Gatekeeping Stories of Dissent and Mobility

Abstract

AbstractThree recent studies meditate on the significance of narratives by and about racial subjects and exiled radicals in an age of increased social surveillance and control. Elda María Román in Race and Upward Mobility (2017) analyzes popular stories about racially or ethnically identified characters who, seeking upward social mobility, face a quandary. They try to sustain an empowering sense of racial affiliation while seeking to gain upward social and class mobility. Permissible Narratives (2017) by Christopher González analyzes how the form taken by narratives about racial and class affiliation serves to mark ethnic identification. Latinx literary texts that do not follow prescribed forms deliberately undo aesthetic norms and thus enact a kind of transgressive Latinidad. Where the US forms the sociocultural parameters of these two books, Teresa V. Longo’s Visible Dissent (2018) considers the sociocultural interchanges between the US and Latin American writers who articulate a literature of opposition, resistance, and dissent against repressive forms of social and political control. Each study weighs a hope for transformative social change against the power of the efficient, impersonal, even brutal management that comprises modernity.