Arlene Davila

Professor of Anthropology, Social and Cultural Analysis
Ph.D. 1996 (Cultural Anthropology), The Graduate Center, CUNY; M.A. 1990 (Anthropology and Museum Studies), NYU; B.A. 1987 (Anthropology), Tufts University.

Office Address: Rufus D. Smith Hall 25 Waverly Place New York, NY 10003
Email:
Phone: 212-998-7592
Fax: 212-995-4014

Areas of Research/Interest

race and ethnicity; nationalism; media studies; political economy, globalization; the politics of museum and visual representation; urban studies; consumption; Latinos in the U.S.

External Affiliations

American Anthropological Association, Puerto Rican Studies Association, American Studies Association, Latin American Studies Association.

Publications

Books:

Latino Spin: Public Image and the Whitewashing of Race. NYU Press, 2008

Barrio Dreams: Puerto Ricans, Latinos and the Neoliberal City. University of California Press, 2004

Latinos Inc.: Marketing and the Making of a People. University of California Press, 2001.

Mambo Montage: The Latinization of New York, co-edited with Agustin Lao. Columbia University Press, 2001.

Sponsored Identities: Cultural Politics in Puerto Rico. Temple Univeristy Press, 1997

Selected Articles:

2004 El Barrio's 'We Are Watching You Campaign:' On the Politics of Inclusion in a Latinized Museum. AZTLAN: A Journal of Chicano Studies. 30 (1): 153-178.

2004 Empowered Culture? New York City's empowerment Zone and the Selling of El Barrio. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 594: 49-64.

Current News / Projects
Updated June 2011

The highlight of this past year was receiving the Latin American Studies Association prize for the best book in Latino studies for my book “Latino Spin: Public Image and the Whitewashing of Race,” (NYU Press), a great honor indeed.  I also continued my present work on three concurrent projects that are now part of a collection on culture, neoliberalism and space, entitled “Culture Works: Space, Value and Mobility across the Neoliberal Americas” that will come out with NYU Press next spring.  This book gathers research on the politics of space, involving research on shopping mall culture and the informal economy in Puerto Rico, as well as a series of papers theorizing the valorization of culture in neoliberalizing contexts focusing on the politics of Latino/a art and the cultural politics and art financing of “minority” museums.. The last component of this book is a series of chapters on Buenos Aires tango tourism and on the international expatriate community of creative workers that is settling there to wither the global economic recession.  Altogether this new volume theorizes the uses of culture in neoliberalizing contexts, calling attention to the ongoing cultural politics that are central to these processes.  I also greatly enjoyed co-editing alongside Johana Londono, one of my Ph.D students, a special issue on “Race and the Cultural Spaces of Neoliberalism” for Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. From the different talks and conferences I presented last year, it was especially stimulating to present my new material on Buenos Aires at the University of Montreal, as well as to share my work on the proposed National Museum of the American Latino at DePaul University, as well as to discuss this project through an editorial published in the New York Times. This year I will be teaching a new graduate course on the politics of Latino and Latin American representation alongside my undergraduate seminar on the Anthropology of Cities, while attending to the last details of my forthcoming book