COMM Faculty Members Published in New Book

By Sabrina Sanchez

Dr. Henry Puente (Associate Professor in Communications) and Dr. Rebecca Sheehan (Associate Professor in Cinema and Television Arts) were recently published in Latinx Ciné in the Twenty-First Century. The book is edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, an Ohio State University professor and leading scholar in Latinx media, and published by the University of Arizona Press.

Contributors offer scholarship that is both celebratory and critical, bringing together a comprehensive presentation of contemporary film and filmmakers from all corners of Latinx culture. Aldama asked both Puente and Sheehan to contribute, as well as Dr. Monica Hanna, from the Department of Chicano and Chicana Studies.

Dr. Puente’s chapter, “Pantelion Films and the Latinx Spanish-Language Film Marketplace,” focuses on the Spanish-language distributor. He says, “It examines whether the company will or will not continue its successful run,” basing his research on how the distributor promoted and circulated its films from 2011-2017, as well as points out significant challenges the company needs to address in order to maintain long-term success.

Dr. Sheehan’s chapter, “Serious Docu-games: Empathy in Action at the Virtual Border,” derived from her previous research on animated documentaries mediating an audience’s identification with border subjects, particularly children. The chapter expands on her research on hybrid-documentary aesthetics and border subjects by examining documentary video games, another kind of documentary hybrid. She says she argues for “reframing what has been understood as a ‘procedural rhetoric’ in such games about the US-Mexican border as, instead, an empathic rhetoric informed by the haptic aesthetics innovated by border cinema (films such as El Norte (1983), Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), and Babel (2006)).”

Latinx Ciné in the Twenty-First Century can be purchased from the University of Arizona Press website.