Stanford Humanities Center
Miguel Samano is a senior double majoring in comparative literature and Chicana/o-Latina/o studies. His research interests include Chicanx and African American literary and visual studies, the historiography of art and literature, and the social aesthetics of race and ethnicity. Previously, he received a Chappell-Lougee grant to conduct ethnographic research on Mexican regional music in the Los Angeles area. He has written for a number of publications on campus including The Stanford Daily and Stanford magazine. Through his positions as a Resident Tutor for the Structured Liberal Education Program, the peer advisor for the Comparative Literature Department, and a peer mentor for the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, he hopes to share his love of the humanities with others. He is currently running a yearlong reading group on Chicanx literature and has previously run workshops on Chicanx and Black aesthetics and the philosophy of race.
SHC Project
What is Chicanx about Chicanx art? Toward a theory of Chicanx aesthetics
Advisors: Ramón Saldívar, Michele Elam
What is the focus of your current research?
My thesis uses close reading to examine how artworks produce affect as historically-coherent and socially-organized experiences of the world. I analyze two case studies: Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965-1985 (CARA), the first major retrospective exhibition of the Chicano art movement, and the writings of the Chicano poet and literary critic Alurista. I pursue an approach to cultural history grounded in sustained attention to the art object, in the process acknowledging the radical potential of art to locate and change our sense of the world in ways that exceed whichever analytical instruments, such as canons or historical narratives, that we bring to the works.
What drew you to this topic?
An Arts Intensive course on curating Latinx and Latin American art helped me realized that I was interested what happens when we put works into conversation with each other in novel ways. During the course, I learned to be attentive to how a work’s being exhibited alongside other works changes my sense of what that work is about. Once I returned to campus, I tried to track which conceptual metaphors kept recurring in poetry criticism through a directed reading on Chicanx poetics. Afterwards, I felt that the study and classification of Chicanx art broadly construed was inextricable from an exploration of how our various reactions to it creates and maintains our collective experiences of the world
How are you conducting your research?
I am drawing upon the materials I collected from the CARA exhibition’s archives and Alurista’s papers to as evidence for my broader theoretical argument. Tentatively, that argument will be about the relationship between affect, social location, and a work’s positioning within a canon. I will be reading through planning documents for CARA such as grant proposals, drafts of catalogue essays, sample label texts, and the exhibition floor plan. My hope is that I will recover the broader arguments the exhibition and catalogue intended to make about the relationship between the works in the CARA show and the Chicanx community. Preliminarily, my work with the Alurista papers leads me to read him as a theorist of the novel. His research files, CVs, and graduate work suggest that Bakhtin, Marxist literary criticism and philosophy, and existentialism in particular influenced him. As a literary critic, he focused on the relationship between literature and its surrounding material conditions of production.
What would people be surprised to learn about the topic you are working on?
If affectively-laden encounters with artworks can be glossed as personal, Chicanx art and literature causes one to reflect on how art transforms the personal into the political, and vice versa. Despite the enduring questions about how art works I am grappling with, the art produced amongst the political milieu of Chicano civil rights movement was often neither created or described as being made for its own sake. However, the political commitments of the Chicanx artists and writers I am studying should not be taken as being overly determinative of their art practice. The artists in the CARA show worked across a variety of media, themes, and styles, yet arguably, all can be classified as working during and within the Chicano art movement. Similarly, Alurista read widely across European philosophy and literature, pre-Columbian Indigenous thought, and Chicanx literature. His cosmopolitanism did not preclude his being hailed as the Chicano poet laureate. The political dimension of Chicanx art enriches the kinds of questions one asks about art more broadly.
In your view, why is it valuable to study this topic?
To my knowledge, there has not yet been a study of the questions the CARA show raises for the interpretation of individual artworks vis-a-vis their emplacement within a canon. There also has not been a study of Alurista that leverages knowledge about his development as literary critic to nuance readings of his poetry. I view both of these studies as opposite sides of a common problematic in the interpretative humanities: namely, how one makes sense of the projects of artists as individuals, and as participants in historical formations such as canons that inevitably precede and exceed their lives and works. If truly great works address themselves simultaneously to a particular historical moment and to people across all of time, not all works are evaluated as if they could transcend their moment. My belief is that the works I am studying map out a shared set of experiences at a given place and time, but that their complexity as works of art means they evade being pinned down to just being of their moment.
How is your honors thesis impacting you academically and/or personally?
While conducting archival research for my thesis, I had the opportunity to converse with scholars working in art history and performance studies. Scholarship from these two fields has changed the trajectory of what was originally a thesis drawing primarily on work in literary studies and philosophical aesthetics. My project as a whole continues to reaffirm my desire to pursue my research interests further through a doctoral program in English or an interdisciplinary humanities field such as American Studies, but I am now also thinking about incorporating the visual arts into my research agenda for graduate school. Finally, and most importantly, working on this project has motivated me to think of my scholarly practice as inseparable from other facets of my life. I am still thinking about how my deference to the rich complexity of the works in my study should affect my interpersonal interactions and political commitments.
