Catastrophic Historicism


Book Description

Catastrophic Historicism unsettles the historicist constitution of Julia de Burgos (1914–53), Puerto Rico’s most iconic writer—a critical task that necessitates redefining the concept of historicism. Through readings of Aristotle, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Werner Hamacher, and Frank Ankersmit, Mendoza-de Jesús shows that historicism grounds historical objectivity in the historian’s capacity to compose totalizing narratives that domesticate the contingency of the past. While critiques of historicism as a realism leave untouched the sovereignty of the historian, the book insists that reading the text of history requires an attunement to danger—a modality that interrupts historicism by infusing the past with a contingency that evades total appropriation. After desedimenting the monumental tradition that has reduced de Burgos to a totemic figure, Catastrophic Historicism reads the poet’s first collection, Poema en 20 surcos (1938). Mendoza-de Jesús argues that the historicity of Poema crystallizes in the lyrical speaker’s self-institution as an embodied ipseity, which requires producing racialized/gendered allegorical figures—the bearers of an abject flesh—that lack any ontological resistance to modern alienation. Rather than treating de Burgos’s poetics of selfhood as the ideal image of Puerto Rican sovereignty, Mendoza-de Jesús endangers this idealization by drawing attention to the abjection that sustains our attachments to ipseity as the form of a truly sovereign life. In this way, Catastrophic Historicism not only resets the terms of ongoing critiques of historicism in the humanities—it also intervenes in Puerto Rican historicity for the sake of its transformation.




Colombian Diasporic Identities


Book Description

This book interrogates the identity politics involved in framing Colombian diasporas, examining the ways that creative writers, directors, performers and artists negotiate collective and personal experiences that shape their identities through their art and cultural productions. New consideration of the diversity of Afro-Latin American and Indigenous communities within the overarching categorization of "Colombianness" or Colombianidad have led to increased focus on the representation of Colombia and Colombian diasporic communities. By focusing on different cultural productions—novels, memoirs, films, plays and visual arts—this book analyzes the performance of Colombianidad by communities throughout the diaspora. Topics include Afro-Colombian, US Latinx, Caribbean and queer identity, marginalization of racialized bodies within Colombia and the Colombian diaspora, and the politics of identity representation. Colombian Diasporic Identities: Representations in Literature, Film, Theater and Art examines how a consciously Colombian diasporic existence travels and is altered across geographic locales. Colombian Diasporic Identities will be key reading for scholars and students in US Latinx studies, and Latin American diasporic studies, together with ethnic studies, gender studies, queer studies and literature.




Postmodern Parody in Latin American Literature


Book Description

This book examines postmodern parody in Latin American literature as the intersection between ideology construction and deconstruction. Parody’s chief task is to deconstruct and criticize the ideologies behind previous texts. During this process, new ideologies are inevitably constructed. However, postmodernism simultaneously recognizes the partiality of all ideologies and rejects their enthronement as absolute truth. This raises the question of how postmodern parody deals with the paradox inherent in its own existence on the threshold between ideology construction/deconstruction and the rejection of ideology. This book explores the relationship between parody and ideology, as well as this paradox of postmodern parody in works written by writers ranging from early twentieth-century poets to the most recent novel by the Nobel Prize-winning Mario Vargas Llosa. The analyses include such authors as Cristina Peri Rossi, Manuel Puig, Luisa Valenzuela, Enrique Sánchez, Roberto Bolaño, Claudia Piñeiro, Margarita Mateo Palmer, Boris Salazar and Rosario Ferré.




Teaching Modern Latin American Poetries


Book Description

The essays in this book, groundbreaking for its focus on teaching Latin American poetry, reflect the region's geographic and cultural heterogeneity. They address works from Mexico, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Uruguay, as well as from indigenous communities found within these national distinctions, including the Kaqchikel Maya and Zapotec. The volume's essays help instructors teach poetry written from the second half of the twentieth century on, meaningfully connecting this contemporary corpus with older poetic traditions. Contributors address teaching various topics, from the silva and the long poem to Afro-descendant poetry, in ways that bring performance, digital approaches, queer theory, and translation into action. The insights offered here will demonstrate how Latin American poetry can become a part of classes in African diasporic studies, indigenous studies, history, and anthropology.




