Racial Immanence

Winner, 2021 NACCS Book Award, given by the National Association for Chicano and Chicana Studies

Explores the how, why, and what of contemporary Chicanx culture, including punk rock, literary fiction, photography, mass graves, and digital and experimental installation art

Racial Immanence attempts to unravel a Gordian knot at the center of the study of race and discourse: it seeks to loosen the constraints that the politics of racial representation put on interpretive methods and on our understanding of race itself. Marissa K. López argues that reading Chicanx literary and cultural texts primarily for the ways they represent Chicanxness only reinscribes the very racial logic that such texts ostensibly set out to undo.

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

Marissa K. López is Associate Professor of English and Chicana/o Studies at UCLA. She is the author of Chicano Nations: The Hemispheric Origins of Mexican American Literature (NYU Press, 2011) and the Vice President of the Latina/o Studies Association.Marissa K. López is Associate Professor of English and Chicana/o Studies at UCLA. She is the author of Chicano Nations: The Hemispheric Origins of Mexican American Literature (NYU Press, 2011) and the Vice President of the Latina/o Studies Association.

John Alba Cutler, author of Ends of Assimilation: The Formation of Chicano Literature:
Racial Immanence sets out to tackle a seemingly intractable problem for the study of race and literature: the constraints that racial representation puts on both interpretive methods and our understanding of race itself . In expanding our horizon of Chicanx cultural production beyond literary works to such objects as the Aztec “sun stone,” contemporary art photography, and Latinx punk music , López proposes a new way to read this body of work, asking what Chicanx texts do, what they produce in the world, and how they access the ineffable yet material experience of race. An urgent and necessary book.

Julie A. Minich, author of Accessible Citizenships: Disability, Nation, and the Cultural Politics of Greater Mexico :
López staunchly debunks the idea that Chicanx identity can be thoroughly known or interpreted. Rather, she demonstrates why literature for and by people of color matters: they eschew the neoliberal argument for multicultural representation, instead questioning structural violence, shared precarity, and human imbrication within the more-than-human world. This is a bold, refreshing book that demonstrates the urgency and importance of Chicanx literature while simultaneously challenging the reasons why we read it.