Naomi Quiñonez

edited books

Decolonial Voices

Decolonial Voices offers a range of interdisciplinary essays that discuss racialized, subaltern, feminist and diasporic identities and the aesthetic politics of hybrid and mestiza/o cultural productions. In doing so, this volume brings together a body of theoretically rigorous interdisciplinary essays that articulate and expand the contours of Chicana and Chicano cultural studies.

Essays on transnational Chicana and Chicano cultural studies, examining a range from music, feminist historiographies, poetics, digital art, and popular cultures. The interdisciplinary essays in Decolonial Voices discuss racialized, subaltern, feminist, and diasporic identities and the aesthetic politics of hybrid and mestiza/o cultural productions. This collection represents several key directions in the field: First, it charts how subaltern cultural productions of the US/ Mexico borderlands speak to the intersections of "local," "hemispheric," and "globalized" power relations of the border imaginary. Second, it recovers the Mexican women's and Chicana literary and cultural heritages that have been ignored by Euro-American canons and patriarchal exclusionary practices. It also expands the field in postnationalist directions by creating an interethnic, comparative, and transnational dialogue between Chicana and Chicano, African American, Mexican feminist, and U.S. Native American cultural vocabularies

Invocation LA

Edited by

Michelle T. Clinton, Sesshu Foster, and Naomi Quiñonez

As Ryzsard Kapuscinski reported in the New Perspectives Quarterly, "Los Angeles is the premonition of a new civilization. Linked more to the Third World and Asia than to the Europe of America's racial and cultural roots, Los Angeles will enter the 21st century as a multiracial and multicultural society.” If this thesis is correct, the young poets in this anthology are the voices of the future, voices of an entirely new, Western but Eurocentric, culture. LA has a poetry scene that never quits, and while this anthology was not edited to be entirely representative of that literary scene, this is the first anthology that truly represents the multicultural character of the city. These poets are thus poets with a future.  Their grasp of the incandescent and often bitter present moment propels them towards it.  Their velocity won’t leave you unmoved. More than half of this work is written by women, who, urged on the feminist movement of the seventies, speak confidently and clearly to indict patriarchal cultural assumptions. These poets are thus doubly grounded in tough conditions, and their poetry will not be denied.
As one would expect of urban poetry, the images are not always pretty or painless, but there is a metaphor o hope etched in these pages by women and men who are not afraid of contradiction or struggle. These poets make bold statements of survival, not so much in celebration, but in challenge.  The book is a testimony to America’s growing multicultural literary talents. In short, this is “Our America,” and America whose poets do represent that vital, resonant wave that’s coming at you.