Leticia Alvarado
Biographic Data
| ID | 163739 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Leticia Alvarado |
| GIVEN NAMES | Leticia |
| FAMILY NAME | Alvarado |
| SIGNATURE | ALVARADO L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Department of American Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4367-3411 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 9 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 26 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 8 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
To Have and to Hoard
Thinking with the work of Oakland-based artist Xandra Ibarra, this essay engages the object lessons accessed through analysis of the artist's oeuvre. Dwelling specifically with the objects Ibarra gathers and thinking askance to new materialist approaches when theorizing the social life of objects, Alvarado explores the racial vespers that suffuse objects, their presentation and exchange, as well as our interpretation of relations of exchange. Alo…
Ricanness
Reviewed by: Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anti-Colonial Performance by Sandra Ruiz Leticia Alvarado RICANNESS: ENDURING TIME IN ANTI-COLONIAL PERFORMANCE. By Sandra Ruiz. New York: New York University Press, 2019; pp. 256. Amid institutional moves to remote learning in the face of COVID-19, my Twitter feed kept me up at night, replete with warnings that we in the continental United States would soon experience federal negligence like that endured …
Flora and Fauna Otherwise
Pairing Dominican-born artist Firelei Báez with Kenyan-born artist Wangechi Mutu, this article meditates on relational black and brown aesthetic strategies by reading femme gestures performatively across individual works, as well as the exhibition spaces within which the artists draft practices of informed and resistant engagement. Working with both theories of brownness that emerge from Latinx studies as well as scholarship of the black radical …
Ghostly givings
Centering the relationship between artist Nao Bustamante and the late theorist José Esteban Muñoz, this article explores the ghostly offerings of performative communal melancholia. Elaborating the importance of haunted communion as a site of relation, Bustamante’s performance furthers what we might understand as a Muñozian sense of brown. From her performance of Given Over to Want (1999–2018) to her contribution to the memorial evening Transnoche…
Abject Performances
In Abject Performances Leticia Alvarado draws out the irreverent, disruptive aesthetic strategies used by Latino artists and cultural producers who shun standards of respectability that are typically used to conjure concrete minority identities. In place of works imbued with pride, redemption, or celebration, artists such as Ana Mendieta, Nao Bustamante, and the Chicano art collective known as Asco employ negative affects-shame, disgust, and unbe…
Towards A Personal Will To Continue Being “Other
This article focuses on Cuban exile artist Ana Mendieta's early 1970s performances, which are often relegated to a cursory status in her oeuvre and sometimes dismissed as inconsequential juvenilia. Instead, I argue that these mark the beginning of Mendieta's elaborate and complex engagement with racialized and gendered difference through the unsettling aesthetic force of her abject performances. I decenter focus on her well-known Silueta Series (…
What Comes after Loss
This essay is a brief reflection on Ana Mendieta's Silueta Series, the Cuban diaspora, Latinidad, and ultimately brownness, after the loss of José E. Muñoz
Asco's Asco and the Queer Affective Resonance of Abjection
This essay renarrativizes existing accounts of Asco's formation and unifying ethos, centering the role of negative affect, to show how the group's abject aesthetic strategies offer an alternative political vision of national belonging predicated on uncivic participation. It foregrounds a queer discordant site of genesis and recruitment that recasts Asco not as a concrete group but as an abject structure of feeling in Chicano East Los Angeles. Asc…
From bananas to buttocks
Abject Performances
In Abject Performances Leticia Alvarado draws out the irreverent, disruptive aesthetic strategies used by Latino artists and cultural producers who shun standards of respectability that are typically used to conjure concrete minority identities. In place of works imbued with pride, redemption, or celebration, artists such as Ana Mendieta, Nao Bustamante, and the Chicano art collective known as Asco employ negative affects-shame, disgust, and unbe…
Ghostly givings
