1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910788303503321

Autore

Socolovsky Maya <1973->

Titolo

Troubling nationhood in U.S. Latina literature : explorations of place and belonging / / Maya Socolovsky

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New Brunswick, New Jersey : , : Rutgers University Press, , [2013]

©2013

ISBN

0-8135-6119-1

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (255 p.)

Collana

American literatures initiative

Classificazione

HU 1727

Disciplina

810.9/928708968

Soggetti

American literature - Hispanic American authors - History and criticism

American literature - Women authors - History and criticism

Hispanic American women - Intellectual life

Hispanic Americans in literature

Belonging (Social psychology)

Identity (Psychology) in literature

National characteristics, Latin American, in literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Introduction: Troubling America(s) -- Spaces of the Southwest: dis-ease, disease, and healing in Denise Chávez's The last of the menu girls and Face of an angel -- Mestizaje in the Midwest: remapping national identity in the American heartland in Ana Castillo's Sapogonia and Sandra Cisneros' Caramelo -- Colonization and transgression in Puerto Rican spaces: Judith Ortiz Cofer's Line of the sun and The meaning of Consuelo -- Memoirs of resistance: colonialism and transnationalism in Esmeralda Santiago's When I was Puerto Rican, Almost a woman, and The Turkish lover -- Tales of the unexpected: Cuban-American narratives of place and body in Himilce Novas' Princess papaya -- Postscript: The illegal aliens of American letters: troubling the immigration debate.

Sommario/riassunto

This book examines the ways in which recent U.S. Latina literature challenges popular definitions of nationhood and national identity. It explores a group of feminist texts that are representative of the U.S. Latina literary boom of the 1980's, 1990's, and 2000's, when an



emerging group of writers gained prominence in mainstream and academic circles. Through close readings of select contemporary Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban American works, Maya Socolovsky argues that these narratives are "remapping" the United States so that it is fully integrated within a larger, hemispheric Americas. Looking at such concerns as nation, place, trauma, and storytelling, writers Denise Chavez, Sandra Cisneros, Esmeralda Santiago, Ana Castillo, Himilce Novas, and Judith Ortiz Cofer challenge popular views of Latino cultural "unbelonging" and make strong cases for the legitimate presence of Latinas/os within the United States. In this way, they also counter much of today's anti-immigration rhetoric. Imagining the U.S. as part of a broader "Americas," these writings trouble imperialist notions of nationhood, in which political borders and a long history of intervention and colonization beyond those borders have come to shape and determine the dominant culture's writing and the defining of all Latinos as "other" to the nation.