In Wild Tongue: A Borderlands Mixtape, scholar and musician Jonathan Leal offers a rich, heartfelt story of music, movement, and belonging in the US-Mexico border region known as the Rio Grande Valley. Through songs, stories, scene dives, memories, conversations, cultural criticism, and more—all threaded together as an epistolary mixtape—Wild Tongue centers the experiences and aesthetics of contemporary borderlands artists animating their geography anew: DJs and beat-makers, electronic experimentalists and conjunto visionaries, singer-songwriters and hip-hop emcees, vinyl collectors and scene archivists, bedroom pop crooners and progressive metal acts, transnational producers and curatorial collectives. As the book’s “tracks” unfold, echoes of colonial history collide with current developments, and contemporary issues find expression through music: local histories and shock discourses, techno-capitalism and (un)bordered futures, space frontierism and algorithmic cultures, preservation efforts and much else. In effect, Leal situates living artistries within longer, local arcs of borderlands creativity, amplifying Gloria Anzaldúa’s durable, pathbreaking observation “Wild tongues can never be tamed, they can only be cut out.” 

Combining lyric nonfiction, artist interviews, archival research, autoethnography, and popular music criticism and production, Wild Tongue presents an exhilarating, embracing account of freedoms pursued between worlds.

Finalist for the 2025 Pattis Family Foundation Creative Arts Book Award at Interlochen

Honorable Mention, 2025 Woody Guthrie Award for Most Outstanding Book on Popular Music, IASPM-US

Honorable Mention, 2023 Book of the Year in History, Criticism, and Culture, Jazz Journalists Association 

In Dreams in Double Time Jonathan Leal examines how the musical revolution of bebop opened up new futures for racialized and minoritized communities. Blending lyrical nonfiction with transdisciplinary critique and moving beyond standard Black/white binary narratives of jazz history, Leal focuses on the stories and experiences of three musicians and writers of color: James Araki, a Nisei multi-instrumentalist, soldier-translator, and literature and folklore scholar; Raúl Salinas, a Chicano poet, jazz critic, and longtime activist who endured the US carceral system for over a decade; and Harold Wing, an Afro-Chinese American drummer, pianist, and songwriter who performed with bebop pioneers before working as a public servant. Leal foregrounds that for these men and their collaborators, bebop was an affectively and intellectually powerful force that helped them build community and dream new social possibilities. Bebop’s complexity and radicality, Leal contends, made it possible for those like Araki, Salinas, and Wing who grappled daily with state-sanctioned violence to challenge a racially supremacist, imperial nation, all while hearing and making the world anew.

We're experiencing a time when digital technologies and advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, and big data are redefining what it means to be human. How do these advancements affect contemporary media and music? This collection traces how media, with a focus on sound and image, engages with these new technologies. It bridges the gap between science and the humanities by pairing humanists' close readings of contemporary media with scientists' discussions of the science and math that inform them.

This text includes contributions by established and emerging scholars performing across-the-aisle research on new technologies, exploring topics such as facial and gait recognition; EEG and audiovisual materials; surveillance; and sound and images in relation to questions of sexual identity, race, ethnicity, disability, and class and includes examples from a range of films and TV shows including Blade Runner, Black Mirror, Mr. Robot, Morgan, Ex Machina, and Westworld. Through a variety of critical, theoretical, proprioceptive, and speculative lenses, the collection facilitates interdisciplinary thinking and collaboration and provides readers with ways of responding to these new technologies.