Brown Gumshoes

Winner, Modern Language Association Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies, 2006 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.

The literary culture of the Spanish-speaking Southwest has its origins in a harsh frontier environment marked by episodes of intense cultural conflict, and much of the literature seeks to capture the epic experiences of conquest and settlement. The Chicano literary canon has evolved rapidly over four centuries to become one of the most dynamic, growing, and vital parts of what we know as contemporary U.S. literature. In this comprehensive examination of Chicano and Chicana literature, Charles M. Tatum brings a new and refreshing perspective to the ethnic identity of Mexican Americans. From the earliest sixteenth-century chronicles of the Spanish Period, to the poetry and narrative fiction of the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, and then to the flowering of all literary genres in the post–Chicano Movement years, Chicano/a literature amply reflects the hopes and aspirations as well as the frustrations and disillusionments of an often marginalized population. Exploring the work of Rudolfo Anaya, Sandra Cisneros, Luis Alberto Urrea, and many more, Tatum examines the important social, historical, and cultural contexts in which the writing evolved, paying special attention to the Chicano Movement and the flourishing of literary texts during the 1960s and early 1970s. Chapters provide an overview of the most important theoretical and critical approaches employed by scholars over the past forty years and survey the major trends and themes in contemporary autobiography, memoir, fiction, and poetry. The most complete and up-to-date introduction to Chicana/o literature available, this book will be an ideal reference for scholars of Hispanic and American literature. Discussion questions and suggested reading included at the end of each chapter are especially suited for classroom use.

From the influential work of Los Bros Hernandez in Love & Rockets, to comic strips and political cartoons, to traditional superheroes made nontraditional by means of racial and sexual identity (e.g., Miles Morales/Spider-Man), comics have become a vibrant medium to express Latino identity and culture. Indeed, Latino fiction and nonfiction narratives are rapidly proliferating in graphic media as diverse and varied in form and content as is the whole of Latino culture today. Graphic Borders presents the most thorough exploration of comics by and about Latinos currently available. Thirteen essays and one interview by eminent and rising scholars of comics bring to life this exciting graphic genre that conveys the distinctive and wide-ranging experiences of Latinos in the United States. The contributors’ exhilarating excavations delve into the following areas: comics created by Latinos that push the boundaries of generic conventions; Latino comic book author-artists who complicate issues of race and gender through their careful reconfigurations of the body; comic strips; Latino superheroes in mainstream comics; and the complex ways that Latino superheroes are created and consumed within larger popular cultural trends. Taken as a whole, the book unveils the resplendent riches of comics by and about Latinos and proves that there are no limits to the ways in which Latinos can be represented and imagined in the world of comics.

Taking up a neglected area in the study of the crime novel, this collection investigates the growing number of writers who adapt conventions of detective fiction to expose problems of law, ethics, and truth that arise in postcolonial and transnational communities. While detective fiction has been linked to imperialism and constructions of race from its earliest origins, recent developments signal the evolution of the genre into a potent framework for narrating the complexities of identity, citizenship, and justice in a postcolonial world. Among the authors considered are Vikram Chandra, Gabriel García Márquez, Michael Ondaatje, Patrick Chamoiseau, Mario Vargas Llosa, Suki Kim, and Walter Mosley. The essays explore detective stories set in Latin America, the Caribbean, India, and North America, including novels that view the American metropolis from the point of view of Asian American, African American, or Latino characters. Offering ten new and original essays by scholars in the field, this volume highlights the diverse employment of detective fictions internationally, and uncovers important political and historical subtexts of popular crime novels.

A History of American Crime Fiction places crime fiction within a context of aesthetic practices and experiments, intellectual concerns, and historical debates generally reserved for canonical literary history. Toward that end, the book is divided into sections that reflect the periods that commonly organize American literary history, with chapters highlighting crime fiction's reciprocal relationships with early American literature, romanticism, realism, modernism and postmodernism. It surveys everything from 17th-century execution sermons, the detective fiction of Harriet Spofford and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, to the films of David Lynch, HBO's The Sopranos, and the podcast Serial, while engaging a wide variety of critical methods. As a result, this book expands crime fiction's significance beyond the boundaries of popular genres and explores the symbiosis between crime fiction and canonical literature that sustains and energizes both.

Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker, Kerri Sakamoto’s The Electrical Field, Don Lee’s Country of Origin, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Susan Choi’s A Person of Interest. These and a host of other Asian North American detection and mystery titles were published between 1995 and 2010. Together they reference more than a decade of Asian North America monitoring that includes internment, campaign financing, espionage, and post-9/11 surveillance. However, these works are less concerned with solving crimes than with creating literary responses to the subtle but persistent surveillance of raced subjects. In Scrutinized! Monica Chiu reveals how Asian North American novels’ fascination with mystery, detection, spying, and surveillance is a literary response to anxieties over race. According to Chiu, this allegiance to a genre that takes interruptions to social norms as its foundation speaks to a state of unease at a time of racial scrutiny. Scrutinized! is broadly about oversight and insight. The race policing of the past has been subsumed under post-racism—an oversight (in the popular nomenclature of race blindness) that is still, ironically, based on a persistent visual construction of race. Detective fiction’s focus on scrutiny presents itself as the most appropriate genre for revealing the failures of a so-called post-racialism in which we continue to deploy visually defined categories of race as social realities—a regulatory mechanism under which Asian North Americans live the paradox of being inscrutable. To be looked at and overlooked is the contradiction that drives the book’s thesis. Readers first revisit Oriental visions, or Asian stereotypes, and then encounter official documentation on major events, such as the Japanese American and Japanese Canadian internment. The former visions, which endure, and the latter documents, diplomatically forgotten, shape how Asian subjects were and are scrutinized and to what effect. They determine which surveillance images remain emblazoned in a nation’s collective memory and which face political burial. The book goes on to provide a compelling analysis of mystery and detective fiction by Lee, Nina Revoyr, Choi, Suki Kim, Sakamoto, and Hamid, whose work exploits the genre’s techniques to highlight pervasive vigilance among Asian North American subjects.

An immensely popular genre, crime fiction has only in recent years been engaged significantly by African American authors. Historically, the racist stereotypes often central to crime fiction and the socially conservative nature of the genre presented problems for writing the black experience, and the tropes of justice and restoration of social order have not resonated with authors who saw social justice as a work in progress. Some African American authors did take up the challenge. Pauline Hopkins, Rudolph Fisher and Chester Himes led the way in the first half of the 20th century, followed by Ishmael Reed's "anti-detective" novels in the 1970s. Since the 1990s, Walter Mosley, Colson Whitehead and Stephen L. Carter have written detective fiction focusing on questions of constitutional law, civil rights, biological and medical issues, education, popular culture, the criminal justice system and matters of social justice. From Hopkins's Hagar's Daughter (published in 1901), to Hime's hardboiled "Harlem Detective" series, to Carter's patrician world of the black bourgeoisie, these authors provide a means of examining literary and social constructions of the African-American experience. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

Often treated like night itself—both visible and invisible, feared and romanticized—Latina/os make up the largest minority group in the US. In her newest work, María DeGuzmán explores representations of night in art and literature from the Caribbean, Colombia, Central and South America, and the US, calling into question night's effect on the formation of identity for Latina/os in and outside of the US. She takes as her subject novels, short stories, poetry, essays, non-fiction, photo-fictions, photography, and film, and examines these texts through the lenses of nationhood, sexuality, human rights, exoticism, among others.

This Companion examines the range of American crime fiction from execution sermons of the Colonial era to television programmes like The Sopranos.

Since the 1980s, a prolific "second wave" of Chicano/a writers and artists has tremendously expanded the range of genres and subject matter in Chicano/a literature and art. Building on the pioneering work of their predecessors, whose artistic creations were often tied to political activism and the civil rights struggle, today's Chicano/a writers and artists feel free to focus as much on the aesthetic quality of their work as on its social content. They use novels, short stories, poetry, drama, documentary films, and comic books to shape the raw materials of life into art objects that cause us to participate empathetically in an increasingly complex Chicano/a identity and experience. This book presents far-ranging interviews with twenty-one "second wave" Chicano/a poets, fiction writers, dramatists, documentary filmmakers, and playwrights. Some are mainstream, widely recognized creators, while others work from the margins because of their sexual orientations or their controversial positions. Frederick Luis Aldama draws out the artists and authors on both the aesthetic and the sociopolitical concerns that animate their work. Their conversations delve into such areas as how the artists' or writers' life experiences have molded their work, why they choose to work in certain genres and how they have transformed them, what it means to be Chicano/a in today's pluralistic society, and how Chicano/a identity influences and is influenced by contact with ethnic and racial identities from around the world.