The Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog Altar to Shakira Grows and Grows

ORIGINALLY posted Apr 29, 2010

Shakira, Ph.D. {update with new LOCA video}

update: October 2010



update | October 2009

A quick update to a posting below from 2007 focusing on the talented intellectual/pop-phenom Shakira; it struck me as an atrocity not to showcase her brilliantly xicanosmotic, colombiandesOsmotic, talents here on the galleryblog!

While the Guy Bourdin meets Helmut Newton (meets Robert Palmer channeling Terence Donovan) aesthetic might not be to everyone's taste, the ongoing Ovid-like metamorphoses of Shakira's career are fun to watch!

Shakira - Las De La Intuicion

original post 9/14/07

As a whole generation of young women (and young men for that matter) writhe and recoil at the spectacles of Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, et al--poster-children for a politico-aesthetics of stupidity, mindless vacuity, and corrupt venal narcissism, it is simply breathtaking to witness the quiet, intellectual curiosity of Shakira, aka Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll , revealed in this story on the Associated Press wire. Other venues have documented this Latina's difference from the throng of young starlets all too eager to flash en route to their flash in the pan futures. Given the historic function of Latina bombshells in American mass culture, Ms. Mebarek Ripoll's intellectual wanderlust may rightly be read as performance art with Derridean traces. If you know the Colombian superstar, tell her the MA and MFA programs at SDSU would love to have her!

UPDATE | October 20, 2009

The Tex[t]-Mex Caravan is Packing Up and Moving to DC for This Weekend

I am really looking forward to participating in my first national American Studies Conference meeting this weekend in Washington, DC--my panel is hyped opposite (click to enlarge). Back in the day when I was an undergraduate at UT, the American Studies program there offered me a posting in their graduate program--one that I passed up to drink of the heady waters of Cayuga Lake. Alfred Crosby ran the show back then (1984) and I always wonder what my academic fate would have been if I had stayed there in the lands of the Armadillo World Headquarters, Club Foot, Zilker Pond, Waterloo Records, and more. If you are at ASA, drop by the panel and say hi (yes it is at 8am in the morning! set that alarm!).

I will be sharing some of my more recent eyegiene-laced ruminations on Latinas and Latinos in US mass culture--including musings on Eva Longoria's and Shakira's recent embrasure of all things academic (and, additionally, Eva's penchant for acting out allegories of the Ethnic Mannequin--see the images below; Shakira has a thing for ropes as well) Hit the labels there below to your right for more info.

Shakira and the Destiny of the Public Intellectual

original posting 6.03.09



updated 8.02.09

Shakira - New Music - More Music Videos