José David Saldívar, Professor, Departments of Ethnic Studies and English
Ethnic Studies Department, Chicano/Latino Studies, Ethnic Studies
Office: 574 Barrows
Email: saldivar@berkeley.edu
Phone: 643-5000
Office hours: T: 12:45-2 in 574 Barrows Hall
José David Saldívar, trained in English and Comparative Literature at Yale University and Stanford University, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, is best known for his literary historical analysis of the inter-American novel, US-Mexico border cultural studies, and critical social theory. His first book, The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History (Duke University Press, 1991), explored the dynamics of cross-cultural transculturation in the literature of the Americas. This was followed by the book Criticism in the Borderlands (Duke University Press, 1991), co-edited with Hector Calderon, a book that has garnered considerable interest in the conceptualizations of border theory and border thinking in US Latino/a Studies and related fields. Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (University of California Press, 1997) wove together Saldívar’s work on the 19 th and 20 th century Chicano/a literatures, traveling border theory, and experimental ethnography and folklore. The general direction of Saldívar’s recent publications in Cultural Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, Nepantla, and American Literary History, concerns local US literary and cultural processes in relation to the outernational pressures of Americanity, coloniality, and power. He is pursuing research on the War of 1898, the Cultures of US Imperialism, Critical Social Theory, and the articulated formations of American Studies, Latinamericanism, and Commonwealth Studies.
While the approach is comparative and transnational, a central focus of Saldívar’s work is in the critical formations of Americanity and US empire. He has completed a new book provisionally entitled Transnational Americanity:Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico (Duke University Press, forthcoming).
Saldívar has served on the Editorial Boards of the University of California Press and Duke University Press, and serves on the Advisory Boards of The Futures of Minority Studies Institute, based at Cornell University, and the Townsend Humanities Center at UC, Berkeley. Additionally, he serves on the Editorial Boards of American Literary History (ALH), The Global South, and ECHO:A Music-Centered Journal at UCLA. He is the past recipient of a University of California President’s Research fellowship in the Humanities, a William Rice Kimball fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center, an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship for Study in Modern Society and Values, and a fellowship to the School of Criticism and Theory at Dartmouth College.
Education
PhD, English (Comparative Literature, minor), 1983, Stanford UniversityMA, English, 1979, Stanford University
BA, Literature Major, 1977 Yale University
Research interests
Literary history of the US ethnic novel; Trans-American literatures and cultural criticism; Cultural Studies; Chicano/a Literary Studies; Latin American literatures and criticism; Post-colonial analysisCourses
UndergraduateBorder and Diaspora Cultures of Laboring (upper-division)
Chicano and Latin American Writers (upper-division)
The American Ethnic Novel (upper-division)
Graduate Seminars
The War of 1898 and the Cultures of U.S. Imperialism
Cultural Texts
The Global South, Faulkner, García Márquez, Morrison, Junot Díaz
Selected publications
Books and Edited VolumesBorder Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (University of California Press, 1997)
The Dialectics of Our America; Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History (Duke University Press, 1991)
Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology (Duke University Press, 1991)
The Rolando Hinojosa Reader: Essays Historical and Critical (Arte Público Press, 1985)
Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico (forthcoming Duke University Press).
Articles and Book Chapters
"Making Democracy Surreal: Political Race and the Miner's Canary," in American Literary History, 20/3 (Summer 2008): 609-621.
"The Hybridity of Culture in Arturo Islas' The Rain God", in Critical Mappings of Arturo Islas' Fictions, ed. Frederick Luis Aldama (Tempe: Bilingual Press, 2008): 21-38. Rpt. From JD Saldívar's The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique and Literary History (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).
"Unsettling Race, Coloniality, and Caste in Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera. Martinez's Parrot in the Oven, and Roy's The God of Small Things," Cultural Studies 21/3-4 (March/May 2007): 339-367.
"Border Thinking, Minoritized Studies, and Realist Interpellations: the Coloniality of Power from Gloria Anzaldúa to Arundhati Roy," in Identity Politics Reconsidered ed. Satya Mohanty, Linda Martín Alcoff, Michael Hames-García, and Paula Moya (New York: Palgrave, 2006): 152-170.