Research Expertise and Interest
Chicano and Chicana literature, twentieth-century American ethnic literatures, theory of the novel, marxism, critical theory, farm worker social movements
Research Description
Marcial González specializes in the study of Chicano/a literature, Chicana/o social movements, narrative theory, and Marxist literary theory. He is the author of Chicano Novels and the Politics of Form: Race, Class and Reification (2009) and the co-editor (with Carlos Gallego) of Dialectical Imaginaries: Materialist Approaches to U.S. Latino/a Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism (2018). He is currently writing a book that focuses on the lives and struggles of Mexican farm laborers as represented in Chicana/o narratives from 1970 to 2005. My articles include:
“Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Theory of the Anti-imperialist Novel: The Re-appropriation of a Literary Form” in Ngũgĩ in the American Imperium, edited by Timothy J. Reiss (African World Press). Forthcoming in 2019.
“Labor Movements and Chicano/a Literature” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, Oxford University Press. February 2019. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.927. Hard copy will be published in 2020.
“Reading U.S. Latino/a Literature through Capitalism—and Vice Versa,” co-authored with Carlos Gallego. In Dialectical Imaginaries: Materialist Approaches to U.S. Latino/a Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism. Co-edited by myself and Carlos Gallego. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018. 1-19.
"Mass Incarceration and the Critique of Capitalism: A Working-class Viewpoint in Ronald Ruiz's Happy Birthday Jesús" in Dialectical Imaginaries: Materialist Approaches to U.S. Latino/a Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism, edited by Marcial González and Carlos Gallego (University of Michigan Press, 2018): 287-308.
“Herbert Marcuse’s Repudiation of Dialectics: From Reason and Revolution to One-Dimensional Thinking,” Science and Society: A Journal of Marxist Thought and Analysis 82.3 (July 2018): 413-439.
“Against Omniscient Narration: A Farmworker Critique of Neoliberalism” in Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture, edited by Mitchum Huehls and Rachel Greenwald Smith (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 140-159.
"Where Do Social Inequalities Come From?: Class Divides in Chicana/o Literature,” Radical Teacher: A Socialist, Feminist, and Anti-Racist Journal on the Theory and Practice of Teaching 101 (Winter 2015), 15-20.
“Narrating the Inadmissible: Storytelling and Dialectical Form in Barefoot Heart and Children of the Fields,” Arizona Quarterly 70:2 (Summer 2014), 55-83.
“The Future as Form: Undoing the Categorical Separation of Class and Gender in Ana Castillo’s Sapogonia” in Created Unequal: Class and the Making of American Literature, edited by Andrew Lawson (Routledge, 2014), 215-228.
“Reception and Authenticity: Danny Santiago’s Famous All Over Town” in New Directions in American Reception Study, edited by Philip Goldstein and James L. Machor (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008): 179-194.
“Postmodernism, Historical Materialism, and Chicana/o Cultural Studies,” Science and Society: A Journal of Marxist Thought and Analysis 68:2 (Summer 2004): 161-186.
“A Marxist Critique of Borderlands Postmodernism: Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and Chicano Cultural Criticism” in Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth Century Literature of the United States, edited by Bill Mullen and Jim Smethurst (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003): 279-97.
“Jameson’s ‘Arrested Dialectic’: From Structuralism to Postmodernism,” Cultural Logic: Marxist Theory and Practice 2:2 (Spring 1999): http://clogic.eserver.org/2-2/gonzalez.html.
Reviews, Interviews, and Stories
Review of Bruce Neuberger's Lettuce Wars: Ten Years of Work and Struggle in the Fields of California (Monthly Review Press, 2013), Science and Society: A Journal of Marxist Thought and Analysis 80.2 (April 2016): 276-279.
“The River Bottom Ranch” (fiction). In The Way We Work: Contemporary Writings from the American Workplace. Edited by Peter Scheckner and Mary Boyes. Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press, 2008. 109-119. (An earlier version appeared in Americas Review.)
“An Interview with Cecile Pineda.” Tertulia Magazine (August 24, 2007) http://www.tertuliamagazine.com/published_articles.php?news_id=63&start=0&category_id=4&parent_id=4&pageaction2=searchnews&searchby=bykey&searchkey=cecile+pineda&datesearch=.
“Cecile Pineda,” “Ronald Ruiz,” and “Danny Santiago (Daniel James).” Entries in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Multiethnic American Literature, Vol. 4. Edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2005. Pages 1744-1746, 1935-1936, and 1973-1974.
“The Poetry of Francisco X. Alarcón: Identifying the Chicano Persona.” Bilingual Review/Revista Bilingüe 19:2 (May-August 1994): 179-187.
“Foot the Buck” (fiction). Sulphur River Literary Review 10:1 (Vernal Equinox 1994): 68-74.