Author: Lee Bebout

Lee Bebout is a professor of English at Arizona State University, where he is affiliate faculty with the School of Transborder Studies and the Program in American Studies. Bebout teaches on and researches in the areas of race, social justice, and political culture. His articles have appeared in Aztlán, MELUS, Latino Studies, and other scholarly journals. His book, Mythohistorical Interventions: The Chicano Movement and Its Legacies (Minnesota 2011), examines how narratives of myth and history were deployed to articulate political identity in the Chicano movement and postmovement era. His second book, Whiteness on the Border: Mapping the US Racial Imagination in Brown and White (New York University Press 2016) examines how representations of Mexico, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans have been used to foster whiteness and Americanness, or more accurately whiteness as Americanness. He has also co-edited (with Philathia Bolton and Cassander Smith) Teaching with Tension: Race, Resistance, and Reality in the Classroom (Northwestern UP), a volume on the challenges of and strategies for teaching about race. His most recent book, Rules for Reactionaries: How to Maintain Inequality and Stop Social Justice, examines everyday language strategies used to obstruct social change. He is currently working on a project on exploring the dynamic possibilities and limitations of public intellectuals in the 20th and 21st centuries.