Rocky Mountain Review 
of Language and Literature

Volume 69, Number 2 
Fall 2015

Articles

Tragic Bitches: An Experiment in Queer Xicana & Xicano Performance Poetry, by Adelina Anthony, Dino Foxx and Lorenzo Herrera y Lozano, recovers a lost voice among current Chicano sociocultural trends, the Queer Xican@. This study analyzes the use of performance poetry as a tool for uncovering Queer Xicanidad. The trio establishes queer people of color via social demonstration, thus giving life through both live performance poetry and the written page. Brazen and unapologetic, Tragic Bitches serves as a social movement in and of itself in which the poets rescue Queer Xicanidad from oblivion. Its authors recognize and claim their collective tragedy while learning and healing from it.

El presente estudio es un cuestionamiento del discurso colonial existente en la cuarta etapa del Cine de la Revolución Mexicana, fase que hace resurgir al género con nuevos bríos y metas durante la administración de Luis Echeverría (1970-1976). La cinematografía del echeverrismo se caracteriza por un fuerte vanguardismo supuestamente a la par del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano que estaba resonado a través del continente desde la década anterior. Sin embargo, el intento mexicano de pasar a ser parte de este movimiento queda frustrado debido a que no documenta la participación social, política e histórica de la mujer, una de las premisas más relevantes del nuevo cine continental.

This article examines the role of food in the context of transnational experiences in Yadé Kara’s 2008 novel Cafe Cyprus. Food, I submit, can be used as a lens for understanding global processes, and culinary changes are a good indicator of social and cultural developments within communities. Cafe Cyprus’s protagonist Hasan, a young Turkish-German who has recently moved to London, adopts a transnational subjectivity that he seeks to express with the help of food references. Discussions of cosmopolitanism (with a special focus on the global-local nexus) provide a framework for my analysis of Kara’s text.

Daniel Moyano’s novel Libro de navíos y borrascas depicts a voyage undertaken by seven hundred exiles in the wake of a 1976 coup d’état in Argentina. The story centers on a violinist named Rolando, who dreams of a better life as he heads for Spain. This study explores how the ship’s journey and the image of shipwreck serve as metaphors that enable a critical examination of representations of time based on linear historical progress. The exiles face a dilemma as they attempt to progress toward a collective destination that conflicts with the multiplicity of historical memory.

This article examines Japanese writer Gotô Meisei’s (1932-1999) story “The Unwritable Report” (“Kakarenai hôkôku”). The plot is set in a danchi (massive apartment complex) built to address the chronic housing shortages that abounded during Japan’s high-speed growth period (1955-1973). The nameless protagonist is convinced that he is at one with his apartment unit, a spell that is later broken by his discovery of a water stain on the ceiling. By contrasting the danchi as viewed “straight” and “awry,” I argue, Gotô mounts an immanent critique of the reifying discourses that colonized Japanese desire for the instrumentalist pursuit of increasing Japan’s GNP.

Turner’s Iraq War experiences, as recounted in Here, Bullet, reflect a phenomenological experience of encounter, one that exposes the speaker to destruction in the warscape as it reconstructs a self that is inseparable from the “other.” Though Turner’s didactic intent relies on a reportage approach to the war, his operative exploitation of the figurative quickly overpowers the literal, while subjectivity and proliferation of subject extend the discursive potential of the texts. As the narrator dismantles the narrative present, indeterminacy forces create instability in the new space of encounter, fueled by nostalgia contending with an imposed alterity. The soldier-speaker’s fractured solitude calls for a commitment to the present, to the breach opened to the “other,” and to the recognition of a self now indissociable from the warscape.

Reviews

Reviews are published in alphabetical order according to the name of the author reviewed.

A Critical Edition of José Cadalso’s Cartas Marruecas with Introduction, Annotations, and Glossary by Arantxa Alegre-González, ed.
Reviewer: Kelly Camille Moore

Transforming the Enemy in Spanish Culture. The Conquest through the Lens of Textual and Visual Multiplicity, by Lauren Beck.
Reviewer: Katherine Karr-Cornejo

Sex, or the Unbearable, by Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman 
Reviewer: Colin Carman

Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning, by José Antonio Bowen.
Reviewer: Andrew P. White

Women Drug Traffickers: Mules, Bosses, and Organized Crime, by Elaine Carey.
Reviewer: Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager

Cine-Ethics: Ethical Dimensions of Film Theory, Practice, and Spectatorship, by Jinhee Choi and Mattias Frey.
Reviewer: Elena Foulis

The Afterlife of Little Women, by Beverly Lyon Clark.
Reviewer: Pamela Washington

Ventura Pons. Una mirada excepcional desde el cine catalán, by Conxita Domènech and Andrés Lema-Hincapié 
Reviewer: Georgina Oller Bosch

Teaching Gender through Latin American, Latino, and Iberian Texts and Cultures, by Leila Gómez, Asunción Horno-Delgado, Mary K. Long, y Núria Silleras-Fernández, eds.
Reviewer: María Isabel Martín Sánchez

Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction, by Gastón R. Gordillo.
Reviewer: Kyle K. Black

José Ortega y Gasset, by Jordi Gracia.
Reviewer: Ricardo Landeira

Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith and Evangelical Culture, by Felipe Hinojosa.
Reviewer: Elena Foulis

The Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics, by José Ignacio Hualde, Antxon Olarrea, and Erin O’Rourke.
Reviewer: John M. Ryan

Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism, by Sheila Jeffreys.
Reviewer: Kelly J. Hunnings

The Graphic Canon. Vols. 1-3, by Russ Kick, ed.
Reviewer : Sarah E. Cornish

The Multispecies Salon, by Eben Kirksey, ed.
Reviewer: Sarah E. Cornish

Rage Is Back, by Adam Mansbach.
Reviewer: Kathryn Chaffee

The Bare-Toed Vaquero: Life in Baja California’s Desert Mountains, by Peter J. Marchand.
Reviewer: Jeraldine R. Kraver

Old Three Toes and Other Tales of Survival and Extinction, by John Joseph Mathews.
Reviewer: Amy Gore

The Victorian Diary: Authorship and Emotional Labour, by Anne-Marie Millim.
Reviewer: Misty Urban

John Kemble’s Gibraltar Journal: The Spanish Expedition of the Cambridge Apostles, 1830-1831, by Eric W. Nye.
Reviewer: Sarah Weaver

A Cuban in Mayberry: Looking Back at America’s Hometown, by Gustavo Pérez Firmat.
Reviewer: Joy Landeira

Stubborn Poetries: Poetic Facticity and the Avant-Garde, by Peter Quartermain.
Reviewer: Jeffery Moser

Consumption and Violence: Radical Protest in Cold-War West Germany, by Alexander Sedlmaier.
Reviewer: Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager

The Privatization of Hope: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia, by Peter Thompson and Slavoj Žižek, eds.
Reviewer: David Sigler

The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness into Flowers, by Alice Walker.
Reviewer: Evan Stapleton

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity: the Birth of the Monster in Literature, Film, and Media, by Andrea Wood and Brandy Schillace, eds. 
Reviewer: Jeffery Moser