Merry Christmas from the Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog!!!! #mextasy

The shades of Margarita Carmen Cansino, aka Rita Hayworth, Lupe Velez, Ricardo Montalban, Speedy Gonzales (still alive, I think), join me in wishing all the visitors to the Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog the merriest and mexiest of Christmases.

Here are some recent graphic desmadres I dreamed up for the upcoming presentations/exhibitions at Penn, Cornell, Arizona, and Kansas--more on those upcoming gigs here!  Own your own by shopping my Society6 tiendita/shoppe here.

Tons of #Mextasy Gigs on the Horizon (plus a lecture on Breaking Bad and Mad Men in Paris!)... The University of Arizona, Tucson; The University of Kansas, Lawrence; Cornell University, Ithaca; EHESS, Paris

Late 2015 and 2016 are gearing up to be a monster--with Textmex/Mextasy presentation/exhibitions and more on the horizon. Go to my vanity site here for all the links/dates

The History of Weird Tales: The Short Version? They Are Not Weird at All--Merely Compulsively Repeated, Projected Nightmares of Mexicans, Africans, Arabs, Asians, and More Running Off with Gorgeous White Women

It comes as no surprise when the main plot point becomes obvious in Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America--that the history of Mexican and Latina/o figuration in the cultural space of the United States is an endless loop of hallucinations, fantasies built around fear of miscegenation, promiscuous female sexual want, etc.  The backstory of xenophobia and nativist pandering from Hitler to Trump is merely a projection of genetic pool anxiety--the caucasian nightmare of swarthy n'ere-do-wells frolicking amidst white women's pudenda!

Weird Tales no doubt fueled these fears--fears that echo loudly with 'birthers' rant about taking back their  country, when anti-miscegenation rage (often fueled just by the sight of a biracial body (thanks Obama) or the sound of a Spanish-language accent) takes center stage. Here's wikipedia (give them some money so they stop acting like PBS around pledge-days) on Weird Tales:

Weird Tales is an American fantasy and horror fiction pulp magazine first published in March 1923. It ceased its original run in September 1954, after 279 issues, but has since been revived. The magazine was set up in Chicago by J. C. Henneberger, an ex-journalist with a taste for the macabre. Edwin Baird was the first editor of the monthly, assisted by Farnsworth Wright.[1] The subgenre pioneered by Weird Tales writers has come to be called "weird fiction". The magazine's office were initially at 450 North Michigan Ave, Chicago, but later moved north to 840 North Michigan Ave.[2] {... more} 

Which brings us to a recent posting from the Golden Age Blog--chock full of telling Weird Tales covers; here, the utter fear/desire for S&M-laced sexuality between endangered caucasian lasses and dark-skinned, violent men explodes off the page with pornish regularity.

Watch out Lexington, Kentucky (AKA Mexington, Kentucky), Come April 2015, Something Mexican Your Way Cometh!

First notice here on the good ol' Galleryblog that I have been invited to bring the Mextasy traveling circus to Lexington, and the University of Kentucky, April 2015 for a couple of lectures--I am going to try to sneak in a pop-up version of the Mextasy exhibition as well, though that is still up in the air.

Here's an outline of what I will be up to there!  The series I am speaking in foregrounds notions of the  transnational and social theory:

Chicanosmosis and the Transnational Imaginary (Imaginary)
21st Century Mextasy In and Beyond the Ivory Tower

Dr. William A. Nericcio

In the closing moments of Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the “Mexican” of America,  right at the point where all hope was lost, when imagining a progressive space for Latinas/os seems all but impossible, a turn occurs. It is a turn to hope, to a future, to something positive.

Naïve, right? 

For a Derridean (and a rascuache Nietzschean), especially a post-movimiento Tejano who had learned his craft at the feet of Gayatri Spivak, Ramón Saldivar, John Kronik, Wolfgang Holdheim, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Jonathan Culler, and Carlos Fuentes, this was not a predictable move.  Theory is negative and imponderable (and insufferable), but I wanted to use it to say something different.

And I did: I coined the neologism Chicanosmosis.  Chicanosmosis or, in the book, Xicanosmosis, is a term that contemplates international intercourse through the semi-permeable fabric of the U.S./Latin American border—a site of transnational intrigue that reeks of hegemony and seduction, imperialism and the voyeuristic turn. In Tex[t]-Mex, the focus was on Frida Kahlo and American writer/artist Gilbert Hernandez, but one could have as easily have focused on El Chavo del Ocho & Pee-wee Herman, or United Fruit/CIA & Narco-cultura en las Americas (this last “narcheology,” as I parsed it in lectures at NYU/SVA in Manhattan last year, is fodder for another colloquia).

So this presentation for Social Theory will represent simultaneously a retrospective and scenes I might be accused of performing something like Nostradamus-like clairvoyance. It is the sum total of my present theoretical adventures based as it is on the writings of Fanon, Said, Sontag, Marx, Foucault, Gallop, Paz, Taussig, Liu, Borges, Virilio and more—and it is my own thing. 

Take the subtitle I have appended to the main title: Imaginary (Imaginary)--the former imaginary, an adjective, common, ubiquitous; the latter imaginary, a noun, the nominalization of the Imaginary, post-Lacan, now de rigueur in the academy. Frenchies were all the rage in the 80s and they still are in a way—this too will probably come up. (In Tex[t]-Mex, I actually created a literary term, la quiebra, in order to break with East Coast Francophiliac jargon-forging—no joke!). 

Readings are to be determined, but they will include works in progress from Eyegiene: Mutations of Subjectivity in the Televisual Age of Sex, Race, and the Smartphone as well as select readings from work by Edmundo Desnoes, Frantz Fanon, Slavoj Žižek, Gayatri Spivak, and others to be implicated shortly.

New Promotional Poster & Prints for the Mextasy/Textmex Exhibition/Lectures at the University of Washington in Seattle | February 28, 2013

click to enlarge

2007 TEXTMEX Reading at DG WILLS in La Jolla

New, Hygienically-Sealed Copies of Tex[t]-Mex, Available from Amazon.com for $11.86

update: October 7, 2009

For some reason, Amazon.com is running a sale on Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America!

Venta, Venta, Venga, Venga--it was $12.87, but is now going for $11.86--the cover price is $22.50! Gracias to Jeff Bezos at Amazon and UT Press for making this firesale available via the internets! If you are a regular Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog visitor and want an autographed copy of the book (with a custom designed cartoon as well), just drop $16 (free shipping) in an envelope to w. nericcio, sdsu lit, mc 6020, SD, CA 92182.6020 with your name and return address and I will get a paperback copy of the book off to you in no time!

Sometime in the next 24 hours the 200,000th visitor to the Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog Will Arrive!

Sometime in the next 24 hours the 200,000th visitor to the Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog will arrive here at this site! If you are that person and you know how to do a screengrab of the event, send that to me at memo@sdsu.edu and I will send you a cool literary surprise. If you are that person and you arrived here looking for hot latina mamas or blacks beach some other sort of search (quite common for my traffic), no worries! You can get a gift as well!

Amazon Reviews Si Vous Plais

If you have not done so, do please consider reviewing TEXTMEX on Amazon.com. I want to thank all the readers and reviewers of the book who have blessed it with their attention--anything that takes 16 years to finish deserves a little love, ¿que no?

More Ohio State Hype!