In the closing lines of the 2000 work Shot in America: Television, the State, and the Rise of Chicano Cinema author Chon Noriega asks his readers, “how do you participate in this world of knowledge and power as something other than a viewer?” (201). Quite honestly, Noriega’s question is one of many that has driven the direction and purpose of my research and scholarship at large. My dissertation, Latinidad in Enstranged Lands: Narrative Interjections in Chicanx and Latinx Literature, Film, and Television has sought to reflect, via narrative, my participations with and complications of knowledge and power within a dominant Anglo American U.S. Consequently, my dissertation has placed a primary emphasis on the constructions, presentations, and representations of Chicanx and Latinx fictional works of narrative that while including fictional works of literature like Corky Gonzales’s Yo Soy Joaquin have also incorporated often identified “alternative” works like comics and graphic novels that also explore the issues of knowledge and power in relation to Chicanxs and Latinxs in the Americas. What I have kept at the center of my analysis, however, has been Chicanxs and Latinxs. Along with Noriega’s question of participation and action as they relate to these particular populations a secondary but equally significant question that asks “what’s new in Chicano/Latino Studies?” or “What has been made new in Chicano/Latino Studies?” has driven my directional explorations of the various narrative forms I have incorporated into my dissertation. To accomplish these goals I turn to Narrative Theory studies which offers a way to broach the various narrative mediums that my dissertation explores. This dissertation explores the specific term Ostranit coined by Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky in his 1917 publication Art as Device, and which was translated by Benjamin Sher in 1991 as enstrangement. Although my dissertation has outlined the complicated and rather expansive relationship Scholars like David Herman, and Darko Suvin have had with Shklovsky’s term, my dissertation positions enstrangement as those moments in literature that are made new for readers who are made or are invited to pause and dwell on a particular literary moment or element of the text they are reading. This particular narrative moment for Shklovsky “is when the literary work attains its greatest and most long-lasting impact” (12).The exploration of narrative enstrangement in Chicanx/Latinx narratives is further established by Frederick L. Aldama, who, in A Users Guide to Postcolonial and Latino Borderland Fiction, identifies enstrangement as one of the many narrative elements that an author can use “to push at the boundaries of convention, to deviate unpredictably from aesthetic norms” and wake readers up from a “state of habituation” (36). This means that as we engage Chicanx/Latinx narrative works, the decisions made by authors and directors to use, for example, bilinguality, structure phenotype, and indigenous elements attempt to enstrange, or make new our engagements of Chicanxs and Latinxs while also breaking away from stereotypical dominant American representations of Chicanxs and Latinxs that have been historically perpetuated dominant American narratives. And while scholars like Lemon and Reis understand enstrangement “not so much a device as a result obtainable by an number of devices” (5 Lemon & Reis), enstrangement is nevertheless a significant narrative tool that can invite readers and scholars to engage Chicanx and Latinx works in new and exiting ways. Thus, my work complicates the role of narrative formation in Chicanx/Latinx fictional literatures, films, and televisions by placing close attention to specific moments that make new our engagements of Chicanx/Latinx narratives and introduce an Enstraged Latinitad.
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