Other Looks
Chicana/o Responses to US Magazine Aesthetics
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11272094 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Carmen Merport Quiñones (Oberlin College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 47 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 71-106 |
| Publication date | 2022-06-06 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | MELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0163-755X • E-ISSN: 1946-3170 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/melus/mlac022 |
| OpenAlex | W4229448721 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 15 |
I argue that Chicana/o artists and activists working in the second half of the twentieth century engaged with the visual culture of US mass picture magazines such as Life because they identified it as a crucial site of struggle even as they recognized the increasing significance of other mass media. Examining pages from Life throughout the years, I show how Henry Luce’s magazine used derogatory depictions of racialized subjects to sell a particular notion of readerly belonging to a white middle-class audience. I find traces of distinct activist and artistic responses to this biased visual culture in the pages of Chicano Movement periodicals such as La Raza, in a Time spread on author Carlos Castaneda, and in the collaboration of two Chicano avant-gardists, Teddy Sandoval and Gronk. Each of these practices, I argue, provide different perspectives on the degree to which the social imaginary and protocols of the magazine medium availed the formation of minoritarian counter-discourses. While the mass picture magazine has faded from prominence, becoming a mere shadow of what it once was, the visual culture that emerged from its glossy pages still haunts our present. As a result, the activist and artistic interventions discussed in this essay provide us with important models for rethinking contemporary efforts to transform the racial logics of the mass cultural sphere
Aesthetics · Art · Mass culture · Mass media · Media studies · Political science · Popular culture · Psychoanalysis · Shadow (psychology) · Sociology · The Imaginary · Visual arts · Visual culture · Visual media · White (mutation) · Anthropology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Cultural Studies · Gender Studies · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Music History and Culture · Psychology
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The Chicano/a Photographic
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| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |