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What is Asian American popular music? How do we identify it, define it, and listen to it? What work is being done by naming a genre as such, and need it even be named? Asian Americanist scholars and music critics have grappled with these questions, articulating the political desires for Asian American representation, recognition, and inclusion, while at the same time remaining wary of how such desires reiterate liberal multiculturalist discourses of assimilation and inclusion. A growing body of interdisciplinary work in American studies, performance studies, critical race and ethnic studies, queer studies, and sound and popular music studies has addressed the historical emergence, visibility, and representation of Asian Americans in popular music. This work has become less concerned with finding out what “Asian American popular music” is and more interested in how Asian Americanist critique can be rooted in minoritarian listening practices so that one might consider the myriad ways Asian Americans—as professional and amateur performers, musicians, virtuosic singers, karaoke goers, YouTube users, listeners, critics, and fans—actively shape and negotiate the soundscapes of US popular music with its visual, sonic, and other sensorial markers of Asian racialization.

Latinofuturism describes a broad range of Latina/o speculative aesthetics and an emerging field of study. In addition to referencing a broad spectrum of speculative texts produced by Chicana/os, Puerto Ricans, Dominican Americans, Cuban Americans, and other Latin American immigrant populations, Latinofuturism also includes innovative cultural productions stemming from hybrid and fluid borderlands spaces such as the US–Mexico border. The umbrella genre of speculative fiction (SF), moreover, indexes the companion genres of science fiction (sci-fi), horror, and fantasy. Instead of approaching these genres separately, SF recognizes the ways in which these genres overlap, blend, and mutually inform one another. As Shelley Streeby notes, the umbrella genre of the speculative is especially useful in analyzing Latinofuturist texts that self-consciously appropriate and blend genres in a manner evocative of the mestizaje animating Latina/o culture. The broader category of SF further enables us to unearth, remap, and focalize how Latina/os have contributed to sci-fi, fantasy, and horror, as well as related subgenres. Through employing the speculative, Latinofuturist texts articulate a grammar of the subjunctive, daring to ask and imagine, “what if?” Latinofuturism builds upon Catherine Ramírez’s foundational prism of Chicanafuturism, which denotes cultural production that redeploys the technological in relation to cultural identity, and, in doing so, interrogates and effaces boundaries between primitive and modern, the past, present, and future, as well as the human and non-human. Propelling Latinofuturism is the disordering aesthetic of rasquachismo, a working-class Chicana/o sensibility of creative recycling or making do. Latinofuturist writers and artists do not passively consume received forms of the speculative, but instead creatively repurpose them toward emancipatory ends. In addition, Latinofuturism draws inspiration from Afrofuturism, as articulated by scholars such as Mark Dery, Alondra Nelson, and Ytasha Womack. Whereas Afrofuturism foregrounds the African diaspora and the legacy of slavery in regard to new media and the technological, Latinofuturism focuses on migrations within and across the Americas and beyond. Prevalent themes in Latinofuturism include indigenismo, mestizaje, and coloniality, which operate to question narratives of progress and technological advancement as well as to render more radical visions of the future. However, as Isabel Millán argues, Afrofuturism and Latinofuturism become tightly knit when considering Afro-Latina/o speculative productions. More broadly, Latinofuturism must be also situated within US ethnic and global subaltern futurisms as the experiences of people of color in the United States and throughout the world are interwoven through histories of bodily and epistemological violences systematically omitted from narratives of progress and technological advancement. Importantly, Latinofuturism, along with other ethnic futurisms, share a radical reimagining of a collective future that blurs colonial binaries, making collective space to imagine and enact otherwise.

The late José Esteban Muñoz’s body of work provides readers and scholars of Latina/o literary scholarship a vast scope that centers the work of performance as the tactic minoritarian subjects engage against a racist and homophobic public sphere. Throughout his writings, Muñoz sought to reveal a trajectory for minoritarian subjects from the realization of difference through disidentification through the search for what he called a “brown commons.” His oeuvre bridges the divides between Latina/o and queer studies, and offers an expansive methodological approach for both fields.