Brown Gumshoes: Detective Fiction and the Search for Chicana/o Identity
- ISBN-10
- 0292774559
- ISBN-13
- 9780292774551
- Category
- Literary Criticism
- Pages
- 201
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2009-03-06
- Publisher
- University of Texas Press
- Author
- Ralph E. Rodriguez
Description
Popular fiction, with its capacity for diversion, can mask important cultural observations within a framework that is often overlooked in the academic world. Works thought to be merely "escapist" can often be more seriously mined for revelations regarding the worlds they portray, especially those of the disenfranchised. As detective fiction has slowly earned critical respect, more authors from minority groups have chosen it as their medium. Chicana/o authors, previously reluctant to write in an underestimated genre that might further marginalize them, have only entered the world of detective fiction in the past two decades. In this book, the first comprehensive study of Chicano/a detective fiction, Ralph E. Rodriguez examines the recent contributions to the genre by writers such as Rudolfo Anaya, Lucha Corpi, Rolando Hinojosa, Michael Nava, and Manuel Ramos. Their works reveal the struggles of Chicanas/os with feminism, homosexuality, familia, masculinity, mysticism, the nationalist subject, and U.S.-Mexico border relations. He maintains that their novels register crucial new discourses of identity, politics, and cultural citizenship that cannot be understood apart from the historical instability following the demise of the nationalist politics of the Chicana/o movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In contrast to that time, when Chicanas/os sought a unified Chicano identity in order to effect social change, the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s have seen a disengagement from these nationalist politics and a new trend toward a heterogeneous sense of self. The detective novel and its traditional focus on questions of knowledge and identity turned out to be the perfect medium in which to examine this new self.
Get the book
Similar books
-
Brown on Brown: Chicano/a Representations of Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity
By Frederick Luis Aldama... Ralph Rodriguez's Brown Gumshoes, and Michael Hames-Garcia's Fugitive Thought. Such borderland scholarship continues to complicate and foreground the multiform expressions of exile and dislocation for Chicano/as living within the ...
-
Gumshoe in the Dark
By Rob Leiningershort PI career, but nothing more horrifying than the trap embedded in Gumshoe Rock. We hope that you will read all four of the “Gumshoes” that preceded Gumshoe in the Dark. And if you do, we promise you an enjoyable, humorous read in ...
-
Latinx Literature Unbound: Undoing Ethnic Expectation
By Ralph E. RodriguezLatinx Literature Unbound asks if and how it helps to identify a corpus of literature as Latinx.
-
Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of la Onda
By Deborah R. VargasExplores the resounding musical performances of Mexican American women such as Chelo Silva, Eva Ybarra, Eva Garza, and Selena within Tejano/Chicano music
-
Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production
By Leticia AlvaradoFor Shimakawa, abjection's collectivity, especially embodied Asian American collectivity, functions to cohere the notion of Americanness as national identity. Her invaluable study reminds us that “abjection is at once a specular and ...
-
Spiritual Mestizaje: Religion, Gender, Race, and Nation in Contemporary Chicana Narrative
By Theresa DelgadilloRodriguez, Brown Gumshoes, 53. 71. Moraga, Heroes andSaints and Other Plays, 35. Rodriguez, Brown Gumshoes, 53. 73. Chávez says that “angels have always played an important part in my life, from the Catholic, as helpers—those luminous ...
-
The Millennial Detective: Essays on Trends in Crime Fiction, Film and Television, 1990–2010
By Malcah EffronSuch texts include Gill Plain's Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (2001), Stephen Soitos's The Blues Detective (1996), and Ralph E. Rodriguez's Brown Gumshoes (2005). 3. Examples include texts such as Howard Haycraft's Murderfor Pleasure ...
-
The African American Experience in Crime Fiction: A Critical Study
By Robert E. CraftonAnderson, James D. “Race-Conscious Educational Policies Versus a 'Color-Blind Constitution': A Historical Perspective.” Educational Researcher 36.5 (2007): 249–57. Print. ... Rev. of The Emperor of Ocean Park, by Stephen L. Carter.
-
Buenas Noches, American Culture: Latina/o Aesthetics of Night
By María DeGuzmánAdditionally, I consider Crimson Moon (2004), the first of the Brown Angel mystery series. ... In Brown Gumshoes: Detective Fiction and the Searchfor Chicana/o Identity, scholar Ralph Rodriguez claims that via “her Gloria Damasco series ...
-
The Routledge Concise History of Latino/a Literature
By Frederick Luis AldamaIn Chicano Literature, for instance, Chuck Tatum (2006) identifies her as a “local ... war include Juan Aldama (1774–1811), Ignacio Aldama (1780–1811), José Mariano Jiménez (1781–1811) and Ignacio José de Allende y Unzaga (1769–1811).