Research Interest

Professor Pérez-Torres specializes in studying the intersection of contemporary U.S. culture with social configurations of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. He is particularly interested in the intersection between contemporary multicultural production and theories of postcoloniality and postmodernity.

Biography

Rafael Pérez-Torres, Professor of Languages in English at UCLA, studies the intersection of contemporary U.S. culture with social configurations of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. He is particularly interested in the intersection between contemporary Latinx cultural production and theories of representation. In addition to the book Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against Margins, he has written Critical Mestizaje: Voice, Agency and Race in Chicano Literature and Culture and co-authored Memories of an East L.A. Outlaw: To Alcatraz, Death Row and Back with Ernie López. He also co-edited The Chicano Studies Reader: An Anthology of Aztlán 1970-2000 with Chon Noriega, Eric Avila, Mary Karen Davilos, and Chela Sandoval. He has served on the editorial boards of such journals as America Literary History, American Literature, Aztlán, and Contemporary Literature and regularly teaches courses on Chicanx literature and culture, globalization and decoloniality, and the novel and its theories.

Publications

He is the author of Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against Margins (Cambridge University Press, 1995), Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicano Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), and co-author of To Alcatraz, Death Row and Back: Memories of an East L.A. Outlaw (University of Texas Press, 2005). He also co-edited The Chicano Studies Reader: An Anthology of Aztlán 1970-2000 with Chon Noriega, Eric Avila, MaryKaren Davilos, and Chela Sandoval (Chicano Studies Research Center Publications, 2001). Other publications include “Chicano Ethnicity, Cultural Hybridity, the Mestizo Voice” (American Literature 70.1), “Refiguring Aztlán” (Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 22.2), “Between Presence and Absence: Beloved, Postmodernism, and Blackness” (A Casebook on Beloved edited by William Andrews and Nellie Y. McKay.. Oxford University Press, 1999), and “Nomads and Migrants – Negotiating a Multicultural Postmodernism” (Cultural Critique, 26).