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Playful Protest

The Political Work of Joy in Latinx Media

Kristie Soares author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of Illinois Press

Published:5th Sep '23

£21.99

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Playful Protest cover

Pleasure-based politics in Puerto Rican and Cuban pop culture

Joy is a politicized form of pleasure that goes beyond gratification to challenge norms of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Kristie Soares focuses on the diasporic media of Puerto Rico and Cuba to examine how music, public activist demonstrations, social media, sitcoms, and other areas of culture resist the dominant stories told about Latinx joy. As she shows, Latinx creators compose versions of joy central to social and political struggle and at odds with colonialist and imperialist narratives that equate joy with political docility and a lack of intelligence. Soares builds her analysis around chapters that delve into gozando in salsa music, precise joy among the New Young Lords Party, choteo in the comedy ¿Qué Pasa U.S.A.?, azúcar in the life and death of Celia Cruz, dale as Pitbull’s signature affect, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s use of silliness to take seriously political violence.

Daring and original, Playful Protest examines how Latinx creators resist the idea that joy only exists outside politics and activist struggle.

“This book is a breath of fresh air. Kristie Soares recuperates joy and its multiple Latinx variants, such as gozando, choteo, and silliness, as radical empowering practices. It is a brilliant challenge to critical approaches that only focus on Latinx negative affect.”--Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, author of Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance

ISBN: 9780252087424

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 18mm

Weight: 481g

264 pages