An illustrated lecture with William Nericcio, PhD (reloaded)
Date: April 12, 2013
Time: 8:00 p.m.
Admission: $8
Presented by: Borderline Projects
After a forced delay due to Hurricane Sandy, William Nericcio is finally coming to New York City to share his confessions with us at Observatory. What happens to the mind of a relatively sane Mexican American academic when plunged into the laughter of an East Coast undergraduate student? What madness ensues once that self-same “scholar” uses his academic superpowers to catalogue Mexican stereotypes in the United States? What happens! Mextasy! Enter the Observatory tonight for a brief MEXSTATIC multimedia presentation examining dominant trends in the 21st century representation of Latinas and Latinos in American popular culture. From Hollywood to Madison Avenue, specific and damaging visions of Latina/o subjectivity have infected the synapses of Americans, and Mexicans alike. These “ethnic mannequins” (William Levy, Eva Longoria, Sophia Vergara) work to infect consciousness even as they entertain, and are not utterly divorced from what’s going down contemporaneously: a talk-radio fueled renaissance on racialized hatred currently en vogue in the U.S. from New York to California, from Arizona to Georgia. If Lou Dobbs spews out that Mexicans are “diseased,” and Rush Limbaugh tells his listeners to tell “Mexicans” to go back to “their country,” what is the result? Research would seem to suggest these collective efforts have led to a resurgence of anti-Latino hate and hate crimes at the very moment demographically that the lands of Uncle Sam are more decidedly Latino/a. The presentation will feature excerpts from Tex[t]-Mex, Eyegiene, the Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog and art from Mextasy.
William Nericcio, born in 1961 at Mercy Hospital, Laredo, Texas, is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University where he directs M.A.L.A.S, the Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences program, an eclectic West Coast cultural studies hive. A 1980 graduate of St. Augustine High School (where he somehow survived being “raised by nuns”), Nericcio graduated with a degree in English from the University of Texas at Austin in 1984 and completed his MA (1987) and PhD (1989) in Comparative Literature at Cornell University—among other noteworthy mentors there, Nericcio TAed for Carlos Fuentes, and studied with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Enrico Mario Santí. Nericcio is the author of Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucination of the “Mexican” in America (UT Press, 2007), and is in the final stages of writing his next eye-candy filled study, Eyegiene: Permutations of Subjectivity in the Televisual Age of Sex and Race, also with the UT Press.