A Critical Collection on Alejandro Morales
A Critical Collection on Alejandro Morales
Forging an Alternative Chicano Fiction
Silver Medalist at the 24th International Latino Book Awards
Alejandro Morales is a pioneer of Chicana and Chicano literature and the author of groundbreaking works including The Brick People, The Rag Doll Plagues, and River of Angels. His work, often experimental, was one of the first to depict harsh urban realities in the barrios—a break from much of the Chicana and Chicano fiction that had been published previously. Morales’ relentless work has grown over the decades into a veritable menagerie of cultural testimonies, fantastic counterhistories, magical realism, challenging metanarratives, and flesh-and-blood aesthetic innovation. The fourteen essays included in this compendium examine Morales’ novels and short stories. The editors also include a critical introduction; an interview between Morales, the editors, and fellow author Daniel Olivas; and a new comprehensive bibliography of Morales’ writings and works about him—books, articles, book reviews, online resources, and dissertations. A Critical Collection on Alejandro Morales: Forging an Alternative Chicano Fiction is a must-read for understanding and appreciating Morales’ work in particular and Chicana and Chicano literature in general.
This landmark collection of critical essays analyzes Alejandro Morales’ works throughout the vast scope of his literary career and fully reveals the genius and the aesthetic and intellectual significance of his prolific contributions to US literature and culture broadly and Chicana and Chicano literature and culture more specifically. This volume gives Morales’ work the prominent place it deserves in US literary history.’—Timothy R. Libretti, contributor to Writer in Exile/Writer in Revolt: Critical Perspectives on Carlos Bulosan
Borges generatively explored how the finite could grasp the infinite—those perfect spheres and points in space that contain all the universe’s points and angles of perception. Alchemical curators Marc García-Martínez and Francisco A. Lomelí show us how words that shape scholarly concepts can lead to the apprehension of the ungraspable. They put into polyversal play perfectly shaped scholarly spheres that open us to the infinitude of Alejandro Morales’ multiverses and futurities.’—Frederick Luis Aldama, coeditor of Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities
Marc García-Martínez is a professor of English at Allan Hancock College and a lecturer of Chicana/o studies at UC–Santa Barbara. He is the author of The Flesh-and-Blood Aesthetics of Alejandro Morales: Disease, Sex, and Figuration.
Francisco A. Lomelí is a professor emeritus of Chicana/o studies and Spanish and Portuguese at UC–Santa Barbara. He is the author, coauthor, and coeditor of forty books, including a landmark translation of Alejandro Morales’ Barrio on the Edge and Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland (UNM Press).
Introduction: Alejandro Morales: An Errant Maverick Faces the Literary Canon and History
Marc García-Martínez and Francisco A. Lomelí
Chapter One. Submersion, Suffocation, and Entombment of the Mexican and Immigrant Body in River of Angels—Probing Figurations of Violence and Isolation
Marc García-Martínez
Chapter Two. The Analogous Correspondence of an Extreme Poetics between Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and Alejandro Morales’ Barrio on the Edge
Francisco A. Lomelí
Chapter Three. Alejandro Morales’ The Captain of All These Men of Death and Philip Roth’s Nemesis: Parallels and Contrasts
Stephen Miller
Chapter Four. Tropes of Ecothinking and the Spatial Imaginary in Alejandro Morales’ River of Angels
Sophia Emmanouilidou
Chapter Five. History, Spatial Justice, and the Esperpento in Alejandro Morales’ Pequeña nación
Jesús Rosales
Chapter Six. Heterotopia and the Emergence of the Modern Ilusa in Waiting to Happen
Margarita López López
Chapter Seven. City History and Space Politics: Los Angeles in Morales’ River of Angels
Baojie Li
Chapter Eight. Pequeña nación: Big (Feminist) Revolution
Amaia Ibarraran-Bigalondo
Chapter Nine. Bodies in Motion in The Place of the White Heron, Volume Two of the Heterotopian Trilogy: A Glance through the Panopticon
Adam Spires
Chapter Ten. Race, Space, and Magical Realism in The Brick People and River of Angels
Adina Ciugureanu
Chapter Eleven. Mestizaje, Cultural Identity, and Environmental Degradation in Alejandro Morales’ The Rag Doll Plagues
Manuel M. Martín Rodríguez
Chapter Twelve. Translation as Rewriting and Resituating: The Two English Versions of Caras viejas y vino nuevo by Alejandro Morales
Elena Errico
Chapter Thirteen. History and Fiction in Alejandro Morales’ Narratives
Luis Leal
Chapter Fourteen. Epidemics, Epistemophilia, and Racism: Ecological Literary Criticism and The Rag Doll Plagues
María Herrera-Sobek
Chapter Fifteen. A Dialogue with the Writer Alejandro Morales
Francisco Lomelí, Marc García-Martínez, and Daniel Olivas
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
