Michael Anthony Turcios

KAM COPELAND

MICHAEL ANTHONY TURCIOS engages the barrios of East Los Angeles and the banlieues of Paris, France in a relational study concerning displacement. Influenced by postcolonial theories, Turcios attends to the metonymy of colonization in the urban context through experiences of police brutality and occupation of racialized space, disappearances, and deportations. In analyzing how artists and community members drew on a visual culture of liberation to resist regimes of displacement as illustrated in political posters and prints, murals, and moving images, Turcios argues that an “urban decolonial consciousness” framework enabled horizontal connections and solidarities between peripheral urban struggles and Third World subaltern self-determination.

Turcios is invested in a separate project that considers the important question of Palestine through Latinx solidarity from the 1970s to the present organized by border struggles and the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) Movement.

RESEARCH INTERESTS: Post/decolonial studies; Chicanx/Latinx studies; Francophone studies; Comparative Literature; Critical Ethnic studies; Migration; Palestine studies.

COMMITTEE: Dr. Christine Acham (Cinema and Media Studies); Dr. Panivong Norindr (French); Dr. Olivia C. Harrison (French and Middle East Studies); Dr. Charlene Villaseñor Black (UCLA Chicana/o Studies and Art History).