The Places of Modernity in Early Mexican American Literature, 1848-1948 - (Postwestern Horizons) by José F Aranda (Paperback)

About the Book

José F. Aranda Jr. demonstrates how the burdens of modernity become the dominant discursive logic for understanding why people of Mexican descent nonetheless wrote and invested in print culture without any guarantee of its social, cultural, or political efficacy.

Book Synopsis

Named a 2023 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

In The Places of Modernity in Early Mexican American Literature, 1848-1948, José F. Aranda Jr. describes the first one hundred years of Mexican American literature. He argues for the importance of interrogating the concept of modernity in light of what has emerged as a canon of earlier pre-1968 Mexican American literature. In order to understand modernity for diverse communities of Mexican Americans, he contends, one must see it as an apprehension, both symbolic and material, of one settler colonial world order giving way to another more powerful colonialist but imperial vision of North America.

Letters, folklore, print culture, and literary production demonstrate how a new Anglo-American political imaginary revised and realigned centuries-old discourses on race, gender, class, religion, citizenship, power, and sovereignty. The "modern," Aranda argues, makes itself visible in cultural productions being foisted on a "conquered people," who were themselves beneficiaries of a notion of the modern that began in 1492. For Mexican Americans, modernity is less about any particular angst over global imperial designs or cultures of capitalism and more about becoming the subordinates of a nation-building project that ushers the United States into the twentieth century.

Review Quotes

"The Places of Modernity in Early Mexican American Literature, 1848-1948 is an excellent example of the promising possibilities that lie between new historicist literary analysis and intellectual history. . . . It is a valuable and important contribution to literary history, intellectual history, and the interdisciplinary field of Latinx studies."--Aaron E. Sánchez, New England Quarterly

"Aranda provides an important lens through which to wrestle with the competing Spanish/Mexican and Anglo-American settler colonialist ideologies in Mexican American cultural production."--Sandra Dahlberg, Western American Literature

"This volume makes a major contribution to Chicanx studies and therefore to American studies. . . . This book will nurture further studies."--B. Almon, Choice

"José F. Aranda Jr. addresses a much-lamented gap in Chicanx literary criticism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century of American literature by Mexican Americans by providing an authoritative, compelling, and creatively challenging interpretive lens. Aranda helps us understand how these texts speak to one another (or why they don't), how they fit in the larger scope of American literary history, and what they bring to today's scholarly conversations about coloniality, modernity, identity, class, place, and geopolitics in Chicanx literature and theory."--Priscilla Solis Ybarra, author of Writing the Goodlife: Mexican American Literature and the Environment

"José F. Aranda Jr. offers an intervention in the literary critical conversation in Chicanx studies that for several decades has been dismissive (or blithely ignorant) of early Mexican American literary cultures from California to Texas, typically mischaracterizing them as complicit with dominant Anglo-American settler colonial projects. This work tirelessly argues for the importance of understanding the entanglements and intersections of ethnoracial, class, and general social categories and factors."--Stephen Tatum, coauthor of Morta Las Vegas: CSI and the Problem of the West

About the Author

José F. Aranda Jr. is a professor of Chicanx and American literature at Rice University. He is the author of When We Arrive: A Literary History of Mexican America.