Abstract
Abstract
I argue that Chicana/o artists and activists working in the second half of the twentieth century engaged with the visual culture of US mass picture magazines such as Life because they identified it as a crucial site of struggle even as they recognized the increasing significance of other mass media. Examining pages from Life throughout the years, I show how Henry Luce’s magazine used derogatory depictions of racialized subjects to sell a particular notion of readerly belonging to a white middle-class audience. I find traces of distinct activist and artistic responses to this biased visual culture in the pages of Chicano Movement periodicals such as La Raza, in a Time spread on author Carlos Castaneda, and in the collaboration of two Chicano avant-gardists, Teddy Sandoval and Gronk. Each of these practices, I argue, provide different perspectives on the degree to which the social imaginary and protocols of the magazine medium availed the formation of minoritarian counter-discourses. While the mass picture magazine has faded from prominence, becoming a mere shadow of what it once was, the visual culture that emerged from its glossy pages still haunts our present. As a result, the activist and artistic interventions discussed in this essay provide us with important models for rethinking contemporary efforts to transform the racial logics of the mass cultural sphere.
Publisher
Oxford University Press (OUP)
Subject
Literature and Literary Theory,Cultural Studies
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