Despite Latinxs being the largest growing demographic in the United States, their experiences and identities continue to be underrepresented and misrepresented in the mainstream pop cultural imaginary. However, for all the negative stereotypes and restrictive ways that the mainstream boxes in Latinxs, Latinx musicians, writers, artists, comic book creators, and performers actively metabolize all cultural phenomena to clear positive spaces of empowerment and to make new perception, thought, and feeling about Latinx identities and experiences. It is important to understand, though, that Latinxs today consume all variety of cultural phenomena. For corporate America, therefore, the Latinx demographic represents a huge buying demographic. Viewed through cynical and skeptical eyes, increased representation of Latinxs in mainstream comic books and film results from this push to capture the Latinx consumer market. Within mainstream comic books and films, Latinx subjects are rarely the protagonists. However, Latinx comic book and film creators are actively creating Latinx protagonists within richly rendered Latinx story worlds. Latinx comic book and film creators work in all the storytelling genres and modes (realism, sci-fi, romance, memoir, biography, among many others) to clear new spaces for the expression of Latinx subjectivities and experiences.
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Latinx Popular Culture and Social Conflict: Comics, Graphic Novels, and Film
Frederick Luis Aldama
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Posthumous Editing in the Modern United States
Allison Fagan
Posthumous publication is part of a long-standing literary tradition that crosses centuries and continents, giving works of art ranging from The Canterbury Tales to The Diary of Anne Frank, from Northanger Abbey to 2666. Preparing for print work that was incomplete and unpublished at the time of the author’s death, posthumous editing is a type of public and goal-oriented grieving that seeks to establish or preserve the legacy of a writer no longer able to establish it for herself. Surrounding the work of posthumous editing are questions of authorial intent, editorial and publisher imperative, and reader response, each shaping the degree to which a posthumously published edition of a text is considered valuable. The visibility of the work of such editing spans from conspicuously absent to noticeably transformative, suggesting a wide range of possibilities for imagining the editorial role in producing the posthumous text. Examples drawn from 20th- and 21st-century US literature reveal the nature of editorial relationships to the deceased as well as the subsequent relationships of readers to the posthumously published text.
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Reception Theory, Reception History, Reception Studies
Ika Willis
Reception-oriented literary theory, history, and criticism, all analyze the processes by which literary texts are received, both in the moment of their first publication and long afterwards: how texts are interpreted, appropriated, adapted, transformed, passed on, canonized, and/or forgotten by various audiences. Reception draws on multiple methodologies and approaches including semiotics and deconstruction; ethnography, sociology, and history; media theory and archaeology; and feminist, Marxist, black, and postcolonial criticism. Studying reception gives us insights into the texts themselves and their possible range of meanings, uses, and value; into the interpretative regimes of specific historical periods and cultural milieux; and into the nature of linguistic meaning and communication.