Becoming Julia de Burgos


Book Description

While it is rare for a poet to become a cultural icon, Julia de Burgos has evoked feelings of bonding and identification in Puerto Ricans and Latinos in the United States for over half a century. In the first book-length study written in English, Vanessa Pérez-Rosario examines poet and political activist Julia de Burgos's development as a writer, her experience of migration, and her legacy in New York City, the poet's home after 1940. Pérez-Rosario situates Julia de Burgos as part of a transitional generation that helps to bridge the historical divide between Puerto Rican nationalist writers of the 1930s and the Nuyorican writers of the 1970s. Becoming Julia de Burgos departs from the prevailing emphasis on the poet and intellectual as a nationalist writer to focus on her contributions to New York Latino/a literary and visual culture. It moves beyond the standard tragedy-centered narratives of de Burgos's life to place her within a nuanced historical understanding of Puerto Rico's peoples and culture to consider more carefully the complex history of the island and the diaspora. Pérez-Rosario unravels the cultural and political dynamics at work when contemporary Latina/o writers and artists in New York revise, reinvent, and riff off of Julia de Burgos as they imagine new possibilities for themselves and their communities.




The Princeton Handbook of World Poetries


Book Description

An authoritative and comprehensive guide to poetry throughout the world The Princeton Handbook of World Poetries—drawn from the latest edition of the acclaimed Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics—provides a comprehensive and authoritative survey of the history and practice of poetry in more than 100 major regional, national, and diasporic literatures and language traditions around the globe. With more than 165 entries, the book combines broad overviews and focused accounts to give extensive coverage of poetic traditions throughout the world. For students, teachers, researchers, poets, and other readers, it supplies a one-of-a-kind resource, offering in-depth treatment of Indo-European poetries (all the major Celtic, Slavic, Germanic, and Romance languages, and others); ancient Middle Eastern poetries (Hebrew, Persian, Sumerian, and Assyro-Babylonian); subcontinental Indian poetries (Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Urdu, and more); Asian and Pacific poetries (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Mongolian, Nepalese, Thai, and Tibetan); Spanish American poetries (those of Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Chile, and many other Latin American countries); indigenous American poetries (Guaraní, Inuit, and Navajo); and African poetries (those of Ethiopia, Somalia, South Africa, and other countries, and including African languages, English, French, and Portuguese). Complete with an introduction by the editors, this is an essential volume for anyone interested in understanding poetry in an international context. Drawn from the latest edition of the acclaimed Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics Provides more than 165 authoritative entries on poetry in more than 100 regional, national, and diasporic literatures and language traditions throughout the world Features extensive coverage of non-Western poetic traditions Includes an introduction, bibliographies, cross-references, and a general index




The Numinous Site


Book Description

"Luis Pales Matos, a white man who began the poesia negra movement in Latin America in 1925, is the subject of The Numinous Site, Julio Marzan's latest book. Unlike its English-language counterpart, poesia negra refers to its subject and not the poet's race, so white poets are credited with writing poesia negra." "Pales's poesia afroantillana popularized the "dark" forces (African roots and unprestigious language) that were the white society's antimatter, an antipoetic consciousness that, complemented and refined by other poesia negra, opened the Latin American poem." "Perhaps influenced by Heidegger, throughout his work Pales reiterated his obsession with the frontier where the mundane touches the spiritual or metaphysical. His poems take the reader on a passage to an encounter with the imagistic representation of that force informing the soul of the individual, the collectivity, and the physical world. All his poems take us on that passage, including his socially conscious Afro-Antillean poems, because they originate from Pales's sense that language, including "Boricua," is synonymous with time and our sense of being. For Luis Pales Matos, poesia was an altar, and style a liturgy that, whether performed in drumbeats or words, invoked the poetic essence that he called the "numen.""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved




The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics


Book Description

Rev. ed. of: The Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics / Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan, co-editors; Frank J. Warnke, O.B. Hardison, Jr., and Earl Miner, associate editors. 1993.




Selected Poems / PoesÕa Selecta


Book Description

Although today Luis Palés Matos is virtually unknown to most American readers, the eminent U.S. poet and writer William Carlos Williams once praised his younger contemporary as "one of the most important poets out of Latin America." Palés Matos was a native, and lifelong resident, of Puerto Rico. Though he was not black, he became one of the Caribbeans leading advocates of poesía negra (black poetry). His landmark 1937 collection Tuntún de Pasa y Grifería: Poesía Afro-Antillana (Tom-Tom of Kinky Hair and Black Things: Afro-Caribbean Poetry) joyously celebrated the African aspects and sources of Puerto Ricos culture and influenced later generations of writers throughout the Western hemisphere. Translator Julio Marzán has selected the best of Palés Matoss poems from throughout his career, among them "Prelude in Boricua," "Danza Negra," "Buccaneer Winds," and "Elegy on the Duke of Marmalade." He also provides a helpful glossary of obscure terms and an introduction that locates Palés Matos in the broader cultural context of his contemporaries and poetic influences including such North American poets as Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, and Vachel Lindsay.