Gilberto M. Blasini, Assistant Professor of Film Studies, is working on a manuscript entitled Bumpy Rides: Road Movies and U.S. Society, 1967-2000. It explores the complex and contradictory ways through which post-1967 road films attempt both to image and to imagine the U.S. as a nation. On the one hand, Bumpy Rides illustrates that the road articulates a notion of nationhood based upon a search for identity, freedom, and social mobility in the face of U.S. oppressive social norms. On the other hand, because most of these films privilege whiteness, masculinity, and heterosexuality, the project exposes the road, and consequently road movies, as a myth or a paradoxical cultural construct reproducing rather than defying normative discourses.
His work explores the relationship between national cultures and representational forms, including film, television, literature, and performance art. He is especially interested (although not exclusively) in questions of race, gender, and sexuality, particularly in relation to the social tensions and displacements that have resulted from the colonial and postcolonial experiences in the Americas, including the U.S. His research, publications, and teaching interests also include areas such as Latin American and Caribbean cultures (including an ongoing project that examines Caribbean Cinema in relation to the cultural politics of creolization), post-1980s U.S. television (especially the televisual articulation of discourses of race, gender and sexuality), and Puerto Rican performance art and contemporary dance. His work has appeared in the journals Emergences, Objeto Visual, and CENTRO: Journal of the Puerto Rican Studies Center as well as in the anthologies Film Analysis: A Norton Reader, Prospero’s Isles: The Presence of the Caribbean in the North American Imaginary, Saqueos: Antología de producción cultural, and Visible Nations: Latin American Cinema and Video.
He holds a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, as well as a M.A. and a Ph.D. in Critical Studies in Film and Television from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Gilberto is on the faculty advisory committee for the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Along with Patrice Petro, he moderates the Milwaukee chapter of the Key Sunday Cinema Club.
