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Honoring relatives by tending graves, building altars, and cooking festive meals has been a major tradition among Latin Americans for centuries. The tribute, "El Día de los Muertos," has enjoyed renewed popularity since the 1970s when Latinx activists and artists in the United States began expanding "Day of the Dead" north of the border with celebrations of performance art, Aztec danza, art exhibits, and other public expressions.
 
Focusing on the power of public ritual to serve as a communication medium, this revised and updated edition combines a mix of ethnography, historical research, oral history, and critical cultural analysis to explore the manifold and unexpected transformations that occur when the tradition is embraced by the mainstream. A testament to the complex role of media and commercial forces in constructions of ethnic identity, Day of the Dead in the USA provides insight into the power of art and ritual to create community, transmit oppositional messages, and advance educational, political, and economic goals.
 
Today Chicano-style Day of the Dead events take place in all fifty states. This revised edition provides new information about:

• The increase in events across the US, incorporating media coverage and financial aspects,
• Recent political movements expressed in contemporary Day of the Dead celebrations, including #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo
• Greater media coverage and online presence of the celebration in blogs, websites, and streaming video
• Día de los Muertos themes and iconography in video games and films 
• The proliferation of commercialized merchandise such as home goods, apparel, face paints and jewelry at mainstream big box and web retailers, as well as the widespread proliferation of calavera-themed decorations and costumes for Halloween
• 24 new full color illustrations

 

Deaf Mobility Studies revolutionizes how we think about deaf people’s international experiences. Equipped with a common theoretical framework, a team of five deaf ethnographers journeyed alongside their participants to delve into a rich array of experiences — ranging from career advancements and marriages to tourism and the challenges faced by deaf refugees. The authors present their findings within the framework of Deaf Mobility Studies, which brings together the transdisciplinary fields of Deaf Studies and Mobility Studies. Far from taking 'deaf cosmopolitanism' as a given, this work scrutinizes it as a multifaceted phenomenon to be both affirmed and questioned. Themes that emerge include how deaf people seek spaces of belonging, engage in languaging, expand their networks, and experience immobility.

The text is augmented by direct links to clips in nine ethnographic films, analysis of selected film excerpts and screenshots, and compelling data visualizations. QR codes throughout the book link to the film clips to create this dual narrative experience. Deaf Mobility Studies is an expansive odyssey through the complexities and opportunities inherent in deaf international mobility.


Deaf Mobility Studies: Exploring International Networks, Tourism, and Migration © 2024 by Gallaudet University is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. 
 

Today’s aesthetic strategies to compose content and identity across digital media are neither new nor exclusively digital, but emerged from migration. In Drift Net: The Aesthetics of Literature and Media in Migration, Chris Campanioni theorizes an aesthetics of transmedia as a framework for civic activism, while showing how migrants have forecasted and reshaped new media practices and norms, producing a political subjectivity that resists subjectification. As borders, global inequality, racism, and xenophobia proliferate, migrants continue to enact the possibilities of something else, beyond being spoken about and spoken for. 

Through a model Campanioni calls a “migratory text,” Drift Net advances a theory of literature and art born in translation that calls into question established theories of world literature, national literatures, literary periodization, and translation itself. Through an analysis of works born in translation and produced in passage, detention, and exile, Campanioni utilizes this model to read creatively across a wide range of social and political formations, from the experience of his parents' exiles to alternative housing initiatives and asylum reform efforts throughout Europe, including the largest LGBT+ refugee center in the world. Drawing on a mixed methodology of qualitative interviews with asylum applicants and shelter directors, textual analysis, and autoethnographic narrative, Drift Net traces literary developments alongside contemporary social and political interventions. This approach proposes interventions on the organizational levels of asylum, integration, public housing, and membership. It also marks the ways migrant creators have reformulated subjectivity through the same genres and modes that have contributed to their devaluation as minoritized subjects. 

Drift Net both deepens and broadens our conceptualization of migrant literature, and recovers an understanding and application of transmedia that predates digital cultures. Campanioni offers a wide-ranging study of texts including Edward Said and Jean Mohr’s After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives, Edgar Garcia’s Skins of Columbus, Anna Seghers’s Transit, Francis Ponge’s Soap, Walid Raad’s The Atlas Group, Klára Hosnedlová’s embroidered paintings, Reem Karssli and Caroline Williams’s Now is the Time To Say Nothing, Cornelia Schleime’s paper prints, and more. Drift Net formulates the “migratory” as a site of artistic production, resistance, and possibility, where theory is not an end but the beginning of tools and practices that might help researchers, instructors, and organizers to develop their strategies.