From Zoot Suits to Rapumentary: Popular Culture and the Politics of the Possible

From Zoot Suits to Rapumentary explores the popular culture, social movements, and utopian politics of aggrieved communities in the United States, Latin America, Caribbean, and elsewhere since World War II. If, as some political observers have suggested, the failed utopia of industrial modernity and neoliberal globalization since the 1940s has fomented ethnocide, ecological devastation, and economic exploitation in lieu of democracy, abundance, and freedom, this project illuminates how seemingly disparate groups articulate transnational, multi-ethnic, and utopian political imaginaries from the interstices of capitalist social relations and cultural technologies.