Race and Cultural Practice in Popular Culture

Domino Perez and Rachel González-Martin have assembled a dynamic and eclectic collection that urges us to see, hear, and place race and racialized representations beyond stereotypical, silenced, and sedentary subjectivities. Engaging the contemporary social politics of race in television, film, music, and other performative sites, Race and Cultural Practice in Popular Culture deftly reframes, remixes, and resituates discourse on folklore and pop culture to usher in nuanced understandings and challenging conversations befitting who we are and where we may be going as local and global creators, consumers, and critics of the popular. Dustin Tahmahkera, author of Tribal Television: Viewing Native People in Sitcoms

The ugly eruptions of racism and resurgent white supremacy in this 'post-racial' time are grim reminders of just how vital it is that we understand and engage the complex and contested logics of race in the United States and other settler states. This volume is an impressive and indeed essential tool for that purpose. The editors have brought together a community of thoughtful, provocative thinkers in conversation at the crossroads of folklore, popular culture, critical theory, political action, and lived experience. Collectively and individually the contributors take race and (self-) representation seriously, in often unexpected, sometimes playful, occasionally fierce, but always compelling ways; they challenge readers to reconsider our own biases and boundaries around knowledge and cultural production, and extend the horizon of what is and can be possible in our critical conversations and embodied understandings. Race and Cultural Practice in Popular Culture offers vital, nourishing intellectual sustenance in these cruel and incurious times. Daniel Heath Justice, author of Why Indigenous Literatures Matter