Today, I am going to Maynooth to give a paper called “Who Made You the Centre of the Universe? Stardom and Racialized Bodies on the Borderland” to a group of Masters’ students and staff at the Hispanic studies department. The title is inspired by a line from a Laura Mvula song, “That’s Alright”. In this…
Tag: Mexico
Remember Them Exhibition and 5TH E. ALLISON PEERS SYMPOSIUM. Remember Them: Artistic and Academic responses to Femicide in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico
I have been wearing pink for a week. Often considered a weak colour, condemned as symbolic of the rigid gender binaries being fomented by the marketplace to sell consumer goods to young girls, when thinking about Juárez it means something else. It was first used as a warning sign for women that certain areas were…
Monkey Business in Hollywood and Mexico
Me Cheeta: The Autobiography James Lever London: Fourth Estate (2008) 2009. I spoke at the Revisiting Star Studies conference in June held at the University of Newcastle about the online presence of Mexican male stars from the so-called Mexican Golden Age. As part of this I made reference to my article on María Félix and…
On death and its representation in Mexico
There is a frequent trope in reporting about Mexico that suggests that Mexicans have a special relationship with death. The Mexican poet and essayist, Octavio Paz wrote an influential essay in his Laberinto de la soledad/Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) exploring the particularities of the Mexican attitude to death through the lens of the annual day of the…
On Galleries and Exhibits: Review of “What we caught we threw away, what we didn’t catch we kept” Mariana Castillo Deball.
Recently, while in Glasgow I went into the Centre for Contemporary Arts. After going into the exhibition space (which consists of three rooms) and taking in the exhibit, I went out into the café and tweeted: I wasn’t sure what I had just been looking at. I had read the initial overview on the outside…
‘Brighter from the off’: Stacey Dooley and the Mexican-US border
This week I watched Stacey Dooley in the US: Border Wars on BBC3 (thanks to Victoria McCollum for drawing my attention to it). The documentary follows Stacey Dooley, a young investigative reporter, who speaks to people on both sides of the border: those who want to travel north, on the Mexican side, and those who want…