United States Air Force Academy

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Dr. José Antonio Arellano

Associate Professor of English

Department of English and Fine Arts

Dr. Arellano
Contact Information

(719) 333-1599

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Bio

José Antonio Arellano is an Associate Professor of English at the U.S. Air Force Academy, where he has taught since 2019. From 2018-2019 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the United States Military Academy. Dr. Arellano has taught English Literature and Composition at various institutions, including the University of Illinois at Chicago, Lewis University, and Triton Community College. He received his Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago in 2018.

He is currently finishing two projects, a short manuscript titled Race Class: Reading Mexican American Literature in the Era of Neoliberalism, 1981-1984 (forthcoming in the Cambridge University Press Elements Series), and Life In Search of Form: 20th Century Mexican American Literature at the End of Art.

Race Class tracks two competing legacies of modernism within Mexican American literature of the 1980s. The first, which Arellano calls the “recognitional,” seeks to express the author's ethnic identity via a narratological discourse of circular self-creation. By narrating the development of what Arellano calls the author figures' “testimonial function,” recognitional fiction fosters ethnic identification, character sympathy, and reconciliatory scenes of familial and ancestral unification. Following a different modernist legacy of Brechtian estrangement, redistributive literature instead averts the readers' sympathy to enable an evaluative distance through which structural critique becomes possible.

Life In Search of Form develops this key difference between two understandings of art, that of “expression,” which seeks to collapse the gap between art and life by exploding the concept of form, and “embodiment,” which requires the recognition of form's embodiment of meaning. Arellano shows how just as, in the late 1960s, art critics and historians highlighted what Lucy Lippard called the “dematerialization of form” and Michael Fried described as the celebration of performance and theater, a few Mexican American writers and painters took up a legacy of modernism to “search for form.” That is, just as an art historical narrative came to an end in the late 1960s (described by Arthur Danto, following Hegel, as “the end of art”), these writers and painters experimented with the conventions of the novel and abstract painting to explore the very possibility of creating art understood as embodiment. Rather than assume that Mexican Americans' work naturally expresses a people's voice, Arellano demonstrates how a search for form was understood as an achievement that could fail. Should it succeed, he argues, literature as art enables the formally externalized representation of the intersubjective meaning necessary for accounts of human agency and freedom.

Dr. Arellano's courses reflect his interest in how artistic form and literary genres shape and reflect debates about politics and aesthetics. In courses including “We Can: 20th Century Mexican American Literature” and “Beauty and Truth: The Functions of African American Literature,” students consider the history of debates about what literature as such can and cannot do. The course “The Novel in America: 1944-1959” studies discourses of “the rise of the novel,” the development of the genre, and how such relate to the American mid-twentieth century debates about ethnic belonging and self-determination, individualism and racial difference. His “Introduction to Literature” course introduces students to the skill of literary analysis via a focus on generic conventions.

Education

Ph.D., English, The University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois (2018)

M.A., English, The University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois (2007)

B.A., English, The University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois (2005)

Professional Experience

Associate Professor, Department of English, U.S. Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, Colo. (2019–Present)

Postdoctoral Fellow, United States Military Academy, West Point, N.Y. (2018–2019)

Honors & Awards

Excellence in Inclusive Teaching, USAFA (2022–2023)

Outstanding Character and Honor Liaison Officer, USAFA (2021–2022)

Outstanding English 211 Instructor, Department of English and Fine Arts (2021–2022)

Achievement Medal for Civilian Service, Department of the Army (2018)

Blair Dissertation-Year Fellowship, University of Chicago, Chicago, Ill. (2016–2017)

Elaine H. and Roger P. Hansen Fellowship, University of Chicago, Chicago, Ill. m(2009–2014)

Graduate Assistantship, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Ill. (2005–2007)

Ernest van Keuren Award for Distinguished English major, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Ill. (2005)

Research and Scholarly Interests

20th Century American Literature

Chicano Literature

The History of Aesthetics

Literary Theory

Modernist Art

Publications

Manuscript

Race Class: Reading Mexican American Literature in the Era of Neoliberalism, 1981-1984 (forthcoming in the Cambridge University Press “Elements in Race and US Literature and Culture” Series, edited by John Ernest and Stephanie Li)

Peer-Reviewed Articles

“The Borders of the Frame”: Chicanx Feminism and the Problem of Representation, Forma Journal 1.2 (2020): 35-62.

“Silent Death Knell: Memorializing Rural New Mexico in Nasario García’s Poems” Quarterly Horse: A Journal of (Brief) American Studies Vol. 4 (2020).

“Screwed in 2020: the Psychology of Horror and Class Immobility in Adaptations of Henry James’s The Turn of the ScrewTeaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice 11:2 (Fall 2020): 1-13.

Refereed Book Chapters

“Here’s to Chicanos in the Middle Class!”: The Limits of Chicano Literary Activism,” forthcoming in The Cambridge Companion to Race and American Literature, ed. John Richard Ernest, Cambridge University Press

“Aztlan for the Middle Class: Chicano Literary Activism,” forthcoming in Race in American Literature and Culture, ed. John Richard Ernest, Cambridge University Press

“Marchando al Futuro: Latino Immigrant Rights Leadership in Chicago,” Marcha: Latino Chicago and the Immigrant Rights Movement, eds. Amalia Pallares and Nilda Flores-Gonzales, University of Illinois Press (2010)

Art Reviews

Islands Beyond Blue: Niki Hastings-McFall and Treasures from the Oceania Collection, Denver Art Museum, DARIA: Denver Art Review, Inquiry, and Analysis (July 2023)

Joel Swanson: The Distance Between Words, New Collection | The Vault, DARIA: Denver Art Review, Inquiry, and Analysis (January 2023)

Action/Abstraction Redefined, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College,  DARIA: Denver Art Review, Inquiry, and Analysis (October 2022)

elin o’Hara slavick: Dark Archive, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, Galleries of Contemporary Art, DARIA: Denver Art Review, Inquiry, and Analysis (September 2022)

Book Reviews

The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-Truth, and Donald Trump by Stanley Fish, forthcoming in Modern Language Studies.

“A Hopeful Eulogy: Pablo Miguel Martinez’s Poem about the Longoria Affair,” War, Literature and the Arts, Vol. 33 (2021)

Encyclopedia Entry

“Tomás Rivera” forthcoming in Latino Literature: An Encyclopedia for Students, eds. Christina Soto van der Plas and Lacie Rae Cunningham.

Web Publications

“Complete Curriculum: The Humanities at the United States Air Force Academy,” ArtDesk, (Spring 2023)

“Decolonizing Mexican Americans,” Decolonize X? Cluster, ed. Scott Challener, post45.org (2021)