Edward Piñuelas, Ph. D.
Associate Professor
Biography
I am born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. Before pursuing my Ph.D. at UCI, I obtained a single-subject teaching credential from CSU Long Beach, and spent two years as an English teacher at California High School in Whittier, CA. Before coming to Fullerton, I spent two years at Duke University, as a postdoctoral fellow in the Thompson Writing Program.
Degrees
2013, Ph.D. in Comparative Literature with an Emphasis in Critical Theory, University of California, Irvine
2008, M.A. in Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine
2003, B.A. in Comparative Literature, University of California, Los Angeles
Research Areas
I am currently working on my first book: “Sonic Blackness: Music, Noise, and Voice in Black Atlantic Literature." "Sonic Blackness" examines how sonic acts throughout the Black Atlantic have activated modes of subjectivity and relation outside, yet frustratingly proximate to, the enslaving and colonizing missions in which they emerged. Drawing on musical and literary examples from the United States, the Anglophone and Hispanic Caribbean, and Brazil, the book builds on what sound studies theorists term the “soundscape”— the socio-cultural environment that mediates the acoustic encounter. By placing the soundscape in conversation with postcolonial theory and critical race theory, the book deconstructs encounters between sonic media and the racialized ear.
I am also working on a separate project, tentatively titled “Vernacular Maps: Figures of Black Space in the Atlantic.” Much in the way “Sonic Blackness” focuses on the materiality and spatial proximity of sound, “Vernacular Maps” investigates how authors and filmmakers reanimate racially-coded spaces, building what I call a figural geography that serves as a generative site for social, political, and historic relations. By orienting their audiences within these figural geographies, authors and artists both employ space as a medium for exploring the often denied legacies of racial slavery and colonization, and reveal how those legacies continue to shape life in the post-slavery, post-colonial Atlantic.
Courses Regularly Taught
My research and teaching interests are literature and film of the African Diaspora, with particular focus on the North American slave narrative and its contemporary derivatives, post-colonial Afro-Caribbean fiction and poetry, and Afro-Brazilian literature and film. I also specialize in Postcolonial Theory and Critical Race Theory.
Publications
“Sounding the Masses: Sonic Collectivity and the Politics of Noise in Earl Lovelace’s Salt.” African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal (2015): 1–12.
“Vernacular Geographies: Space, Power, and Slave Territoriality in the Favelas of Paulo Lins.” English Language Notes 52, no. 1 (2014): 155–64
Office Hours
Spring 2024
MW 9:30am-11:00am
