Congratulations to Nicole Guidotti-Hernández and Maylei Blackwell – both finalists for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize for 2011. The winner will be announced in June. Nicole writes “I am so happy to be nominated amongst such strong intellectual prowess.”
Maylei’s work, Chicana Power!: Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement was reviewed here earlier this year.
Miroslava Chavez-Garcia wrote “Blackwell analyzes Chicanas’ quest to bring gender and sexuality as well as race and class to the forefront of the Chicano movement. In documenting these women’s significance, she is not simply retelling a story but also making a political statement: until now, they have been relegated to the margins of both the Chicano civil rights and women’s liberation struggles. In fact, however, Chicana feminists built what Blackwell calls a complex “vision of liberation,†which shaped US women of color consciousness and evolved into the larger US and third world women’s movements of the 1970s and 1980s—which in turn influenced activists, artists, writers, and intellectuals.”
Nicole’s work is titled Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries, released with the Duke University Press series, “Latin America Otherwise.” 
The work addresses the epistemic and physical violence inflicted on racialized and gendered subjects in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands from the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth. Arguing that this violence was fundamental to U.S., Mexican, and Chicana/o nationalisms, Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández examines the lynching of a Mexican woman in California in 1851, the Camp Grant Indian Massacre of 1871, the racism evident in the work of the anthropologist Jovita González, and the attempted genocide, between 1876 and 1907, of the Yaqui Indians in the Arizona–Sonora borderlands. Unspeakable Violence calls for a new, transnational feminist approach to violence, gender, sexuality, race, and citizenship in the borderlands.
Congrats to both our amazing scholars! Please feel free to leave your comments below! (no registration required)
The complete nominee list includes:
- Arnar, Anna Sigridur. The Book as Instrument: Stephane Mallarmé, the Artist’s Book, and the Transformation of Print Culture (University of Chicago Press).
- Blackwell, Maylei. ¡Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement (University of Texas Press).
- Guidotti-Hernández, Nicole. Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries (Duke University Press).
- Haulman, Kate. The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press).
- Martin, Meredith. Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine de Medici to Marie-Antoinette (Harvard University Press).
- Raiford, Leigh. Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (University of North Carolina Press).
- Ramsey, Kate. The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti (University of Chicago Press).
- Sharma, Jayeeta. Empire’s Garden: Assam and the Making of India (Duke University Press).
