TikTok Cultures in the United States (Routledge, 2022)
Edited by Trevor Boffone
TikTok Cultures in the United States examines the role of TikTok in US popular culture, paying close attention to the app’s growing body of subcultures. Featuring an array of scholars from varied disciplines and backgrounds, this book uses TikTok (sub)cultures as a point of departure from which to explore TikTok’s role in US popular culture today. Engaging with the extensive and growing scholarship on TikTok from international scholars, chapters in this book create frameworks and blueprints from which to analyze TikTok within a distinctly US context, examining topics such as gender and sexuality, feminism, race and ethnicity and wellness. Shaping TikTok as an interdisciplinary field in and of itself, this insightful and timely volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of new and digital media, social media, popular culture, communication studies, sociology of media, dance, gender studies, and performance studies.
Latinx Teens: U.S. Popular Culture on the Page, Stage, and Screen (University of Arizona Press, 2022)
By Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera
What can Latinx youth contribute to critical conversations on culture, politics, identity, and representation? Latinx Teens answers this question and more by offering an energetic, in-depth look at how Latinx teenagers influence twenty-first-century U.S. popular culture. This book explores the diverse ways that contemporary mainstream film, television, theater, and young adult literature invokes, constructs, and interprets adolescent Latinidad. Latinx Teens shows how coming-of-age Latinx representation is performed in mainstream media, and how U.S. audiences consume Latinx characters and stories. Despite the challenges that the Latinx community face in both real and fictional settings, Latinx teens in pop culture forge spaces that institutionalize Latinidad. Teen characters make Latinx adolescence mainstream and situate teen characters as both in and outside their Latinx communities and U.S. mainstream culture, conveying the complexities of “fitting in,” and refusing to fit in all at the same time.
Renegades: Digital Dance Cultures from Dubsmash to TikTok (Oxford University Press, 2021)
By Trevor Boffone
Renegades: Digital Dance Cultures from Dubsmash to TikTok interrogates the roles that Dubsmash, social media, and hip hop music and dance play in youth identity formation in the United States. It explores why Generation Z—so-called Zoomers—use social media dance apps to connect, how they use them to build relationships, how race and other factors of identity play out through these apps, how social media dance shapes a wider cultural context, and how community is formed in the same way that it might be in a club. These Zoomer artists—namely D1 Nayah, Jalaiah Harmon, TisaKorean, Brooklyn Queen, Kayla Nicole Jones, and Dr. Boffone’s high school students—have become key agents in culture creation and dissemination in the age of social media dance and music. These Black artists are some of today’s most influential content creators, even if they lack widespread name recognition. Their artistic contributions have come to define a generation. And yet, up until this point, the majority of influential Dubsmashers have not been recognized for their influence on US popular culture. This book tells their stories.
Shakespeare and Latinidad (Edinburgh University Press, 2021)
Edited by Trevor Boffone and Carla Della Gatta
Shakespeare and Latinidad is a collection of scholarly and practitioner essays in the field of Latinx theatre that specifically focuses on Latinx productions and appropriations of Shakespeare’s plays. It is the first truly comprehensive treatment of this style of adaptation, bringing together the diverse voices working in this field today including leading academics, playwrights and theatre practitioners. This blend of essays and interviews reflects the transdisciplinary synthesis of scholarship, dramaturgy and pedagogy that shapes Latinx engagement with Shakespeare.
Seeking Common Ground: Latinx and Latin American Theatre and Performance (Methuen Drama/Bloomsbury Academic, 2021)
Edited by Trevor Boffone, Teresa Marrero, and Chantal Rodriguez
A curated collection of new Latinx and Latin American plays, monologues, interviews, and critical essays that asks the question: what is the common ground between Latinx and Latin American artists?
Featuring a mix of plays and scholarly essays, this work originally emerged from the Latino Theater Company’s Encuentro de las Américas festival, produced in partnership with the Latinx Theatre Commons (LTC) at the Los Angeles Theatre Center in 2017. The collection chronicles not only the theatrical productions of the festival, but also features a transnational exploration of U.S. Latinx and Latin American theatre-making.
Alongside plays by Evelina Fernández, Alex Alpharaoh, J.Ed Araiza and Carlos Celdrán this anthology also includes a mix of monologues, snapshots, profiles and interviews that together provide a dynamic account of these intersections within U.S. Latinx and Latin American Theater. A unique collection it serves not only as a testament to the diversity of Latinx artists, but also to the strength of the Latinx Theater movement and its ever-growing networks across the Hemispheric Americas.
Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature (University Press of Mississippi, 2020)
Edited by Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera
In Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature, the outsider intersects with discussions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. The essays in this volume address questions of outsider identities and how these identities are shaped by mainstream myths around Chicanx and Latinx young people, particularly with the common stereotype of the struggling, underachieving inner-city teens. Contributors also grapple with how young adults reclaim what it means to be an outsider, weirdo, nerd, or goth, and how the reclamation of these marginalized identities expand conversations around authenticity and narrow understandings of what constitutes cultural identity. Addressed in the essays are themes of outsiders in Chicanx/Latinx young adult literature, and the contributors insist that to understand Latinx youth identities it is necessary to shed light on outsiders within an already marginalized ethnic group: nerds, goths, geeks, freaks, and others who might not fit within such Latinx popular cultural paradigms as the chola and cholo, identities that are ever-present in films, television, and the internet.
Encuentro: Latinx Performance for the New American Theater (Northwestern University Press, 2019)
Edited by Trevor Boffone, Terresa Marrero, and Chantal Rodriguez
This anthology has its origins in the Encuentro theater festival, which was produced by the Latino Theater Company in association with the Latinx Theatre Commons in Los Angeles in 2014. Encuentro means “an encounter,” and meetings form a core theme in these six groundbreaking plays, each prefaced by a critical introduction from a leading Latinx theater scholar.
Playwrights Ruben C. Gonzalez, José Torres-Tama, Rickerby Hinds, Mariana Carreño King, Javier Antonio González, and Evelina Fernández exhibit a wide range of aesthetic approaches, dramatic structures, and themes, ranging from marriage, gentrification, racial and gendered violence, migration, and the ever-present politics of the U.S.–Mexico border. There is power in the communal experience of creating, witnessing, and participating in theater festivals. This anthology is a testament to that power and seeks to document the historic festival as well as to make these works available to a wider audience.
Teatro Latino: Nuevas obras de los Estados Unidos (La Casita Grande Media, 2019)
Edited by Trevor Boffone, Amrita Das, Kathryn Quinn-Sanchez, and Michele Shaul
Teatro Latino: Nuevas obras de los Estados Unidos is an anthology of U.S. Latinx plays in Spanish. This anthology fills gaps in theatre, academia, and the general public by bringing contemporary U.S. Latinx dramatic literature in Spanish to the forefront and uncovering it for a new audience. The selected plays focus on theatrical production post-2000 and feature authors from different backgrounds writing from the U.S. This collection provides academics and students an opportunity to explore new texts in Spanish within the realm of U.S. Latinx literature and a departure point to start a meaningful critical discourse about what it means to write and publish in Spanish in the U.S.
Trevor Boffone, Ph.D. 