CMAS Plática: Ben V. Olguín
Wed, March 10, 2010 • 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM • Texas Union, Chicano Culture Room (UNB 4.206)
"Prison Work, Academic Institutions, and Chicana/o Organic Intellectuals: Revisiting Marxist Critiques of Chicana/o Studies."
Chicana/o Studies is grounded in an oppositional consciousness and movement, and contemporary Chicana/o Studies methodologies continue to propose the field as a counterhegemonic. This plática by Ben V. Olguín explores the complexities and contradictions inherent to organic Chicana/o intellectual attempts to negotiate institutions of power, from universities to maximum-security prisons. Several questions emerge. What are the old and new goals of Chicana/o Studies? How does the establishment of alternative Chicana/o literary canons, and related institutionalization of the field across disciplines, undergird new Chicana/o relationships to ideology? How do various models of Chicana/o organic intellectuals both succeed and fail in the actualization of counterhegemonic praxis? What might be the discursive limits of Chicana/o Studies?
Ben V. Olguín is an associate professor in the Department of English at The University of Texas at San Antonio. Dr. Olguín's research and teaching interests are in the fields of U.S. Latina/o literatures and popular culture, mulit-ethnic literatures of the United States, Latin American literature, and literary and cultural theory. He is the author of La Pinta: Chicana/o Prisoner, Literature, Culture and Politics, The University of Texas Press, 2010.