Centering the relationship between artist Nao Bustamante and the late theorist José Esteban Muñoz, this article explores the ghostly offerings of performative communal melancholia. Elaborating the importance of haunted communion as a site of relation, Bustamante’s performance furthers what we might understand as a Muñozian sense of brown. From her performance of Given Over to Want (1999–2018) to her contribution to the memorial evening Transnoche…
Towards A Personal Will To Continue Being “Other
This article focuses on Cuban exile artist Ana Mendieta's early 1970s performances, which are often relegated to a cursory status in her oeuvre and sometimes dismissed as inconsequential juvenilia. Instead, I argue that these mark the beginning of Mendieta's elaborate and complex engagement with racialized and gendered difference through the unsettling aesthetic force of her abject performances. I decenter focus on her well-known Silueta Series (…
From bananas to buttocks
Towards A Personal Will To Continue Being “Other
This article focuses on Cuban exile artist Ana Mendieta's early 1970s performances, which are often relegated to a cursory status in her oeuvre and sometimes dismissed as inconsequential juvenilia. Instead, I argue that these mark the beginning of Mendieta's elaborate and complex engagement with racialized and gendered difference through the unsettling aesthetic force of her abject performances. I decenter focus on her well-known Silueta Series (…
What Comes after Loss
This essay is a brief reflection on Ana Mendieta's Silueta Series, the Cuban diaspora, Latinidad, and ultimately brownness, after the loss of José E. Muñoz
Asco's Asco and the Queer Affective Resonance of Abjection
This essay renarrativizes existing accounts of Asco's formation and unifying ethos, centering the role of negative affect, to show how the group's abject aesthetic strategies offer an alternative political vision of national belonging predicated on uncivic participation. It foregrounds a queer discordant site of genesis and recruitment that recasts Asco not as a concrete group but as an abject structure of feeling in Chicano East Los Angeles. Asc…
Abject Performances
In Abject Performances Leticia Alvarado draws out the irreverent, disruptive aesthetic strategies used by Latino artists and cultural producers who shun standards of respectability that are typically used to conjure concrete minority identities. In place of works imbued with pride, redemption, or celebration, artists such as Ana Mendieta, Nao Bustamante, and the Chicano art collective known as Asco employ negative affects-shame, disgust, and unbe…
Flora and Fauna Otherwise
Pairing Dominican-born artist Firelei Báez with Kenyan-born artist Wangechi Mutu, this article meditates on relational black and brown aesthetic strategies by reading femme gestures performatively across individual works, as well as the exhibition spaces within which the artists draft practices of informed and resistant engagement. Working with both theories of brownness that emerge from Latinx studies as well as scholarship of the black radical …
Ghostly givings
Centering the relationship between artist Nao Bustamante and the late theorist José Esteban Muñoz, this article explores the ghostly offerings of performative communal melancholia. Elaborating the importance of haunted communion as a site of relation, Bustamante’s performance furthers what we might understand as a Muñozian sense of brown. From her performance of Given Over to Want (1999–2018) to her contribution to the memorial evening Transnoche…
Ricanness
Reviewed by: Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anti-Colonial Performance by Sandra Ruiz Leticia Alvarado RICANNESS: ENDURING TIME IN ANTI-COLONIAL PERFORMANCE. By Sandra Ruiz. New York: New York University Press, 2019; pp. 256. Amid institutional moves to remote learning in the face of COVID-19, my Twitter feed kept me up at night, replete with warnings that we in the continental United States would soon experience federal negligence like that endured …
To Have and to Hoard
Thinking with the work of Oakland-based artist Xandra Ibarra, this essay engages the object lessons accessed through analysis of the artist's oeuvre. Dwelling specifically with the objects Ibarra gathers and thinking askance to new materialist approaches when theorizing the social life of objects, Alvarado explores the racial vespers that suffuse objects, their presentation and exchange, as well as our interpretation of relations of exchange. Alo…
Art (9 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Latin American and Latino Studies (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Gender Studies (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Gender Studies (3 works) · Performative utterance (3 works)