| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st Century. Ed. by Arturo J. Aldama and Naomi H. Quiñonez. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. xiv, 413 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-253-34014-4. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-253-21492-0.)

This is a superb text of literary analysis that attempts to analyze the dangers and problems affecting the socioliterary "Chicano body" (chapter 1, "Dangerous Bodies"); to deconstruct the textual intellectual tempers and cultural climates that continue to (post) colonize the Chicano community (chapter 2, "Dismantling Colonial/Patriarchal Legacies"); and to find out in what direction Chicano/a cultural studies is headed (chapter 3, "Mapping Space and Reclaiming Place"). This text must be seen as a milestone in the development of the state of Chicano thought and social theory, social theory because the essayists are interested in understanding the American hegemony of cultural power through the analysis of aesthetic vehicles, as the editors, Arturo J. Aldama and Naomi H. Quiñonez, write, of "subaltern cultural productions: such as 'films, art, music, lit[erature], pop culture, and alternative historiographies'" (p. 2) in order to change social and cultural conditions. The main tension in all of the essays is between theory and praxis and between the generations of Chicano intellectuals.

The text essayists, paradoxically, define the Chicano community as a monolith and, basically, examine only writers who focus on workers, migrants, immigrants, and women. All of the essays, unfortunately, disregard historical works and only use the theorist Gloria Anzaldua's postmodern/postcolonial historical interpretation—with her emphasis on the concept of borderland, "La Frontera," which analyzes the collectivity of Chicano consciousness through the process of post-colonial "liminality"—a state of ambiguity, phantasmagoria, and reconfiguration (pp. 122–24).

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