Tijuana Dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822352907 ISBN 13: 9780822352907

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2012

Synopsis

Tijuana Dreaming is an unprecedented introduction to the arts, culture, politics, and economics of contemporary Tijuana, Mexico. With many pieces translated from Spanish for the first time, the anthology features contributions by prominent scholars, journalists, bloggers, novelists, poets, curators, and photographers from Tijuana and greater Mexico. They explore urban planning in light of Tijuana's unique infrastructural, demographic, and environmental challenges. They delve into its musical countercultures, architectural ruins, cinema, and emergence as a hot spot on the international art scene. One contributor examines fictional representations of Tijuana's past as a Prohibition-era "city of sin" for U.S. pleasure seekers. Another reflects on the city's recent struggles with kidnappings and drug violence. In an interview, Néstor García Canclini revisits ideas that he advanced in Culturas híbridas (1990), his watershed book about Latin America and cultural hybridity. Taken together, the selections present a kaleidoscopic portrait of a major border city in the age of globalization.

Contributors. Tito Alegría, Humberto Félix Berumen, Roberto Castillo Udiarte, Iain Chambers, Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, Teddy Cruz, Ejival, Tarek Elhaik, Guillermo Fadanelli, Néstor García Canclini, Ingrid Hernández, Jennifer Insley-Pruitt, Kathryn Kopinak, Josh Kun, Jesse Lerner, Fiamma Montezemolo, Rene Peralta, Rafa Saavedra, Lucía Sanromán, Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez, Heriberto Yépez

About this title

About the Author:

Josh Kun is a professor in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America and coeditor of Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies.

Fiamma Montezemolo is an anthropologist and artist currently teaching in the Department of Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Faceless: Ethnicity and Gender in the Zapatista Movement and a co-author of Here Is Tijuana! Iain Chambers teaches cultural and postcolonial studies at the Orientale University of Naples. He is the author, most recently, of Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity, also published by Duke University Press.

Review:

"Tijuana Dreaming is important and inspirational: a study of the imaginary of a city that constantly reinvents itself. By documenting the artistic and social expressions of this border city, Josh Kun and Fiamma Montezemolo reveal what motivates us and what makes us proud as tijuanenses: living in a city so full of inspiration and possibility."—Ramón Amezcua, aka Bostich, of Nortec Collective

"This is an exciting and timely collection of cultural criticism and creative work. The selections are inspired, alert to a wide spectrum of practices and debates. Personal narratives, urban development, art, literature, photography, and architecture are just some of the matters covered in this rich and thought-provoking conversation, and the foreword by Iain Chambers provides the perfect framing device, linking Tijuana to global studies and critical inquiry."—Roberto Tejada, author of National Camera: Photography and Mexico's Image Environment

“An eclectic anthology of critical cultural studies, Tijuana Dreaming brings to life the tumultuous history of the border town’s shifting identity: the Prohibition-era booze-and-brothel magnet adjacent to San Diego, the late-twentieth-century booming free-trade zone of globalized assembly plants, and, most recently, the bloody site of today’s horrific drug-war violence. . . . [T]he volume’s overall high quality makes for a stimulating . . . read.” (Richard Feinberg Foreign Affairs)

“Tijuana Dreaming is a significant anthology of recent writings on this city from the perspective of art, literature, architecture, music, and film. It is one of the most concentrated studies of the city to date. . . . The anthology also addresses a void in the existing literature on Tijuana through English translations of several texts by prominent Mexican writers, filling out gaps in the border-studies research that circulates in Anglo-American contexts.” (Lee Rodney Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies)

“This volume is an enriching and fasci­nating contribution to the study of Tijuana and the Mexico-US borderland, and would be of interest to any scholar with an interest in the culture and history of the region. It is a dynamic, engaging and timely collection of works which address key questions of identity and identification against the backdrop of cultural and sociohistorical processes.” (Julia Banwell Bulletin of Hispanic Studies)

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0822352907
• ISBN 13: 9780822352907
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 408
• Editor: Josh Kun, Fiamma Montezemolo