic is genuine, geopolitical narratives shake, punk is a Latina/o given rather than a something taken. The castaways of neoliberalism are key protagonists. The illegible artists and audiences and the bootleg tapes that live and play in this indispensable book push Ramos towards transformative theories about performance and aesthetics. Readers will no doubt become forever altered having come to know them intimately through Ramos’s beautiful treatise on unbelonging. -- Alexandra Vazquez, New York University
A lucid and theoretically informed account of how listening practices between Mexico and the United States can work in opposition to the national popular and its regimes of affect. Unbelonging sets the record straight on whitewashed accounts of rock and punk that ignore how Latinx subjects took up subcultural spaces and stances. Taking time to ‘feel brown’ beyond the boundaries of race and nation, Iván Ramos delivers up a new and vibrant account of aesthetic dissensus that will forward queer-of-color critique. -- Tavia Amolo Ochieng' Nyong'o, Yale University
In his gloriously cranky yet deeply moving book, the performance-studies scholar Iván A. Ramos invites us to relish in the dissonance of the punk, metal, and other 'inauthentic sounds' bootlegged and bartered in the marketplaces of Mexico City and beyond from the late 1980s to 2015... In the company of Chicana punks, queer performance artists, filmmakers, and disaffected Morrissey fans on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, Ramos gives us the space, time, and fortitude to not belong together. -- Karen Tongson * The Chronicle of Higher Education *
