Levan Book Chat—Jonathan Leal, Wild Tongue
A discussion of Jonathan Leal's new book, Wild Tongue: A Borderlands Mixtape (Duke University Press, 2026). The author will be joined in conversation by Alex E. Chávez (University of Notre Dame) and Richard T. Rodriguez (UC Riverside), moderated by Edwin Hill (USC). Registration is required. REGISTER HERE
About the Book: In Wild Tongue, writer, scholar, and musician Jonathan Leal invites readers to the Texas borderlands to witness contemporary sonic cultures and expressive forms of Latine struggle and world-making. Blending autoethnography, music criticism, and border theory into an epistolary mixtape, Leal depicts the borderlands as a generative place made by its inhabitants, a geography where creativity and cultural performance engage powerfully with politico-aesthetic issues, create communal identity, and challenge xenophobic and nationalist dominance. Across the mixtape’s contrasting “tracks,” Leal situates living artistries within longer, local arcs of borderlands creativity, amplifying Gloria Anzaldúa’s durable, pathbreaking observation, “Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out.” Combining lyric nonfiction, artist interviews, archival research, transdisciplinary analysis, and popular music criticism and production, Wild Tongue presents an exhilarating, embracing account of freedoms pursued between worlds.
About the Author: Jonathan Leal is Associate Professor of English and Affiliated Faculty in the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Dreams in Double Time: On Race, Freedom, and Bebop, also published by Duke University Press, and coeditor of Cybermedia: Explorations in Science, Sound, and Vision.
Open to attendants outside of USC. An excerpt of the book will be made available to registered attendants. Registration before the event is required.
This event is part of the Levan Institute for the Humanities' “Book Chats” series, conversations about new books published by USC scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. To see more events in this series, including recordings of past events, visit https://dornsife.usc.edu/levan-institute/book-chats/.